Country fundamentals and currency excess returns

We examine whether country fundamentals help explain the cross-section of currency excess returns. For this purpose, we consider fundamental variables such as default risk, foreign exchange rate regime, capital control as well as interest rate in the multi-factor model framework. Our empirical results show that fundamental factors explain a large part of the cross-section of currency excess returns. The zerointercept restriction of the factor model is not rejected for most currencies. They also reveal that our factor model with country fundamentals performs better than a factor model with usual investment-style factors. Our main empirical results are based on 2001-2010 balanced panel data of 19 major currencies. This paper may fill the gap between country fundamentals and practitioners’ strategies on currency investment.