We explore the interaction between exchange rates, institutional investor currency flows and exchange-rate fundamentals. We find that these flows are highly correlated with contemporaneous and lagged exchange rate changes, and that they carry information for future excess currency returns. This...

We explore the interaction between exchange rates, institutional investor currency flows and exchange-rate fundamentals. We find that these flows are highly correlated with contemporaneous and lagged exchange rate changes, and that they carry information for future excess currency returns. This...

We examine the forecasting power of international portfolio flows for local equity markets and attempt to attribute it to either better information about fundamentals on the part of international investors, or to price pressure. Price pressure is a potential explanation because flows have...

This paper discusses the recent changes in the market for catastrophe risk. These risks have traditionally been distributed through the insurance and reinsurance systems. However, because insurance companies tend to share relatively small amounts of their cat exposures and because insurance...

This paper examines the market for catastrophe event risk -- i.e., financial claims that are linked to losses associated with natural hazards, such as hurricanes and earthquakes. This market is in transition as new approaches for transferring risk are being explored. The paper studies several...

This paper builds on Froot and Stein (1998) in developing a framework for analyzing the risk allocation, capital budgeting, and capital structure decisions facing insurers and reinsurers. The model incorporates three key features: i) value-maximizing insurers and reinsurers face product-market...

This paper examines the market for catastrophe event risk i.e., financial claims that are linked to losses associated with natural hazards, such as hurricanes and earthquakes. Risk management theory suggests protection by insurers and other corporations against the largest cat events is most...

This paper argues that the financial exposure of households and firms to natural catastrophe disasters is borne primarily by insurance companies. Surprisingly, insurers use reinsurance to cover only a small fraction of these exposures, yet many insurers do not have enough capital and surplus to...

This paper reexamines the widely-held wisdom that the currency exposure of international investments should be entirely hedged. It finds that the previously documented ability of hedges to reduce portfolio return variance holds at short horizons, but not at long horizons. At horizons of several...

Japan's outflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) have increased dramatically in recent years, to the point where Japan has become the world's largest overseas direct investor. This paper documents the increase in Japanese FDI, as well as its breakdown across industries and countries....