Optimal Intervention in the Foreign Exchange Market: The Case of Iran

In a managed floating exchange rate regime, one of the most important issues is the degree to which the monetary authorities intervene in the foreign exchange market.  The appropriate level of intervention in the foreign exchange market can be discussed in a framework which emphasizes the trade-off between changes in the country’s level of international reserves and minimizes the country’s real exchange rate misalignment.  In this paper we derived an optimal intervention rule for the period of post managed floating regime in Iran applying a dynamic programming approach. The derived rule indicates that, in the context of the Iranian economy, how the monetary authorities can manage the foreign exchange market with minimum possible cost.