We show that a global imbalance risk factor that captures the spread in countries' external imbalances and their propensity to issue external liabilities in foreign currency explains the cross-sectional variation in currency excess returns. The economic intuition is simple: net debtor countries...

We assess the properties of currency value strategies based on real exchange rates in a cross-sectional portfolio setting. We find that real exchange rates predict currency excess returns, but in a way that is inconsistent with the notion of currency value because a high valuation level...