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Working Paper
Explaining the Great Moderation Exchange Rate Volatility Puzzle
In this paper, we study how the volatility of both realized and expected macroeconomic variables relates to the variation in exchange rate volatility through the prism of the Great Moderation hypothesis. We find significant heterogeneity in exchange rate trend volatility across currency pairs despite decreases in the volatility of expected future interest rate differentials and of realized yields themselves. We argue that time variation in the relationship between macroeconomic variables and exchange rates has prevented the Great Moderation in realized yield volatility from translating to a ...
Working Paper
A Fundamental Connection: Exchange Rates and Macroeconomic Expectations
This paper presents new stylized facts about exchange rates and their relationship with macroeconomic fundamentals. We show that macroeconomic surprises explain a large majority of the variation in nominal exchange rate changes at a quarterly frequency. Using a novel present value decomposition of exchange rate changes that is disciplined with survey forecast data, we show that macroeconomic surprises are also a very important driver of the currency risk premium component and explain about half of its variation. These surprises have even greater explanatory power during economic downturns and ...
Working Paper
Exchange rates and monetary policy
In this paper we confront the data with the financial-market folk wisdom that monetary policy is one of the key drivers of nominal exchange rates. Focusing on measures of conventional and unconventional monetary policy, we find that monetary policy surprises and changes in expectations about future monetary policy can explain a sizable fraction of the variation in exchange rate changes for certain currency pairs. However, our results show that expected excess returns account for most of this variation. We also find that the importance unconventional monetary policy plays for explaining ...
Working Paper
The dollar during the global recession: US monetary policy and the exorbitant duty
We document that during the Global Recession, US monetary policy easings triggered the ?exorbitant duty? of the United States, the issuer of the world?s dominant currency, by causing a dollar appreciation and a transfer of wealth from the United States to the rest of the world. This dollar appreciation runs counter to the predictions of standard macroeconomic models and works through two channels: (i) a flight-to-safety effect which lowered the expected excess returns of holding safe US government debt relative to foreign debt and (ii) lowered expected future inflation in the United States ...