Essays On Exchange Rate Risk And Uncertainty

A collection of essays about foreign exchange risk and how to cope with it.

These twelve essays take up economic management under flexible exchange rates in the presence of uncertainty. Nearly all of the contributions adopt a rational expectations framework, focusing on the stochastic aspects of the assumption and exploring the variability of, for example, output and prices in relation to the variability of various external disturbances.Jagdeep Bhandari is Associate Professor of International Economics at West Virginia University.

At least since Knight (1921), economists have suspected that the distinction between risk and ̀uncertainty' might be important in economics. However,Savage (1954) showed this distinction is meaningless if agents adhere to certain axioms, which seem to be normatively compelling. Savage's SubjectiveExpected Utility (SEU) model became the dominant paradigm in economics, and remains so to this very day. Still, suspicions that the distinction matters never really died. The Ellsberg Paradox (1961) first raised doubts about the SEU model. Then, Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989) showed how to modifySavage's axioms so that the distinction does matter. In their model, agents entertain a set of priors, and optimize against the worst-caseprior. Finally, Hansen and Sargent (2008) operationalized this new approach by linking it to the engineering literature on ̀robust control'. My dissertationapplies the Hansen-Sargent framework to the foreign exchange market. I show that if we think of market participants as confronting both uncertainty andrisk, then we can easily explain several well known empirical puzzles in the foreign exchange market.The second chapter of my dissertation, entitled "Robustness and Exchange Rate Volatility", was published in the Journal of International Economics in 2013, and is coauthored with my supervisor, Prof. Kenneth Kasa. This paper uses the monetary model of exchange rates. It assumes investors are aware of their own lack of knowledge about the economy. They respond to their ignorance strategically, by constructing forecasts that are robust to model misspecification. We show that revisions of robust forecasts are more sensitive to new information, and can easily explain observed violations of Shiller's variance bound inequality.The third chapter, entitled "Model Uncertainty and the Forward Premium Puzzle", was published in the "Journal of International Money and Finance" in 2014. It studies a standard two-country Lucas (1982) asset-pricing model. The main objective is to understand the determinants of observed excess return in the foreign exchange market. The paper shows that Hansen-Jagannathan (1991) volatility bounds can be attained with both reasonable degrees of risk aversion and empirically plausible detection error probabilities. Hence, excess returns in the foreign exchange market appear to be primarily driven by a ̀model uncertainty premium' rather than a risk premium.The fourth chaper, entitled "Robust Learning in the Foreign Exchange Market", was recently revised and resubmitted to the "Canadian Journal of Economics". Following Hansen and Sargent (2010), it assumes agents cope with uncertainty by both learning and by formulating robust decision rules. Agents entertain two competing models, differing by the persistence of consumption growth. As in my previous paper, agents continue to doubt the specification of each model. It shows that robust learning can not only explain unconditional risk premia in the foreign exchange market, but can also explain the cyclical dynamics of risk premia. In particular, an empirically plausible concern for model misspecification and model uncertainty generates a stochastic discount factor that uniformly satisfies the spectral Hansen-Jagannathan bound of Otrok et. al. (2007).

This dissertation examines both the determinants and the effects of exchange rate dynamics. The work is both theoretical and empirical and examines exchange rates from the perspective of investment and production activity. The dissertation is divided into three chapters.

This book adds to the resolution of two problems in finance and economics: i) what is macro-financial uncertainty? : How to measure it? How is it different from risk? How important is it for the financial markets? And ii) what sort of asymmetries underlie financial risk and uncertainty propagation across the global financial markets? That is, how risk and uncertainty change according to factors such as market states or market participants. In Chapter 2, which is entitled “Momentum Uncertainties”, the relationship between macroeconomic uncertainty and the abnormal returns of a momentum trading strategy in the stock market is studies. We show that high levels of uncertainty in the economy impact negatively and significantly the returns of a portfolio of stocks that consist of buying past winners and selling past losers. High uncertainty reduces below zero the abnormal returns of momentum, extinguishes the Sharpe ratio of the momentum strategy, while increases the probability of momentum crashes both by increasing the skewness and the kurtosis of the momentum return distribution. Uncertainty acts as an economic regime that underlies abrupt changes over time of the returns generated by momentum strategies. In Chapter 3, “Measuring Uncertainty in the Stock Market”, a new index for measuring stock market uncertainty on a daily basis is proposed. The index considers the inherent differentiation between uncertainty and the common variations between the series. The second contribution of chapter 3 is to show how this financial uncertainty index can also serve as an indicator of macroeconomic uncertainty. Finally, the dynamic relationship between uncertainty and the series of consumption, interest rates, production and stock market prices, among others, is analized. In chapter 4: “Uncertainty, Systemic Shocks and the Global Banking Sector: Has the Crisis Modified their Relationship?” we explore the stability of systemic risk and uncertainty propagation among financial institutions in the global economy, and show that it has remained stable over the last decade. Additionally, a new simple tool for measuring the resilience of financial institutions to these systemic shocks is provided. We examine the characteristics and stability of systemic risk and uncertainty, in relation to the dynamics of the banking sector stock returns. This sort of evidence is supportive of past claims, made in the field of macroeconomics, which hold that during the global financial crisis the financial system may have faced stronger versions of traditional shocks rather than a new type of shock. In chapter 5, “Currency downside risk, liquidity, and financial stability”, downside risk propagation across global currency markets and the ways in which it is related to liquidity is analyzed. Two primary contributions to the literature follow. First, tail-spillovers between currencies in the global FX market are estimated. This index is easy to build and does not require intraday data, which constitutes an important advantage. Second, we show that turnover is related to risk spillovers in global currency markets. Chapter 6 is entitled “Spillovers from the United States to Latin American and G7 Stock Markets: A VAR-Quantile Analysis”. This chapter contributes to the studies of contagion, market integration and cross-border spillovers during both regular and crisis episodes by carrying out a multivariate quantile analysis. It focuses on Latin American stock markets, which have been characterized by a highly positive dynamic in recent decades, in terms of market capitalization and liquidity ratios, after a far-reaching process of market liberalization and reforms to pension funds across the continent during the 80s and 90s. We document smaller dependences between the LA markets and the US market than those between the US and the developed economies, especially in the highest and lowest quantiles.

Contains essays on the impact of exchange-rate variability on trade policy and trade flows

Issues addressed include the prospects for foreign exchange crises, trade wars, international banking crises, and oil shortages.

What impact do random events have on individuals? How do they adapt to living in an uncertain stochastic environment? This work pays tribute to the contribution of James L. Ford to our understanding of these themes.