We propose a "debt view" to explain the dominant international role of the dollar and provide broad empirical support for it. Within a simple capital structure model in which firms optimally choose the currency composition of their debt, we derive conditions under which all firms issue debt in a...

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...

This paper introduces an expected value estimator with expert knowledge to the robust estimation of sovereign rating transitions which are characterised by few observations. Our estimates of default premia within Mexican, Colombian and Brazilian Eurobond yield spreads provide a better fit than...

I examine U.S. firms' motives for participating in cross-border syndicated loans with foreign banks. Firms borrowing from foreign lead arrangers pay higher interest rates on their loans compared to firms borrowing from local banks, controlling for firm and loan characteristics and using matched...

It is well known that non-normality plays an important role in asset and risk management. However, handling a large number of assets has long been a challenge due to the curse of dimensionality. We describe a statistical technique, which we call Moment Component Analysis (MCA), that extends...

This paper analyzes the relationships between local and global securitized real estate markets, but also between securitized real estate and common stock markets. First, the volatility transmissions across markets are examined using an asymmetric t-BEKK (Baba-Engle-Kraft-Kroner) specification of...

This paper (i) proposes a simple multi-currency model of speculative foreign exchange (FX) trading, (ii) uses a natural experiment to identify the implied components of the optimal trading strategy, and (iii) proposes a new spectral inference method to strengthen the statistical evidence on the...

This paper establishes a general relation between investor's ambiguity and non-Gaussianity of financial asset returns. Based on that relation and utilizing a flexible non-Gaussian returns model for the joint distribution of portfolio and currency returns, we develop an ambiguity-adjusted dynamic...

This paper addresses the question of optimal currency exposure for a risk-and-ambiguity-avers international investor. A robust mean-variance model with smooth ambiguity preferences is used to derive the optimal currency exposure. In the theoretical part, we show that the sample-efficient...

We show how distributions can be reduced to low-dimensional scenario trees. Applied to intertemporal distributions, the scenarios and their probabilities become time-varying factors. From S&P 500 options, two or three time-varying scenarios suffice to forecast returns, implied variance or...