To counter the sharp appreciation of the Swiss franc that set in in the wake of the European sovereign debt crisis, on September 6, 2011, the Swiss National Bank announced to enforce a minimum EUR/CHF exchange rate of CHF 1.20. We find that the simple, though elegant model for the exchange rate...

Starting from the stylized fact that the Swiss franc is a safe haven currency, this paper focuses on the determinants of the Swiss franc during the lower bound regime from September 2011 to January 2015. We describe the Swiss franc as a function of global market risk fundamentals and find that...

This paper analyzes the effects of changes in the Czech exchange rate mechanism on the volatility of the Czech spot exchange rate. While related studies draw the conclusion that exchange rate volatility decreased after the widening of the imposed fluctuation band, the results derived in the...

On 6 September 2011, a ceiling on the value of the Swiss franc was imposed, at CHF 1.2 per euro. With the continuous weakness of the euro area economy, this exchange rate limit was abandoned on 15 January 2015. This paper proposes a quasi-bounded process for the Swiss franc exchange rate...

The effectiveness of the foreign exchange market interventions conducted by the Deutsche Bundesbank during the Louvre period to alter either the level or the volatility of the $/DM spot rate is examined. Volatility quotes implicit in foreign currency options are employed to recover the impact of...

Since its announcement made on Sept. 6, 2011, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) has been pursuing the goal of a minimum EUR/CHF exchange rate of 1.20, promising to intervene on currency markets to prevent the exchange rate from falling below this level. We use a compound option pricing approach to...

Time series evidence on exchange rates has been unable to reject the random walk hypothesis. A simple structural model that accounts for target zone nonlinearities provides conclusive evidence of mean reversion in EMS exchange rates.

In this paper we claim that the empirical literature on target zones which is usuallay interpreted as having overwhelmingly tested and falsified Krugman's model is really a test of ERM asymmetry. Its massive empirical rejection thus means that the ERM never operated as a fully symmetrical system