Estimating the Impact of China’s Central Bank Intervention on the RMB/US$ Exchange Rate Misalignment

Abstract

The paper studies the misalignment path of the RMB/US$ exchange rate, focusing on the managed floating period since July 2005 and determining the impact of the central bank’s intervention on the RMB/US$ misalignment. We adopt the permanent-and-transitory component decomposition approach developed by Gonzalo and Granger (1995) to estimate the equilibrium RMB/US$ rate and its misalignment within a vector error correction model (VECM). The sample for our study is the quarterly data on the exchange rate and some fundamental variables for the US and China between the 1st quarter of 2000 and the 2nd quarter of 2020. The results show a trend of the RMB/US$ reducing its undervaluation during the sample period, going from 41% to 35%. The government intervention substantially increased the RMB undervaluation, from an average of 5% to 39% without accounting for the weak exogeneity of the intervention, but to 25.8% after accounting for the exogeneity.