The Effectiveness of Foreign Exchange Intervention in Australia: A Factor Model Approach with GARCH Specifications

This paper analyses the effectiveness of foreign exchange intervention by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA). Initially, a latent factor model is used to decompose the volatility of exchange rates into three unobserved factors - world, numeraire and idiosyncratic. Subsequently, the impact of foreign exchange rate intervention is examined by further decomposing the numeraire (Australian) factor into an intervention component and an unobserved component. An indirect estimation approach is employed to facilitate the imposition of GARCH structures on some of the unobserved factors. The empirical results suggest that less than three percent of observed exchange rate volatility is explained by RBA intervention.