PREDICTORS OF EXCHANGE RATE RETURNS: EVIDENCE FROM INDONESIA

Using historical time-series data, we investigate Indonesia’s exchange rate return predictability. We employ nine predictors, namely stock price, gold price, oil price, commodity price, inflation, balance of payment, total exports, the US T-bill rate, and the US federal fund rate. With historical data, we fail to discover any evidence that these factors predict Indonesia’s exchange rate returns. However, we find that oil price, commodity price, inflation, and the US T-bill rate can significantly predict Indonesia’s exchange rate returns during the Asian financial crisis. Our findings key implication is that it is the external factors that dominate the evolution of Indonesia’s exchange rate, and inflation rate is the only domestic factor for policy makers to control.

Indian Implied Volatility Index: A Macroeconomic Study

The study investigates the dynamic behavior of Indian implied volatility index and its time dependent conditional correlations with selected macroeconomic variables. The volatility of macroeconomic variables is likely to put burden on inflation and also influence the economic decisions as investment vehicles. Thus, the volatility of these variables has become central issue for fund managers and investors. The study uses three macroeconomic variables, oil price, gold price and federal fund rate over the period 2nd March 2009 to 30th June 2018. The Dynamic Regime-Switching model reveals that the Indian Implied volatility index exhibits two regimes high volatility and low volatility states. There exists a high degree of synchronicity between Indian VIX and oil price movement. Oil price has significant impact on India VIX during high volatile state. The result alarms the attention of monetary policy makers. The policy of oil price deregulation has to be carefully monitored.

Impact of FOMC announcement on stock price index in Southeast Asian countries

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements, which includes information about the targeted Federal fund rate and revision to the future path of monetary policy on Southeast Asian stock market performance. Design/methodology/approach This paper has used a sample of five national equity market indexes over the period 1997-2013 that covers 132 scheduled FOMC meetings. The authors have developed the model of Wongswan (2009) and Kontonikas et al. (2013) to quantify target surprise and path surprise. Findings The results first show that all the stock markets examined do respond to information in FOMC announcements. Second, the target Federal fund rate has more impact on Southeast Asian stocks performance than information about the future path of monetary policy does. Third, different Southeast Asian equity markets respond similarly to targeting the Federal fund rate, while the responses to monetary policy differ from each other. Fourth, the response of each country to the FOMC announcement is not statistically different in the two periods of financial crisis. Research limitations/implications Southeast Asian financial markets are increasingly highly correlated to the US market. The main channel in which FOMC announcement has impact on Southeast Asian stock markets is through US price transmission. This is the case of foreign firms borrowing from the US market. Then, an increase in interest rate, which means that the cost of financing increases, will lower firm equity value. Originality/value The understanding of the response of the Southeast Asian stock markets to target surprise and path surprise, and the impact of each surprise in different time periods, would be important to investors and encourage further discussion amongst academics in Southeast Asia, where stock markets have been emerging in recent years.