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Working Paper
Foreign holdings of U.S. Treasuries and U.S. Treasury yields
Foreign official holdings of U.S. Treasuries increased from $400 billion in January 1994 to about $3 trillion in June 2010. Most of this growth is accounted for by a handful of emerging market economies that have been running large current account surpluses. These countries are channeling their savings through the official sector, which is then acquiring foreign exchange reserves. Any shift in policy to reduce their current account surpluses or dampen the rate of reserves accumulation would likely slow the pace of foreign official purchases of U.S. Treasuries. Would such a slowing of foreign ...
Working Paper
Measuring U.S. international relative prices: a WARP view of the world
In this paper we construct a new measure of U.S. prices relative to those of its trading partners and use it to reexamine the behavior of U.S. net exports. Our measure differs from existing measures of the dollar's real effective exchange rate (REER) in that it explicitly incorporates both the difference in price levels between the United States and developing economies and the growing importance of these developing economies in world trade. Unlike existing REERs, our measure shows that relative U.S. prices have increased significantly over the past 15 years. In terms of simple correlations, ...
Working Paper
The Performance of International Equity Portfolios
This paper evaluates the performance of U.S. investors' portfolios in the equities of over 40 countries over a 25-year period. We find that these portfolios achieved a significantly higher Sharpe ratio than foreign benchmarks, especially since 1990. We uncover three potential reasons for this success. First, U.S. investors abstained from momentum trading and instead sold past winners. Second, conditional performance tests provide no evidence that the superior (unconditional) performance owed to private information, suggesting that the successful exploitation of publicly available information ...
Working Paper
Measurement matters for modeling U.S. import prices
We focus on capturing the increasingly important role that emerging economies play in determining U.S. import prices. Emerging market producers differ from others in two respects: (1) their cost structure is well below that of developed-market producers, and (2) their wide profit margins induce pricing policies that seek to exhaust production capacity. We argue that these features have dampened the short-run responses of import prices to changes in the value of the dollar but that they have not altered the associated long-run response. To capture these considerations, we develop a new method ...
Working Paper
The sovereignty option: the Quebec referendum and market views on the Canadian dollar
We use exchange traded options on Canadian dollar futures to estimate the market's risk-neutral distribution for the Canadian dollar in the days before and after the Quebec sovereignty referendum. We employ a relatively new technique that places little a priori structure on the estimated distribution. This lack of structure allows the estimated distribution to reflect the multi-modal nature of expectations associated with the referendum's results. The technique is especially suited to circumstances in which a particular event will reduce a large degree of uncertainty prior to the expiration ...
Working Paper
War and peace: recovering the market's probability distribution of crude oil futures prices during the Gulf crisis
This paper investigates the market's expectations for oil prices during the Persian Gulf crisis. To do so a general method for using options markets to recover the implied distribution for futures prices is developed. The method applies to a wide class of distributions. In particular, it is not limited to those distributions arising from diffusion or jump-diffusion processes.
Working Paper
International relative price levels: a look under the hood
This paper examines the structure of international relative price levels using purchasing power parities (PPP) at the product-level from the 2005 World Bank?s International Comparison Program (ICP). Our examination is motivated by questions arising from two applications using economy-wide PPPs: the measurement of real effective exchange rates (REERs) and the correlation between prices and development. Specifically, how would our view on competitiveness be affected if one were to use PPP measures that exclude non-tradable categories? Is it the case that an increase in per-capita income raises ...
Working Paper
On returns differentials
Estimates of U.S. returns differentials have ranged from exorbitant to quite small, in part because of their volatility coupled with the relatively short time series available. We shed light on underlying drivers of returns differentials by presenting a number of decompositions: a by-asset-class decomposition into yields and capital gains, the Gourinchas and Rey (2007a) composition and return effects, and further decompositions of capital gains that focus on exchange rate effects. While each decomposition informs thinking about returns differentials, one constant is evident throughout: to ...
Working Paper
How long can the unsustainable U.S. current account deficit be sustained?
This paper addresses three questions about the prospects for the U.S. current account deficit. Is it sustainable in the long term? If not, how long will it take for measures of external debt and debt service to reach levels that could prompt some pullback by global investors? And if and when such levels are breached, how readily would asset prices respond and the current account start to narrow? ; To address these questions, we start with projections of a detailed partial-equilibrium model of the U.S. balance of payments. Based on plausible assumptions of the key drivers of the U.S. external ...
Working Paper
Using options prices to infer PDF'S for asset prices: an application to oil prices during the Gulf crisis
We develop a general method to infer martingale equivalent probability density functions (PDFs) for asset prices using American options prices. The early exercise feature of American options precludes expressing the option price in terms of the PDF of the price of the underlying asset. We derive tight bounds for the option price in terms of the PDF and demonstrate how these bounds, together with observed option prices, can be used to estimate the parameters of the PDF. We infer the distribution for the price of crude oil during the Persian Gulf crisis and find the distribution differs ...