The Forward Premium Puzzle Revisited

Download or read book The Forward Premium Puzzle Revisited written by Guy Meredith and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2002-02 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The forward premium is a notoriously poor predictor of exchange rate movements. This failure must reflect deviations from risk neutrality and/or rational expectations. In addition, a mechanism is needed that generates the appropriate correlation between the forward premium and shocks arising from risk premia or expectations errors. This paper extends McCallum (1994) to show how such a correlation can arise from the response of monetary policy to output and inflation, which are in turn affected by the exchange rate. The theoretical models considered all generate results that are consistent with the forward premium being a biased predictor of short-term exchange rate movements; the bias decreases, however, as the horizon of the exchange rate change lengthens. Another common feature of the models is that the true reduced-form equation for exchange rate changes contains variables other than the interest differential, providing a justification for "eclectic" relationships for forecasting exchange rates. The results, however, remain consistent with using uncovered interest parity as a building block for structural models.