Adrien Verdelhan

Sovereign Risk Premia

Emerging countries tend to default when their economic conditions worsen. If bad times in an emerging country correspond to bad times for the US investor, then these foreign sovereign bonds are particularly risky and should offer high returns. We explore how this mechanism plays out in the data and in a general equilibrium model of optimal borrowing and default. Empirically, we obtain a cross-section of sovereign bond returns: the higher the correlation between past bond returns and US corporate default risk, the higher the average bond returns. A model of risk-averse lenders with external habit preferences can replicate this feature.

Business Cycle Variation in the Risk-Return Trade-Off

In the United States and other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, the expected returns on stocks, adjusted for volatility, are much higher in recessions than in expansions. We consider feasible trading strategies that buy or sell shortly after business cycle turning points that are identifiable in real time and involve holding periods of up to 1 year. The observed business cycle changes in expected returns are not spuriously driven by changes in expected near-term dividend growth. Our findings imply that value-maximizing managers face much higher risk-adjusted costs of capital in their investment decisions during recessions than expansions.

The International CAPM Redux

We provide evidence that international equity investors are compensated for bearing currency risk. Three factors --- a global equity factor denominated in local currencies, and two currency factors, dollar and carry --- account for a wide cross-section of equity returns from 46 developed and emerging countries from 1976 to the present. They are also useful at explaining the risks of international mutual funds and hedge funds. A simple complete-markets model replicates our empirical findings. The model implies a novel perspective on optimal currency hedging.

Uncertainty and International Capital Flows

In a large panel of 26 emerging countries over the last 40 years, aggregate stock market return volatilities, our measure of uncertainty, forecast capital flows. When the stock market return volatility increases, capital inflows decrease and capital outflows increase. We propose a simple decomposition of each countrys market return volatility into two components: countries differ by their exposure to systematic volatility, measured by their uncertainty betas, and by their country-specific volatility. Capital inflows respond to both systematic and country-specific shocks to volatility, and they respond more in high uncertainty beta countries. These results are all statistically significant. A simple portfolio choice model illustrates the impact of uncertainty on gross capital flows: in the model, foreigners are exposed to expropriation risk. When the probability of expropriation increases, foreigners sell the domestic assets to the domestic investors, leading to a counter-cyclical home bias.

Does Incomplete Spanning in International Financial Markets Help to Explain Exchange Rates

Compared to the predictions of complete market models, actual exchange rates are puzzlingly smooth and only weakly correlated with macro-economic fundamentals, suggesting that market incompleteness plays a key role in exchange rate dynamics. Incompleteness in international financial markets introduces a stochastic wedge between the growth rates of marginal utility at home and abroad, and the change in the exchange rate. We derive a preference-free upper bound on the effects of the FX wedges. Even if domestic agents can invest only in the foreign risk-free asset, incomplete spanning fails to simultaneously match the exchange rate volatility, cyclicality and the FX risk premia in the data.

Common Factors, Order Flows, and Exchange Rate Dynamics

We built the largest dataset of high-frequency exchange rates so far. Our sample covers the spot prices and order flows of 19 currency pairs over the last 15 years measured on Reuters and EBS at the thirty-second frequency. We show that common, price-based factors describe exchange rate dynamics at high frequencies at least as well as the quantity-based order flows. The same price-based factors describe exchange rates over a large spectrum of frequencies, from 30 seconds to one month. While the descriptive power of order flows decreases when frequencies decrease, the descriptive power of common factors increases.