Transmission of volatility and trading activity in the global interdealer foreign exchange market

"This paper studies the transmission of volatility and trading activity in the foreign exchange market across trading regions for the euro-dollar and dollar-yen currency pairs, using high-frequency intraday data from Electronic Broking Services (EBS). In contrast with previous studies that use indicative quote frequency to proxy for trading activity, we use actual regional trading volume to identify five distinct trading regions in the foreign exchange market: Asia Pacific, the Asia-Europe overlap, Europe, the Europe-America overlap, and America. Based on realized volatility computed from high-frequency data and a regional volatility model, we find statistically significant evidence for volatility spillovers at both the own-region and the inter-region levels, but the economic significance of own-region spillovers is much more important than that of inter-region spillovers. We also examine the transmission of trading activity (trading volume and number of transactions) across the five trading regions and find similar results to those for volatility, but the economic significance of own-region spillovers is even more dominant"--Federal Reserve Board web site.