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Journal Article
The role of currency derivatives in internationally diversified portfolios
Diversification is widely practiced by investors seeking to reduce risk. In recent years investors have been turning to foreign markets to obtain even greater scope for diversification than domestic markets offer. With the internationalization of security portfolios, however, also comes an additional risk-foreign exchange risk. ; The use of currency derivatives in internationally diversified portfolios can help mitigate foreign exchange risk. This article investigates the impact of currency hedging on these portfolios, in particular index portfolios of stocks and bonds from markets in seven ...
Working Paper
Nonaddictive habit formation and the equity premium puzzle
I analyze a model in a simple representative-agent economy with one risky and one riskless asset, populated by habit-forming consumer-investors. These consumer-investors exhibit nonaddictive habit formation in the sense that the current consumption rate of the consumer-investors can fall below the habit-forming past consumption rate. I endogenize the real riskless rate of return in this representative-agent economy and find that the equity premium puzzle is resolved for values of the coefficient of relative risk aversion, the discount rate, and the intensity of nonaddictive habit formation, ...
Working Paper
Managing the risk of loans with basis risk: sell, hedge, or do nothing?
Individual loans contain a bundle of risks including credit risk and interest rate risk. This paper focuses on the general issue of banks? management of these various risks in a model with costly loan monitoring and convex taxes. The results suggest that if the hedge is not subject to basis risk, then hedging dominates a strategy of ?do nothing.? Whether hedging dominates loan sales depends on whether it induces reduced monitoring, the net benefit of monitoring, and the reduced tax burden of eliminating all risk via selling. If the hedge is subject to basis risk, then a ?do nothing? strategy ...
Working Paper
The cost of doing business abroad and international capital market equilibrium
The implications of the costs of doing business in foreign countries for the resulting capital market equilibrium are studied. When transferring capital goods across national boundaries, the costs incurred are quasi-fixed in a one-good, two-country, intertemporal model with complete financial markets. In our model of the international capital market, deviations from purchasing power parity are endogenously generated. The relative price of physical resources located in one country compared to resources located in another is called the "real exchange rate." The outcome of the model-based ...
Working Paper
Exchange rate pass-through and the role of international distribution channels
Manufacturers selling in foreign markets often do not completely pass on the effects of fluctuations in exchange rates to the prices of their products. Our paper addresses this puzzle and studies the effects of the international distribution channel on exchange rate pass-through. We develop an exchange rate pass-through model that takes into account the role of an intermediary between a domestic manufacturer and its consumers in a foreign market. We find that the magnitude of the pass-through depends on the presence of an incentive problem in the distribution channel. When there is no ...
Working Paper
Interest rate swaps and economic exposure
The interest rate swap market has grown rapidly. Since the inception of the swap market in 1981, the outstanding notional principal of interest rate swaps has reached a level of $12.81 trillion in 1995. Recent surveys indicate that interest rate swaps are the most commonly used interest rate derivative by nonfinancial firms and that nonfinancial firms are major users of interest rate swaps. In this paper, we provide an economic rationale for the use of interest rate swaps by such nonfinancial firms. In a global economy, given the floating exchange rate regime, nonfinancial firms face economic ...