Psychological Barrier in Foreign Exchange Rate and Implied Volatility in Currency Exchange Option

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the existence of the psychological barriers in three foreign exchange rate, won/dollar, euro/dollar, yen/dollar, and test that the psychological barriers effect to the implied volatilities of the FX options. For each exchange rate, the existence and spots of the psychological barriers are estimated from roughly 10 years data for each currency rate, and GARCH (1, 1) model was applied to observe the momentum effect about the mean and variance of the conditional returns, and the implied volatility of the FX-options for each currency rate near the psychological barriers. Since this effect is more clearly observed on the implied volatility data, this fact supports that psychological barriers affects to the price of the FX-options.