• East Asian Economic Review
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.61-87
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• 2020

Five diffusion models are estimated using three different foreign exchange rates to find an appropriate model for each. Daily spot exchange rates expressed as the prices of 1 euro, 1 British pound and 100 Japanese yen in US dollars, respectively denoted by USD/EUR, USD/GBP, and USD/100JPY, are used. The maximum likelihood estimation method is implemented after deriving an approximate log-transition density function (log-TDF) of the diffusion processes because the true log-TDF is unknown. Of the five models, the most general model is the best fit for the USD/GBP, and USD/100JPY exchange rates, but it is not the case for the case of USD/EUR. Although we could not find any evidence of the mean-reverting property for the USD/EUR exchange rate, the USD/GBP, and USD/100JPY exchange rates show the mean-reversion behavior. Interestingly, the volatility function of the USD/EUR exchange rate is increasing in the exchange rate while the volatility functions of the USD/GBP and USD/100Yen exchange rates have a U-shape. Our results reveal that more care has to be taken when determining a diffusion model for the exchange rate. The results also imply that we may have to use a more general diffusion model than those proposed in the literature when developing economic theories for the behavior of the exchange rate and pricing foreign currency options or derivatives.

• East Asian Economic Review
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.365-390
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• 2016

This paper quantitatively compares the intrinsic features of the daily USD-GBP exchange rates in two different periods, the 1920s and the 2010s, under the same freely floating exchange rate system. Even though the foreign exchange markets in the 1920s seem to be much less organized and developed than in the 2010s, this paper finds that both the long memory volatility property and the structural break appear to be the common intrigue features of the exchange rates in the two periods by using the FIGARCH model. In particular, the long memory volatility properties in the two periods are found to be upward biased and overstated because of the structural breaks in the exchange markets. Thus this paper applies the Adaptive-FIGARCH model to consider the long memory volatility property and the structural breaks jointly. The main finding is that the structural breaks in the exchange markets affect the long memory volatility property significantly in the two periods but the degree of the long memory volatility property in the 1920s is reduced more remarkably than in the 2010s after the structural breaks are accounted for; thus implying that the structural breaks in the foreign exchange markets in the 1920s seem to be more significant.

• International Commerce and Information Review
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.99-121
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• 2010

This paper reviews the categories and properties of risk measures, analyzes the classes and structural equations of volatility forecasting models, and presents the practical methodologies and their expansion methods of estimating and forecasting the volatilities of exchange rates using Excel spreadsheet modeling. We apply the GARCH(1,1) model to the Korean won(KRW) denominated daily and monthly exchange rates of USD, JPY, EUR, GBP, CAD and CNY during the periods from January 4, 1998 to December 31, 2009, make the estimates of long-run variances in the returns of exchange rate calculated as the step-by-step change rate, and test the adequacy of estimated GARCH(1,1) model using the Box-Pierce-Ljung statistics Q and chi-square test-statistics. We demonstrate the adequacy of GARCH(1,1) model in estimating and forecasting the volatility of exchange rates in the monthly series except the semi-variance GARCH(1,1) applied to KRW/JPY100 rate. But we reject the adequacy of GARCH(1,1) model in estimating and forecasting the volatility of exchange rates in the daily series because of the very high Box-Pierce-Ljung statistics in the respective time lags resulting to the self-autocorrelation. In conclusion, the GARCH(1,1) model provides for the easy and helpful tools to forecast the exchange rate volatilities and may become the powerful methodology to overcome the application difficulties with the spreadsheet modeling.