foreign exchange

  • 详情 Beyond Reserves: State-Led Outward Investment and China’s Strategic Recycling of Newly Accumulated Foreign Assets
    This paper examines how China allocates its newly accumulated foreign assets by analyzing the long-run relationship between net national savings, foreign exchange reserves, and outward direct investment (ODI). Using quarterly data from 2005 to 2023, a cointegrated vector autoregression framework shows that ODI—particularly through state-owned enterprises— has emerged as an important channel for recycling national savings abroad. Although short-run reserve fluctuations persist, sustained reserve accumulation has become less central to China’s external asset management. This study contributes to the literature by highlighting the institutional role of state ownership in shaping cross-border investment patterns and by identifying ODI as a strategic mechanism for channeling national savings internationally. The findings shed new light on China’s evolving approach to external asset allocation and its broader economic and geopolitical implications.
  • 详情 Substitutes or Complements? The Role of Foreign Exchange Derivatives and Foreign Currency Debt in Mitigating Corporate Default Risk
    Using a sample of 501 Chinese non-financial firms listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange from 2008 to 2020, we find that both foreign exchange (FX) derivatives and foreign currency (FC) debt significantly reduce firms’ probability of default. We further observe that larger, non-state-owned enterprises (SOEs), Hong Kong-headquartered firms, firms operating after China’s 2015 exchange rate reform and firms under high trade policy uncertainty (TPU) are more likely to use both FX derivatives and FC debt concurrently, thereby diversifying their strategies for managing default risk. Our analysis indicates that these tools reduce firms’ default risk primarily by improving firms’ profitability, raising their likelihood of obtaining credit ratings, and increasing their use of interest rate derivatives. Importantly, we reveal that FX derivatives and FC debt act as substitutes in mitigating firms’ default risk. Notably, this substitution effect is more pronounced for larger, non-SOEs, Hong Kong-headquartered firms, firms operating after exchange rate reform and firms facing high TPU. Finally, we find that using FX derivatives significantly dampens firms’ investment, which may explain why Chinese firms tend to prefer FC debt to manage their default risk.
  • 详情 Profitability Of Technical Trading Rules in the Chinese Yuan-Based Foreign Exchange Market
    This article presents a comprehensive examination of technical trading rules in the Chinese yuan-based foreign exchange market. The investigation employs daily data spanning seven years for 14 developed and 10 emerging market currencies. The analysis encompasses a vast universe of 41,660 trading rules, representing a significant expansion over the previous studies. The stepwise tests, which was employed to address the data-snooping bias, discover excess profitability in at least half of the developed and emerging currencies, implying the heterogeneous market efficiency across currencies. Our results are robust to sub-sample analysis and different parameter values of the stepwise tests.
  • 详情 Short-Horizon Currency Expectations
    In this paper, we show that only the systematic component of exchange rate expectations of professional investors is a strong predictor of the cross-section of currency returns. The predictability is strong in short and long horizons. The strategy offers significant Sharpe ratios for holding periods of 1 to 12 months, and it is unrelated to existing currency investment strategies, including risk-based currency momentum. The results hold for forecast horizons of 3, 12, and 24 months, and they are robust after accounting for transaction costs. The idiosyncratic component of currency expectations does not contain important information for the cross-section of currency returns. Our strategy is more significant for currencies with low sentiment and it is not driven by volatility and illiquidity. The results are robust when we extract the systematic component of the forecasts using a larger number of predictors.
  • 详情 The Regime-Switching Policy for the RMB
    The RMB exchange rate policy follows a “two-pillar” rule, with the market pillar reflecting foreign exchange market conditions and the basket pillar stabilizing the RMB index. This paper documents a clear pattern of regime-switching in the policy coefficients on the market pillar. And the regime-switching patterns are driven by macroeconomic variables, the intraday market condition as well as the news on trade conflicts. In a Markov-switching rational expectations model, we demonstrate that regime-switching rules expand the policy parameter’s space over which a unique equilibrium exists and the self-fulfilling depreciation is ruled out. Thus, this paper rationalizes the use of counter-cyclical factor— a policy tool proposed to stabilize the RMB exchange market.
  • 详情 The Construction Method of Defense Lines for China’s Future Foreign Exchange Market
    To construct the foreign exchange market defense line, I propose the following methods: (1) Compete for market focus, improve verbal intervention and news tactics (2) Quickly create several market-leading data that is in our control (3) Update the foreign exchange regulatory strategy, replace the original routine intervention with segmented intervention. (4) Use the anchor antidote in defending The U.S. launched the exercise as early as March 2009 organized by a team composed of the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Energy, the RAND Corporation, the Peterson Institute, and Wall Street people. They took China as an imaginary enemy to conduct drills as possible conflicts would happen in the derivative and foreign exchange market in the future. If we hesitate in the construction of the foreign exchange market defense line, the damage may be on the overall situation.
  • 详情 Superstition Everywhere
    In Chinese culture, digit 8 (4) is taken as lucky (unlucky). We find that the numerological superstition has a profound impact across China’s stock, bond, foreign exchange and commodities markets, affecting asset prices in both the primary and secondary markets. The superstition effect, i.e., the probability of asset price ending with a lucky (unlucky) digit far exceeds (falls short of) what would be expected by chance, is prevalent. The effect is driven by investors’ reliance on superstition as an anchor to face uncertainty in asset pricing and the overoptimism of unsophisticated investors. While the superstition effect does not lead to systemic mispricing for assets traded by sophisticated investors, it implies overpricing for assets involving more unsophisticated investors.
  • 详情 Convertibility Restriction in China’s Foreign Exchange Market and its Impact on Forward Pricing
    Different from the well established markets such as the dollar-Euro market, recent CIP deviations observed in the onshore dollar-RMB forward market were primarily caused by conversion restrictions in the spot market rather than changes in credit risk and/or liquidity constraint. This paper proposes a theoretical framework under which the Chinese authorities impose conversion restrictions in the spot market in an attempt to achieve capital flow balance, but face the tradeoff between achieving such balance and disturbing current account transactions. Consequently, the level of conversion restriction should increase with the amount of capital account transactions and decrease with the amount of current account transactions. Such conversion restriction in turn places a binding constraint on forward traders’ ability to cover their forward positions, resulting in the observed CIP deviation. More particularly, the model predicts that onshore forward rate is equal to a weighted average of CIP-implied forward rate and the market’s expectation of future spot rate, with the weight determined by the level of conversion restriction. As a secondary result, the model also implies that offshore non-deliverable forwards reflect the market’s expectation of future spot rate. Empirical results are consistent with these predictions.
  • 详情 A study on Chinese Yuan index and its Derivatives
    Following the successful experience of USDX, this paper gives a profile of how to design a foreign exchange index for China and elaborates three functions and implications of CNYX in foreign exchange market. This paper also demonstrate the models to get the equilibrium price of CNYX derivatives. CNYX derivatives provide traders and hedgers with a tool for avoiding risk and give a new approach for China’s large foreign reserve to optimize its structure to prevent the devaluation.
  • 详情 The market, interest rate and foreign exchange rate risk in China’s banking industry(博士生论坛征文)
    This study employs the Gerneralised Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model to investigate the sensitivity of Chinese bank stock returns to market, interest rate and foreign exchange rate risks. Daily data are used to model these risks over the period 2007 to 2010. The results suggest that market risk is an important factor of Chinese bank stock returns, along with foreign exchange risk. However, interest rates risk tends to be insignificant factors in Chinese bank equity pricing process over the period considered.