Since the global financial crisis, the Swiss National Bank has been accumulating reserve assets amounting to the size of the Swiss GDP. Yet, the Swiss franc is still considered to be significantly over-valued. This paper analyzes the drivers behind the new situation and discusses challenges and...

Exchange rates are crucial variables for each economy as they affect the price at which a country can exchange goods and services with other currency areas. A strong domestic currency makes it relatively cheap to import goods and services, but at the same time renders domestic goods and services...

We find that the degree and dynamics of sovereign bond market integration across 21 developed and 18 emerging countries is significantly heterogeneous. We show that better spanning can significantly enhance market integration through dissipating local risk premiums. Integration of the sovereign...

We provide a theoretical framework to uncover in a model-free way the relationship between international stochastic discount factors (SDFs), stochastic wedges, and financial market structures. Exchange rates are in general different from the ratio of international SDFs in incomplete markets, as...

Foreign exchange operates as a two-tiered over-the-counter (OTC) market dominatedby large, strategic dealers. Using proprietary high frequency data on quotesby the largest foreign exchange dealer banks in the dealer-to-customer (D2C) market,we find a significant heterogeneity in their behavior....

We identify local and global factors across international bond markets that are poorly spanned by the traditional level, slope and curvature factors but have strong forecasting power for future bond excess returns. Local and global factors are jointly significant predictors of bond returns,...

We examine time varying integration of developed (DM) and emerging (EM) market government bonds. Although we find an upward trend for most countries and maturity bands, we do observe reversals and negative trends among both DMs and EMs and for some maturities during the financial crisis. We...

Using a novel and comprehensive dataset, we provide the first systematic study of liquidity in the foreign exchange (FX) market. Contrary to common perceptions, we find significant variation in liquidity across exchange rates, substantial costs due to FX illiquidity, and strong commonality in...

DeMiguel, Garlappi, and Uppal (Review of Financial Studies, 22 (2009), 1915-1953) showed that in the stock market, it is difficult for an optimized portfolio constructed using mean-variance analysis to outperform a simple equally-weighted portfolio because of estimation error. In this paper, we...

We develop a general equilibrium model with intermediaries at the heart of international financial markets. Global intermediaries bargain with households and extract rents for providing access to foreign claims. The behavior of intermediaries, by tilting state prices, breaks monetary neutrality...