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Working Paper
The risk premium and long-run global imbalances
Our paper investigates whether the valuation effect caused by a large risk premium and a low risk-free rate can help to explain the enormous US current account and trade deficit observed in the past decade. To answer this question, we set up an endowment growth model in which investors are endowed with heterogeneous trading technologies. In our model, the average US investors load up more aggregate risk by investing in a risky asset abroad and issuing a risk-free asset. Thanks to the large risk premium as well as the low risk-free rate, the US can sustain a long-run trade deficit even as a ...
Working Paper
Why Are Exchange Rates So Smooth? A Household Finance Explanation
Empirical moments of asset prices and exchange rates imply that pricing kernels are almost perfectly correlated across countries. Otherwise, observed real exchange rates would be too smooth for high Sharpe ratios. However, the cross country correlation among macro fundamentals is weak. We reconcile these facts in a two-country stochastic growth model with heterogeneous households and a home bias in consumption. In our model, only a small fraction of households trade domestic and foreign equities. We show that this mechanism can quantitatively account for the smoothness of exchange rates in ...