Were Bid-Ask Spreads in the Foreign Exchange Market Excessive During the Asian Crisis?

Torbjorn Becker and Amadou Sy

No 2005/034, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: Bid-ask spreads for Asian emerging market currencies increased sharply during the Asian crisis. A key question is whether such wide spreads were excessive or explained by models of bid-ask spreads. Precrisis estimates of standard models show that spreads during the crisis were in most cases tighter than spreads predicted by the models and there are few cases of excessive spreads. The result is largely explained by the substantial increase in exchange rate volatility during the crisis and to some extent by the level change. The empirical models have greater explanatory power for emerging- than for mature-market currencies.

Keywords: WP; Hong Kong dollar; Philippine peso; Thai baht (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31
Date: 2005-02-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=17943 (application/pdf)

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:imf:imfwpa:2005/034

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi (amodi@imf.org).