Foreign exchange intervention and monetary policy rules under a managed floating regime: evidence from China

Abstract

This paper investigates the consequences of foreign exchange (FX) intervention in monetary policy under a managed floating regime. Focusing on China’s FX intervention, we identify periods of strong and weak FX intervention using a Markov regime switching approach. We then evaluate quantity-based monetary policy rules using both regime switching reduced-form and structural estimations. In particular, monetary policy regimes obtained from the structural estimation match well with the previously identified intervention regimes. We find that the People’s Bank of China has significant exchange rate stabilization incentives during periods of strong FX intervention, and that the monetary policy rule depends on the state of FX intervention. Furthermore, our estimations point to a trade-off between the central bank’s internal and external policy targets in that strong FX intervention leads to weak responses to domestic GDP and inflation fluctuations.