Jérôme Lahaye

The role of jumps in volatility spillovers in foreign exchange markets: meteor shower and heat waves revisited

ABSTRACT This article extends the literature on geographic (heat waves) and intertemporal (meteor showers) foreign exchange volatility transmission to characterize the role of jumps and cross-rate propagation. We employ multivariate heterogenous autoregressive (HAR) models to capture the quasi-long memory properties of volatility and both Shapley–Owen R2’s and portfolio optimization exercises to quantify the contributions of information sets. We conclude that meteor showers (MS) are substantially more influential than heat waves (HW), that jumps play a modest but significant role in volatility transmission, that cross-market propagation of volatility is important, and that allowing for differential HW and MS effects and differential parameters across intraday market segments is valuable. Finally, we illustrate what types of news weaken or strengthen heat wave, meteor shower, continuous, and jump patterns with sensitivity analysis. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Do jumps mislead the FX market

This paper investigates the link between jumps in the exchange rate process and rumours of central bank interventions. Using the case of Japan, we analyse specifically whether jumps trigger false reports of intervention (i.e. an intervention is reported when it did not occur). Intraday jumps are extracted using a non-parametric technique recently proposed by Lee and Mykland in 2008 and by Andersen et al. in 2007, and later modified by Boudt et al. in 2011. Rumours are identified by using a unique database of Reuters and Dow Jones newswires. Our results suggest that a significant number of jumps on the YEN/USD have been falsely interpreted by the market as being the result of a central bank intervention. The paper has policy implications in terms of central bank interventions. We show that in times where the central bank is known to intervene, some investors may attach a lot of weight to central bank interventions as a source of exchange rate movement, leading to a false ‘intervention explanation’ for observed jumps.

The Role of Jumps in Volatility Spillovers in Foreign Exchange Markets: Meteor Shower and Heat Waves Revisited

We investigate the role of jumps in transmitting volatility between foreign exchange markets (Engle, Ito, and Lin, 1990; Melvin and Peiers Melvin, 2003; Cai, Howorka, and Wongswan, 2008). We show that recently developed estimators have very dierent implications for the impact of jumps on exchange rate volatility transmission. Specically, isolated and successive jumps have opposite predictions for future volatility. Although the realized volatility literature nds that heat wave eects prevail for volatility transmission, we nd evidence of both meteor shower and heat wave transmission of integrated volatility; in contrast, that jumps operate mainly in a meteor shower fashion. We also demonstrate the EUR/USD volatility and jump shocks spillover to the USD/JPY but the reverse transmission is much weaker.