Theories of systemic risk suggest that financial intermediaries’ balance-sheet constraints amplify fundamental shocks. We provide supportive evidence for such theories by decomposing the U.S. dollar risk premium into components associated with macroeconomic fundamentals and a component...

We show that excess returns to the carry trade can be interpreted as compensation for foreign exchange dealers' capital risk. Given that the top market makers in foreign exchange are at the heart of the market's information aggregation process we also suggest that it is their marginal value of...

We identify a global risk factor in the cross-section of implied volatility returns in currency markets. A zero-cost strategy that buys forward volatility agreements with downward sloping implied volatility curves and sells those with upward slopes - volatility carry strategy - generates...

Fama’s (1984) volatility relations show that the risk premium in foreign exchange markets is more volatile than, and is negatively correlated with the expected rate of depreciation. This paper studies these relations from the perspective of goods markets frictions. Using a sticky-price general...

We sort currencies by countries' consumption growth over the past four quarters. Currency portfolios of countries experiencing consumption booms have higher Sharpe ratios than those of countries going through a consumption-based recession. A carry strategy that goes short in countries that are...

We study a cross section of carry-trade-generated currency excess returns in terms of their exposure to global fundamental macroeconomic risk. The cross-country high-minuslow (HML) conditional skewness of the unemployment gap - our measure of global macroeconomic uncertainty - is a factor that...

Zero-investment uncovered interest parity (UIP) portfolio positions provide perfect factor-mimicking portfolios for currency risk in the International CAPM context. Their returns are the currency risk premia. Since the UIP positions on average provide low returns, the currency risk premia must...

The foreign exchange (FX) market is considered to be the largest and presumably most liquid financial market in the world. We show that even in this market exposure to liquidity risk commands a non-trivial risk premium of up to 3.6% per annum. In particular, systematic and currency-specific...

This paper presents a new hierarchical methodology for estimating multi factor dynamic asset pricing models. The approach is loosely based on the sequential approach of Fama and MacBeth (1973). However, the hierarchical method uses very flexible bandwidth selection methods in kernel weighted...