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This paper documents an economically significant risk premium associated with a currency's sensitivity to time-varying risk aversion. Consequently, an investment strategy that takes a long (short) position in currencies with high (low) sensitivity to aggregate market risk aversion yields significantly positive excess returns. While advanced market currencies including the Euro, Yen and Swiss Francs dominate the short end of these portfolios with low sensitivity to risk aversion, emerging market currencies including the Brazilian Real, Mexican Peso and Turkish Lira are found to be the most sensitive currencies to risk aversion. The excess returns from the proposed strategy are significant even after controlling for systematic equity market risk factors as well as liquidity risk and cannot be explained by measures of economic conditions or uncertainty. Interestingly, the excess returns generated by the risk aversion-based strategy are found to have significant loadings on global momentum, suggesting possible commonality in the behavioral drivers of anomalies in the global equity and currency markets. The findings highlight the role of behavioral factors as predictor of currency excess returns with significant investment implications. Publisher's Version

The failure of uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) is a well-known phenomenon of the last thirty years. UIP failure is more prominent in advanced economies than in emerging market economies. Typically, UIP estimation for an advanced economy generates a negative coefficient, meaning that a higher interest rate in advanced economy A will result in the appreciation of economy A's exchange rate. For emerging market economies, higher interest rates usually correspond to future depreciation, although this depreciation is not sufficient for UIP to hold. This paper shows that UIP holds in Russia better than in other emerging market economies when the UIP equation accounts for a constant risk premium. Consequently, there is no forward premium puzzle for Russian data for 2001–2014. To determine the results for Russia and to compare them with the results for other countries, we estimate UIP first for Russia and then for advanced and emerging market economies using seemingly unrelated regressions and panel data analysis. By comparing the profitability of static and dynamic carry trade strategies, we also confirm that in emerging market economies, risk premiums are often constant, whereas in advanced economies, risk premiums are almost always volatile. This may explain why UIP holds better in emerging market economies. It also enables us to formulate a hypothesis that macroeconomic policies of emerging market economies (e.g., the accumulation of large foreign exchange reserves) stabilize risk premiums.

This paper constructs a heterogeneous agent model for the foreign exchange market that is based on the law of supply and demand and includes carry trade, central bank intervention, and macroeconomic fundamentals. With the artificial intelligence method of the unscented Kalman filter, this paper investigates carry traders&rsquo, expectation formation and risk aversion and the impact of their activities on the movement of the Chinese yuan exchange rate and on the efficiency of central bank intervention. The findings demonstrate that carry traders&rsquo, activities are partially responsible for fluctuations in the Chinese yuan exchange rate, carry traders behave with obvious risk aversion, their activities tend to weaken the ability of the central bank to intervene in China&rsquo, s foreign exchange market, and the volatility of the Chinese yuan exchange rate and the weight of carry traders are negatively related. Based on these empirical results, specific suggestions for exploring sustainable financial resources are provided.

It is commonly agreed that excessive household financial debts are detrimental to psychological and physical health. Research also demonstrates that housing instability, mortgage indebtedness and mortgage foreclosure negatively influence subjective well-being. In Poland at the beginning of 2015, homeowners with Swiss franc denominated mortgages suffered from an abrupt swing in the Swiss franc/Polish zloty (CHF/PLN) exchange rate, which resulted in considerable increase in the local currency value of their mortgages. These adverse financial circumstances were hypothesised to affect not only household finance but also negatively affect the psychological well-being and physical health of peoples. The 2013 and 2015 waves of the Polish representative household panel ‘Social Diagnosis’ were used to examine impact of the abrupt change in the CHF/PLN exchange rate in Jan. 2015 on well-being and health. Causal inference was investigated using a difference-in-differences matching estimator. Results showed that although impact of Swiss franc appreciation on the mortgage related financial burden was considerable, it did not affect well-being or health outcomes. Any manifestation of adverse effects was absent in the short term, which does not however preclude their long term existence.

Although, according to uncovered interest rate parity, exchange rates should move so as to prevent the carry trade being systematically profitable, there is a vast empirical literature demonstrating the opposite. High interest currencies more often tend to appreciate rather than depreciate, as noted by Fama (1984). In this paper, we treat volatility as the critical state variable and show that positive returns to the carry trade are overwhelmingly generated in the low-volatility “normal” state, whereas the high-volatility state is associated with lower returns or with losses as currencies revert to the long run level approximated by their mean real exchange rate – in other words, purchasing-power parity (PPP) tends to reassert itself, at least to some extent, during periods of turbulence. We confirm these results by comparing the returns from three possible monthly trading strategies: the carry trade, a strategy which is long the undervalued and short the overvalued currencies (the “fundamental” strategy) and a mixed strategy which involves switching from carry trade to fundamentals whenever the previous period's volatility was in the top quartile. We are left with the anomalous (but apparently robust) result that the mixed strategy appears to generate higher returns and Sharpe ratios than either of the pure strategies.

This paper attempts to predict the cyclical behavior of exchange rates by using five risk factors, viz., violations of uncovered interest rate parity (UIP), relative purchasing power parity (RPPP) and pseudo-parity for equity returns, relative (cross-country) TED spreads and relative term spreads. These factors are found to forecast periods of depreciation or appreciation and subsequent reversals. The estimates based on a dynamic probit model reveal that violations of UIP, RPPP and equity market pseudo-parity exhibit predictive power for currency cycles albeit only at short horizons. The proposed framework can be utilized by policy makers to smoothen the resulting currency misalignment and by investors to form trading strategies and hedge their positions as well as re-balance their carry trade positions.

Foreign exchange correlation is a key driver of risk premia in the cross-section of carry trade returns. First, we show that the correlation risk premium, defined as the difference between the risk-neutral and objective measure correlation is large (15% per year) and highly time-varying. Second, sorting currencies according to their exposure with correlation innovations yields portfolios with attractive risk and return characteristics. We also find that high (low) interest rate currencies have negative (positive) loadings on the correlation risk factor. To address our empirical findings, we consider a multi-country general equilibrium model with time-varying risk aversion generated by external habit preferences. In the model, currency risk premia mostly compensate for exposure to global risk aversion, defined as a weighted average of country risk aversions. Given countercyclical real interest rates, the model can also address the forward premium puzzle, as high interest rate currencies are exposed to (while low interest rate currencies provide a hedge to) global risk aversion risk. We also show that high global risk aversion is associated with high conditional exchange rate variance and covariance, providing theoretical justification for sorting currencies on their exposure to fluctuations of exchange rate conditional second moments.

Academic studies show that technical trading rules would have earned substantial excess returns over long periods in foreign exchange markets. However, the approach to risk adjustment has typically been rather cursory. We examine the ability of a wide range of models: CAPM, quadratic CAPM, downside risk CAPM, C-CAPM, Carhart’s 4-factor model, an extended C-CAPM with durable consumption, Lustig-Verdelhan (LV) factors, volatility and skewness to explain these technical trading returns. No model plausibly accounts for technical profitability in the foreign exchange market. These findings strengthen the case for models incorporating cognitive bias, learning and adaptation, as exemplified in the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis.

This thesis concerns with speculative carry trade strategy. Carry trade is based on breach of Uncovered Interest Parity. The theoretical part is focused on traditional fundamental analysis. This thesis deals with the identification of carry trade existence and capture their expressions in the financial markets, verification profitability and attractiveness of carry trade operations, analysis of conditions for carry trade on financial markets before and after global financial crisis 2008. Important part of the work was also description of the consequences of carry trade transactions and their effects on the exchange rate and financial situation

© 2016 The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. 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 offer a currency risk premium to compensate investors willing to finance negative external imbalances because their currencies depreciate in bad times. This mechanism is consistent with exchange rate theory based on capital flows in imperfect financial markets. We also find that the global imbalance factor is priced in cross-sections of other major asset markets.

Since the fall of 2008, option smiles have been clearly asymmetric: out-of-the-money currency options point to large expected exchange rate depreciations (appreciations) for high (low) interest rate currencies, suggesting that disaster risk is priced in currency markets. To study the price of disaster risk, we propose a simple structural model that includes both Gaussian and disaster risk and can be estimated even in samples that do not contain disasters. Estimating the model over the 1996 to 2011 period using exchange rate spot, forward, and option data, we obtain a real-time index of world disaster risk premia. We find that disaster risk accounts for more than a third of currency risk premia in advanced countries over the period.

Lower-interest-rate currencies tend to depreciate relative to higher-interest-rate currencies. This observation is inconsistent with a popular theory, uncovered interest parity (UIP). According to market participants' views, this is caused by the carry-trade activities in a low-volatility environment. This paper investigates how exchange rate volatilities influence the failure of UIP by using a regime-switching model, which is less restricted than those used in the literature. We estimate this model using a new method of Bayesian Gibbs sampling, which enables us to examine higher-frequency state transmissions and, at the same time, avoid possible estimation biases arising from the use of overlapping data. The main findings are as follows. First, statistical tests support our model in comparison with the alternatives. The evidence suggests that regime switches in exchange rate returns should be interpreted as switches in the relationship between the returns and interest rate differentials, which may be interpreted as switches between the carry trade and its unwinding. Second, low-interest-rate currencies appreciate less frequently, but once it occurs, its movement is faster than when they depreciate. This may be because the appreciation is influenced by a rapid unwinding of the carry trade. Third, a low volatility tends to cause UIP failure. In fact, the reverse is also true. That is, UIP failure contributes to maintaining a lower-volatility environment, which may imply that a high volatility does not tend to occur until an unwinding of the carry trade. These results imply that the low-volatility environment and UIP failure are mutually dependent. Finally, the second and third findings are more evident for shorter maturities, and this may imply that UIP failure is influenced by short-term speculations. All these results are consistent with market participants' views: the short-term carry trade in a low-volatility environment and its rapid unwinding substantially influence exchange rates.

The carry trade strategy involves selling forward currencies that are at a forward premium and buying forward currencies that are at a forward discount. We compare the payoffs to the carry trade applied to two different portfolios. The first portfolio consists exclusively of developed country currencies. The second portfolio includes the currencies of both developed countries and emerging markets. Our main empirical findings are as follows. First, including emerging market currencies in our portfolio substantially increases the Sharpe ratio associated with the carry trade. Second, bid-ask spreads are two to four times larger in emerging markets than in developed countries. Third and most dramatically, the payoffs to the carry trade for both portfolios are uncorrelated with returns to the U.S. stock market.