The Impact of Pre-announced Day-to-day Interventions on the Colombian Exchange Rate

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The series Working Papers on Economics is published by the Office for Economic Studies at the Banco de la República (Central Bank of Colombia). The works published are provisional, and their authors are fully responsible for the opinions expressed in them, as well as for possible mistakes. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Banco de la República or its Board of Directors.

AUTHOR OR EDITOR
Juan José Echavarría
Luis Fernando Melo
Santiago Téllez
Mauricio Villamizar

The adoption of a managed regime assumes that interventions are relatively successful. However, while some authors consider that foreign exchange interventions are ineffective, arguing that domestic and foreign assets are close substitutes, others advocate their use and maintain that their effects can even last for months. There is also a lack of consensus on the related question of how to intervene. Are dirty interventions more powerful than pre-announced ones? This paper compares the effects of day-to-day interventions with discretionary interventions by combining a Tobit-GARCH reaction function with an asymmetric power PGARCH(1,1) impact function. Our results show that the impact of pre-announced and transparent US$ 20 million daily interventions, adopted by Colombia in 2008–20–12, has been much larger than the impact of dirty interventions adopted in 2004–2007.We find that the impact of a change in daily interventions (from US$ 20 million to US$ 40 million) raises the exchange rate by approximately Col $2, implying that actual interventions of US$ 1,000 million increase the exchange rate in one day by 5.50%. We also find that capital controls have a positive effect. 

 

The views expressed in this working paper are those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent those of the Colombian Central Bank.