Exchange rate expectations and economic policy uncertainty

•We provide a new angle on the link between political decisions and exchange rates.•We connect an exchange rate model to the literature on the political economy.•We find that forecast errors are strongly affected by policy uncertainty.

This study provides a new angle on the relationship between political decisions and exchange rates. We link a conventional exchange rate modeling approach to the literature on the political economy of exchange rates and studies dealing with the role of policy announcements for financial market expectations by addressing the impact of policy uncertainty on exchange rate expectations and forecast errors of professionals. Our results show that expectations are not only affected by announcements but also by the degree of uncertainty regarding the future stance of economic policy. We find that forecast errors are strongly affected by policy uncertainty compared to expectations, suggesting that the effect of uncertainty is not efficiently accounted for in market expectations. Our main findings hold for economic policy uncertainty, fiscal policy uncertainty and monetary policy uncertainty. In addition, the estimates for the Japanese yen suggest a safe haven role of the yen since higher policy uncertainty in the US results in an expected appreciation of the yen.