Foreign exchange intervention: a new database

Abstract: We construct a novel database of monthly foreign exchange interventions for 49 countries over up to 22 years. We build on a text classification approach that extracts information about interventions from news articles and calibrate our procedure to data about actual interventions. This new dataset allows us to document stylized facts about the use of foreign exchange interventions for countries that neither publish their data nor make them available to researchers. Moreover, we provide evidence on how foreign exchange interventions are used in conjunction with capital controls and macroprudential policy.