Title:
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Essays in international finance
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This thesis comprises three essays in international finance, with a focus on the foreign
exchange (FX) market. The first chapter examines the pricing ability of the short- and
long-run components of global FX volatility in the cross-section of carry trade returns. I
find a negative and statistically significant factor risk price for the long-run component.
Low interest rate currencies covary positively with innovations in the long-run component
of volatility, while currencies with high interest rates covary negatively. Interestingly, I
do not find significant evidence in favor of the short-run volatility component being a
cross-sectional priced risk factor. I also show empirically that the long-run component
is the dominant part of global FX volatility and is dynamically related to US-specific
macroeconomic fundamentals such as industrial production and money balances.
The second chapter investigates the time-series predictability of bilateral exchange
rates from unconditional and conditional linear factor models using dollar, carry, and
global FX volatility risk factors. I find evidence that all versions of the models largely
fail to outperform the random walk with drift benchmark in out-of-sample forecasting
of monthly exchange rate returns for individual currencies. This holds for currencies
sorted into portfolios conditional on forward discounts. I also show that information
embedded in dollar, carry, and global FX volatility risk factors do not generate systematic
economic value to investors. In fact, linear factor models with currency-based risk factors
do not outperform the random walk with drift benchmark in out-of-sample economic value
analysis.
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