How much of carry trade excess returns can be explained by the presence of disaster risk? To answer this question, we propose a simple structural model that includes both Gaussian and disaster risk premia and can be estimated even in samples that do not contain disasters. The model points to a...

This paper suggests a factor model for carry trade strategies where the regression coefficients are allowed to depend on market volatility and liquidity. Empirical results on daily data from 1995 to 2008 show that a typical carry trade strategy has much higher exposure to the stock market and...

We investigate the relation between global foreign exchange (FX) volatility risk and the cross-section of excess returns arising from popular strategies that borrow in low interest rate currencies and invest in high-interest rate currencies, so-called 'carry trades'. We find that high interest...

Any security’s expected return can be decomposed into its “carry” and its expected price appreciation, where carry is a model-free characteristic that can be observed in advance. While carry has been studied almost exclusively for currencies, we find that carry predicts returns both in the...

The downside risk CAPM (DR-CAPM) can price the cross section of currency returns. The market-beta differential between high and low interest rate currencies is higher conditional on bad market returns, when the market price of risk is also high, than it is conditional on good market returns....

We decompose violations of uncovered interest parity into a cross-currency, a betweentime-and-currency, and a cross-time component. We show that most of the systematic violations are in the cross-currency dimension. By contrast, we find no statistically reliable evidence that currency risk...

We examine the evolution of the Icelandic banking sector in its macroeconomic environment. The story culminates in the crisis of October 2008, when all three major banks in Iceland collapsed in three successive days. The country is still struggling to cope with the consequences. The paper...

We document the existence of excess returns to naïve currency trading strategies during the emergence of the modern foreign exchange market in the 1920s and 1930s. This era of active currency speculation constitutes a natural out-of-sample test of the performance of carry, momentum and value...

Currencies that are at a forward premium tend to depreciate. This `forward-premium puzzle' is an egregious deviation from uncovered interest parity. We document the properties of the carry trade, a currency speculation strategy that exploits this anomaly. This strategy consists of borrowing...

Currencies that are at a forward premium tend to depreciate. This ‘forward-premium puzzle’ represents an egregious deviation from uncovered interest parity. We document the properties of returns to currency speculation strategies that exploit this anomaly. The first strategy, known as the...