Friction model and foreign exchange market intervention

The friction model is consistent with the hypothesis that a central bank intervenes in a foreign exchange market only if the necessity grows beyond certain thresholds. For this feature, the model is adopted in some recent studies as an attractive central bank reaction function. However, with official data on Federal Reserve and Bundesbank intervention, this paper shows that the friction model's advantage relative to a linear model may be negligible in terms of RMSE and MAE of in-sample fitting and out-of-sample forecasts. The implication is that intervention decisions are at the monetary authorities' discretion rather than dictated by a rule.