Recent crises have seen very large spikes in asset price risk without dramatic shifts in fundamentals. We propose an explanation for these risk panics based on self-fulfilling shifts in risk made possible by a negative link between the current asset price and risk about the future asset price....

Since 2007, an increase in risk or risk aversion has resulted in a US dollar appreciation and greater deviations from covered interest parity (CIP). In contrast, prior to 2007, risk had no impact on the dollar, and CIP held. To explain these phenomena, we develop a two-country model featuring...

We develop a new theory of international capital flows based on dispersed information across individual investors. There is extensive evidence of information heterogeneity within and across countries, which has proven critical to understanding asset price behavior. We introduce information...

On the eve of a major change in the world monetary system, the adoption of a single currency in Europe, our theoretical understanding of the implications of the exchange rate regime for trade and capital flows is still limited. We argue that two key model ingredients are essential to address...

The paper analyzes the impact of financial liberalizations and reforms in emerging markets on the dynamics of capital flows to these markets, using a simple model of international investors' behavior. We first show that the gradual nature of liberalizations, combined with the cost of absorbing...

The objective of this paper is to show that the proposal by Froot and Thaler (1990) of delayed portfolio adjustment can account for a broad set of puzzles about the relationship between interest rates and exchange rates. The puzzles include: i) the delayed overshooting puzzle; ii) the forward...

It is well known from anecdotal, survey and econometric evidence that the relationship between the exchange rate and macro fundamentals is highly unstable. This could be explained when structural parameters are known and very volatile, neither of which seems plausible. Instead we argue that...

Two well-known, but seemingly contradictory, features of exchange rates are that they are close to a random walk while at the same time exchange rate changes are predictable by interest rate differentials. In this paper we investigate whether these two features of the data may in fact be...

The uncovered interest rate parity equation is the cornerstone of most models in international macro. However, this equation does not hold empirically since the forward discount, or interest rate differential, is negatively related to the subsequent change in the exchange rate. This forward...

While empirical evidence finds only a weak relationship between nominal exchange rates and macroeconomic fundamentals, forex markets participants often attribute exchange rate movements to a macroeconomic variable. The variables that matter, however, appear to change over time and some variable...