Exchange rates and political uncertainty: the Brexit case.

This paper studies the impact of political risk on exchange rates. We focus on the Brexit Referendum as it provides a natural experiment where both exchange rate expectations and a time‐varying political risk factor can be measured directly. We build a portfolio model that relates changes in the Leave probability to changes of the British pound's market price, both via expectations and via a political risk factor. We estimate the model for multilateral and bilateral British pound exchange rates. We find that the Leave probability predicts a depreciation of the pound, consistent with the outcome post‐referendum, and that the time‐varying political risk affects exchange rates independently. This paper is part of the Economica 100 Series. Economica, the LSE "house journal" is now 100 years old. To commemorate this achievement, we are publishing 100 papers by former students, as well as current and former faculty. Paolo Manasse obtained his MSc and PhD from the LSE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]