Time-Varying Risk Aversion and Currency Excess Returns

Abstract

This paper documents an economically significant risk premium associated with a currency’s sensitivity to time-varying risk aversion. Consequently, an investment strategy that takes a long (short) position in currencies with high (low) sensitivity to the aggregate market risk aversion yields significantly positive excess returns. While advanced market currencies including the Euro, Yen and Swiss Francs dominate the short end of these portfolios with low sensitivity to risk aversion, emerging market currencies including the Brazilian Real, Mexican Peso and Turkish Lira are found to be the most sensitive currencies to risk aversion. The excess returns from the proposed strategy are significant even after controlling for systematic equity market risk factors as well as liquidity risk and cannot be explained by measures of economic conditions or uncertainty. Interestingly the excess returns generated by the risk aversion based strategy are found to have significant loadings on global momentum, suggesting possible commonality in the behavioral drivers of anomalies in the global equity and currency markets. The findings highlight the role of behavioral factors as predictor of currency excess returns with significant investment implications.