The discontinuation of the EUR/CHF minimum exchange rate in January 2015: was it expected?

Michael Funke, Julius Loermann and Richhild Moessner

No 652, BIS Working Papers from Bank for International Settlements

Abstract: We derive risk-neutral probability densities for future euro/Swiss franc exchange rates as implied by option prices. We find that the credibility of the Swiss franc floor somewhat decreased as the spot exchange rate approached the lower bound of 1.20 CHF per euro. We also compare the forecasting performance of a random walk benchmark model with an error-correction model (ECM) augmented with option-implied break probabilities of breaching the currency floor. We find some evidence that the augmented ECM has an informational advantage over the random walk when using one-month break probabilities. But we find that one-month option-implied densities cannot predict the entire range of exchange rate realizations.

Keywords: Swiss franc; forecasting; options; risk-neutral probability densities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C53 F31 F37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2017-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-for and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bis.org/publ/work652.pdf Full PDF document (application/pdf)
http://www.bis.org/publ/work652.htm (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bis:biswps:652

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in BIS Working Papers from Bank for International Settlements Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Martin Fessler (webmaster@bis.org).