Cointegration And Exchange Rate Forecasting PDF Download

If foreign exchange market participants form rational forecasts of future exchange rates, we should expect that these forecasts should be closely matched to subsequent realizations. Specifically, rational forecasts of a time series and the observed series itself should be cointegrated. In this paper, we apply this insight to multiple exchange rate series and a corresponding set of market expectations of future values of the exchange rate series. We build a cointegration (and associated error-correction) model of actual and expected exchange rates for five exchange rates against the U.S. Dollar, using weekly expectations data from Money Market Services, International for the 1986 - 1997 period. Our empirical work produces very strong evidence of cointegration between the exchange rate series and the expected rates series. We find strong evidence that existing work that ignores the impact of error-correction is significantly misspecified. At the shortest forecast horizon, the error-correction term dominates all other determinants of changes in expected exchange rates in our sample and indicates a sensible response by market participants to past mistakes in forecasting future rates. At longer forecast horizons, error-correction remains very important, but lagged changes in actual and expected rates also play a role. We find limited evidence of threshold effects in our error-correction models.