Systematic Managed Floating

Jeffrey Frankel

No 23663, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: A majority of countries neither freely float their currencies nor firmly peg. But most of the remainder in practice also don’t obey such well-defined intermediate exchange rate regimes as target zones. This paper proposes to define an intermediate regime, to be called “systematic managed floating,” as an arrangement where the central bank regularly responds to changes in total exchange market pressure by allowing some fraction to be reflected as a change in the exchange rate and the remaining fraction to be absorbed as a change in foreign exchange reserves. An operational criterion for judging systematic managed floaters is a high correlation between exchange rate changes and reserve changes. The paper rejects the view that exchange rate regimes make no difference. In regressions to test effects on real exchange rates, we find that positive external shocks tend to cause real appreciation for most systematic managed-floaters; more strongly so for pure floaters; and not at all for most firm peggers. Two measures of exogenous external shocks are used: (i) for commodity-exporters, a country-specific index of global prices of the export commodities and (ii) for other Asian emerging market economies, the VIX.

JEL-codes: F31 F33 F41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mon and nep-sea
Note: IFM ME
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published as Jeffrey Frankel, 2019. "Systematic Managed Floating," Open Economies Review, vol 30(2), pages 255-295.

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Journal Article: Systematic Managed Floating (2019)
Working Paper: Systematic Managed Floating (2017)
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