Conditional currency hedging

I propose a simple and robust approach to hedge currency risk that can be directly applied by international investors in diverse asset classes. Compared to current mean-variance approaches, it is robust to overfitting and thus better anticipates risk-minimizing currency positions for global equity, bond, and commodity investors out of sample. Furthermore, correlations among currencies, equities, and commodities can be predicted by lagged implied foreign exchange volatility. This allows investors to dynamically adjust their hedges, resulting in significantly lower risk compared to other hedging alternatives while maintaining or even improving Sharpe ratio, particularly during crisis periods.     

The Global CAPM and a Firm's Cost of Capital in Different Currencies

In an integrated global market, a firm's cost of capital expressed in one currency should be consistent with its cost of capital expressed in another currency. This article presents and illustrates a process for estimating consistent costs of capital in different currencies for a U.K. based multinational. In so doing, it uses a simple, easy-to-use version of the global CAPM that attempts to incorporate the effect of uncertain exchange rates by calculating exchange rate "betas." As argued in the previous article, at least part of a company's currency exposure is systematically related to the global market and thus should be treated as a component of the firm's systematic equity risk.
For example, the U.K. firm featured in this article is shown to have an exchange rate beta of 0.20 from the perspective of a U.S. investor. This implies that a 10% return on the global market in U.S. dollars tends to be associated with a 2% change in the U.S. dollar value of the British pound. One interesting consequence of incorporating exchange risk in this fashion is that two firms with identical U.S. global betas and costs of equity will have different expected returns expressed in another currency if they have different exposures to that currency.     

The Era of Cross‐Border M&A: How Current Market Dynamics are Changing the M&A Landscape

Rising equity volatility, surging energy prices, a weakening dollar, and widening credit spreads are influencing both tactical financing decisions and long‐term financial strategy. Amid this turbulence is a quickly changing global M&A landscape that portends long‐term opportunities to deliver value to shareholders. In this environment, the authors offer the following suggestions for U.S. multinationals: (1) continue looking overseas for well‐positioned targets, especially in emerging markets, even in the context of a weak U.S. dollar; (2) consider using their financial flexibility for opportunistic deals today now that asset values are contracting; and (3) critically evaluate non‐core assets at home or abroad that might be valuable to cross‐border acquirers. For multinationals in Europe and developing economies, the time may be right to consider transformational cross‐border “megadeals.” Emerging‐market companies have the opportunity to buy low and sell high by using high‐valued equity as an acquisition currency, particularly to gain access to developed markets. Companies in need of new capital should consider the financial and strategic benefits of selling minority stakes to a sovereign wealth fund or other foreign partner.     

Uncovered Equity Parity and rebalancing in international portfolios

Portfolio rebalancing is a key driver of the Uncovered Equity Parity (UEP) condition. According to UEP, when foreign equity holdings outperform domestic holdings, domestic investors are exposed to higher exchange rate exposure and hence repatriate some of the foreign equity to decrease their exchange rate risk. By doing so, foreign currency is sold, leading to foreign currency depreciation. We examine the relationship between U.S. investors' portfolio reallocations and returns and find some evidence consistent with UEP: Portfolio shifts are related to past returns in the underlying equity markets. But we argue that a motive other than reducing currency risk exposure is likely behind this rebalancing. In particular, U.S. investors rebalance away from equity markets that recently performed well and move into equity markets just prior to relatively strong performance, suggesting tactical reallocations to increase returns rather than reduce risk.     

iShares Australia: a clinical study in international behavioral finance

Using iShares Australia returns as a proxy for the influence of overseas investors in the Australian market, we found that U.S.-based investors in the Australian market overreact to contemporaneous and lagged returns of the U.S. equity market, the U.S.-Australian dollar exchange rate, and past iShares Australia returns. In response to changing conditional risk, however, investors behave rationally: increasing (decreasing) expected risk is associated with falling (rising) prices. In light of these findings, we hypothesize that behavioral finance might explain the observed correlations between international equity markets.     

Bond Risk Premia and The Exchange Rate

In emerging market economies, currency appreciation goes hand in hand with compressed sovereign bond spreads, even for local currency sovereign bonds. This yield compression comes from a reduction in the credit risk premium. Crucially, the relevant exchange rate involved in yield compression is the bilateral U.S. dollar exchange rate, not the trade-weighted exchange rate. Our findings highlight endogenous co-movement of bond risk premia and exchange rates through the portfolio choice of global investors who evaluate returns in dollar terms.     

Countercyclical currency risk premia

We describe a novel currency investment strategy, the ‘dollar carry trade,’ which delivers large excess returns, uncorrelated with the returns on well-known carry trade strategies. Using a no-arbitrage model of exchange rates we show that these excess returns compensate U.S. investors for taking on aggregate risk by shorting the dollar in bad times, when the U.S. price of risk is high. The countercyclical variation in risk premia leads to strong return predictability: the average forward discount and U.S. industrial production growth rates forecast up to 25% of the dollar return variation at the one-year horizon. The estimated model implies that the variation in the exposure of U.S. investors to worldwide risk is the key driver of predictability.     

The dynamics among G7 government bond and equity markets and the implications for international capital market diversification

This paper investigates potential international capital market diversification gains from relationships between global government bond and equity markets. Its primary contributions are (1) including both government debt and equity markets in the investigation of global diversification gains, (2) basing the analysis on real, risk-adjusted returns, and (3) evaluating both variance decompositions and impulse responses, as well as long-term relationships for international U.S. dollar investors. We find the cointegration, variance decomposition, and impulse response function results indicate interdependence and reduction in gains to international diversification.     

论全球储备货币多元化格局与中国外汇储备之出路

如今出现金融危机,美元的长期滥发以至全球流动性泛滥难辞其咎。可以预见,美元霸权在未来必将终结,世界货币体系需要重建,最终形成储备货币多元化格局。中国应投资实体产业,以寻求供需平衡之道。     

Australia’s equity home bias and real exchange rate volatility

The main purpose of this paper is to consider the effect of real exchange rate volatility on equity investment by Australian investors. Equity investment is of major importance to savers and investors in Australia. Also real exchange rate volatility is an important influence on Australia’s financial integration in the global economy. Analysis of the effect of real exchange rate volatility on Australia’s equity home bias is important since Australian dollar is a commodity currency. There is a close relationship between Australia’s terms of trade and real exchange rate volatility. Home bias is measured on the basis of free float-adjusted market capitalization in recognition of the fact that closely held shares are not available to ordinary investors. Real exchange rate volatility is measured by deviations from purchasing power parity on a bilateral basis between Australia and 35 countries. The cross-border equity investment data over the period 2001–2007 are from International Monetary Fund’s Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey. Australian investors are found to invest significantly less in a country if the real exchange rate volatility of that country is relatively high (results that are robust to standard control measures and generalized method of moments).     

Foreign investment with inflation-linked securities: A natural hedge under Fisher theory?

All foreign holders of U.S. dollars currencies face significant risk of unfavorable currency exchange movements, proportional to the amounts they hold. Some of these risks can be hedged to an extent, but the costs of doing so can be significant, and errors in execution or maintenance of the hedges can cause serious capital losses. Today the vast holdings of China and others creates currency risk on an unprecedented scale. China alone now has a total in excess of a trillion (1 × 10¹²) U.S. dollars, which makes traditional approaches to hedging problematic at best.¹ This paper analyzes the potential hedging effectiveness of investing foreign dollar holdings in U.S. inflation-indexed securities under Fisher's Identity. To the extent that Fisher's Identity and its derivative theories hold, foreign investors can effectively protect the purchasing power of their dollar balances, and earn an assured rate of return. Investment in inflation-indexed securities does not incur the additional expenses that swaps and currency hedges do.     

Average funds versus average dollars: Implications for mutual fund research

The top 5% of actively managed U.S. equity mutual funds in 2012 had greater aggregate TNA than the remaining 95% of funds combined. This skewness in size has implications for mutual fund research: What is true of the average fund is not necessarily true of the average dollar. We explore several key findings in the literature with an eye on this distinction. Our results indicate that if the goal of mutual fund research is to understand the importance of the industry to investors, then researchers should consider the experience of the average dollar, rather than the average fund.     

Country and currency diversification of bond investments: do they really make sense for Swiss investors?

The inclusion of hedged or unhedged foreign currency bonds within a strategic asset allocation is a crucial decision which should be analyzed carefully. The goal of this paper is to provide a contribution to this analysis by focusing particularly on the time horizon of the investment. Results are analyzed from the perspective of a Swiss investor. We find that over the last 21 years, investing in bonds denominated in Swiss Francs has been clearly less efficient in terms of risk-adjusted returns than investing in a hedged global bond portfolio. For short-term investors, we find robust evidence against the hypothesis of investing in unhedged foreign currency bonds. The picture changes dramatically, however, when we consider an investment horizon of 6 years and the normal case of balanced portfolios including also equities and domestic bonds. In this case, the optimal strategy for the period we analyzed would have been to hedge only the exposure to US dollar bonds.      

谁将挑战美元

1976年以来,美元作为国际货币的作用逐渐减弱,一些新兴市场经济体的货币开始登上历史舞台。而美元作为国际货币的地位并没有发生直线下降,尤其是2010年以来,美元在各国中央银行外汇储备中的占比止跌企稳,在外汇市场交易中的占比也开始回升。目前来看,欧元和人民币均难以替代美元。但未来美元仍存在被其他货币超越和取代的可能。     

U.S. Money Supply and China’s Business Cycles

This article models the U.S. dollar as a world currency in a global DSGE framework, and investigates the spillover effects of the U.S. money supply shock on China’s economy. Exchange rate targeting and capital controls in the context of dollar hegemony are investigated. Given a positive U.S. money supply shock, both the inflation and real GDP of China will be below their steady-state levels in the medium term; while for the U.S. there is no inflation pressure. The spillover of liquidity effect exists. Cost-push effects and relative price effects are employed to discuss the transmission mechanism. Under the U.S. money supply shock, a fully liberalizing reform with no capital controls and a floating exchange rate of Renminbi is not the best reform for China.     

Oil Currency and the Dollar Standard: A Simple Analytical Model of an International Trade Currency

The U.S. dollar is the central reference currency for international trade pricing and the main invoicing currency for primary commodities. This paper links these two observations within a stylized theoretical framework, and shows how to obtain a quantitative estimate of the gain to the U.S. economy when the dollar is a reference currency. With dollar invoicing of primary commodities, U.S. firms bear less exchange rate risk than foreign firms. This asymmetry leads to a dollar standard in international goods pricing. We then derive a simple analytical formula to calculate the gains and find that they are extremely small.     

Speculative attacks in a two-peg model

We present a two-country model of speculative attacks where the two countries peg their currency to the U.S. dollar and a continuum of investors can either attack or defend one or the two pegs. The main objective of the paper is to show how extending a single-peg model of speculative attacks with the presence of a second country pegging its currency changes the range of parameters for which a currency is attacked. The model suggests that the presence of another country fixing its exchange rate changes dramatically the range of parameters for which a currency is attacked or defended. For example, the model indicates that a peg with a relatively high probability of collapse could survive if the other peg is not very likely to be abandoned, so investors prefer instead to defend the second peg. Finally, under complete information, when the level of fundamentals in both economies is neither weak nor strong the stronger peg may collapse while the weaker peg may survive, so in principle any peg could be successfully attacked.     

当前国际货币体系新特征与人民币国际化

本文着重探讨了当前牙买加体系的运行状况及新世纪以来表现出的新特征。研究发现,当前国际货币体系除存在软约束的储备货币增长、货币危机的频繁发生和国际收支调节的低效等问题外,还表现出全球通货膨胀不断、美元悖论、新兴市场崛起、外汇储备分配失衡、货币风险高度集中、美元相对地位下降等六大新特征,而这些都源于牙买加体系固有的内在缺陷。因此,本文简要勾勒了当前国际货币体系的发展趋势,并对人民币国际化的现状和路径选择进行了探讨。     

Currency hedging failure in international equity investments and an efficient hedging strategy: The perspective of Korean investors

Korean fund investors suffered significant financial losses from their international equity investments during the recent global financial crisis. Contrary to expectations for improved investment performance, the currency position for hedging purposes worsened performance. In this paper, we critically assess currency-hedging practices for international equity investments from the perspective of Korean investors. We find that international equity portfolios are concentrated in a limited number of emerging market regions; most international equity funds employ near-fixed and near-perfect currency-hedging policies; the minimum-variance currency-hedging strategy performs the best in emerging market regions and its relative gains over the current hedging policy are significant; the no-hedging strategy provides the best performance for the investments into the US and Europe during a turbulent period.