Domestic investors hold a substantially larger proportion of their wealth portfolios in domestic assets than standard portfolio theory would suggest. This phenomenon has been called equity home bias.' In the absence of this home bias, investors would optimally diversify away domestic output...

In this paper, I empirically examine consumption smoothing behavior across a broad group of countries using a unique data set that indicates whether residents in a country face an official government restriction. I then ask whether the ex ante consumption movements among restricted countries...

Standard theoretical models predict that domestic residents should diversify their portfolios into foreign assets much more than observed in practice. Whether this lack of diversification is important depends upon the potential gains from risk-sharing. General equilibrium models and consumption...

This paper describes a class of stochastic stabilizing policies within asset price regimes that can be easily incorporated into the framework of regime switching recently proposed by Froot and Obstfeld (1991). In contrast to previous treatments of market-driven fundamentals within the regime,...

Most studies of the expectations theory of the term structure reject the model. However, the significance of the rejections depend strongly upon the form of the test. In this paper, we use the pattern of rejection across maturities to back out the implied behavior of time-varying risk premia...

Under conventional notions about rational expectations and market efficiency, expected returns differ from the actual expost returns by a forecast error that is uncorrelated with current information. In this paper, we describe how small departures from conventional notions of rational...

Recent research in international business cycles finds that international consumption co-movements do not match the risk- sharing predictions of standard complete markets models. In this paper, I ask whether two different types of explanations can help explain this result: 1) non-separabilities...

Foreign exchange returns exhibit behavior difficult to reconcile with standard theoretical models. This paper asks whether the recent findings of long swings in exchange rates between appreciating and depreciating periods affect estimates of the foreign exchange risk premium. We demonstrate how...

Recent empirical studies suggest that nominal interest rates and expected inflation do not move together one for one in the long run, a finding at odds with many theoretical models. This paper shows that these results can be deceptive when the process followed by inflation shifts infrequently....

The relationship between foreign exchange intervention and monetary policy underlies the question of whether sterilized interventions can affect the exchange rate. In this article, I examine this relationship using data on U.S. foreign exchange interventions from 1985 to 1990, recently made...