Do Foreign Exchange Market Responses to Interest Rate Announcements Evolve over Time? Evidence from Poland

Abstract

Evidence from the international markets shows that the responsiveness of financial instruments’ prices to monetary policy announcements tends to weaken in a low level interest rate environment. The objective of our study is to verify if a similar effect existed in Poland when interest rate decreased from high to low levels over time. The focus of our paper is the currency market. We use GARCH class models with dummy variables as our main methodological tool. In the case of interest rate announcements, we distinguish between the nominal changes in interest rate and surprise changes. The surprise component is extracted by comparing the actual NBP announcements regarding the change of the interest rate with market expectations captured by the consensus forecasts from Reuters surveys of financial market participants in Poland. The results from our study demonstrate that in a lower interest rate environment, the foreign exchange market in Poland has become less responsive to interest rate decisions. We also find evidence that the reactions of foreign exchange rate returns tend to be stronger in case of interest rate changing upwards rather than downwards. Our results about the evolving nature of reactions of the foreign exchange market in Poland in both high and low interest rate environments may provide helpful information for policymakers about the impact of their policy decisions.