No abstract

BIS Working Papers are written by members of the Monetary and Economic Department of the Bank for International Settlements, and from time to time by other economists, and are published by the Bank. The papers are on subjects of topical interest and are technical in character. The views expressed in them are those of their authors and not necessarily the views of the BIS.This publication is available on the BIS website (www.bis.org).

BIS Working Papers are written by members of the Monetary and Economic Department of the Bank for International Settlements, and from time to time by other economists, and are published by the Bank. The papers are on subjects of topical interest and are technical in character. The views expressed in them are those of their authors and not necessarily the views of the BIS.

We survey the literature on the efficacy of foreign exchange market intervention in emerging market countries, emphasising the differences with the literature on industrial countries. We then use official statistics on central bank intervention by the Czech National Bank in conjunction with options market data to study the impact of intervention during 2001e2002. We find that central bank intervention had some (weakly) statistically significant impact on the spot rate and the risk reversal but that this impact was small. We do not find evidence that intervention had an influence on short-term exchange rate volatility. We also find that, in our sample period, Czech authorities appeared to intervene mainly in response to an acceleration of the speed of koruna appreciation.

A central proposition in research on the role of banks in the transmission mechanism is that monetary policy imparts a direct impact on deposits and that deposits act as the driving force of bank lending. This paper argues that the emphasis on policy-induced changes in deposits is misplaced. A reformulation of the bank lending channel is proposed that works primarily through the impact of monetary policy on banks' balance sheet strength and risk perception. Such a recasting implies, contrary to conventional wisdom, that greater reliance on market-based funding enhances the importance of the channel.JEL codes: E40, E44, E51, E52, E58