Export Flexibility and Hedging

The paper considers a risk-averse international firm which sells its output in either the domestic or the foreign market. The firm possesses export flexibility, and so it can choose between the domestic and export markets after considering the foreign exchange rate. It is shown that a separation property holds if the proper hedging instrument is used: the firm's production depends on market prices and technology and does not depend on its attitude towards risk nor on its expectations. A full-hedge proposition is derived.     

THE EFFECT OF FORWARD MARKETS ON MULTINATIONAL FIRMS

This paper presents a model of a risk averse multinational firm under exchange rate risk. The firm, which owns and controls assets in two countries, is engaged in production, sales and forward contracting whenever forward markets exist. First, we investigate the effects of exchange rate uncertainty without any risk sharing markets. It is shown that the firm internalizes missing hedging markets by increasing foreign production and lowering foreign sales. Therefore the firm hedges by repatriating foreign profits in the form of goods. Second, the implications of the existence of forward markets of global market decisions are discussed. It is shown that a separation theorem holds. This does not imply that the multinational firm shifts all the risk into the forward exchange market.     

Hedging effectiveness of fertilizer swaps

The fertilizer swaps market is a potential tool to protect against fertilizer price risk. The swaps evaluated here are cash settled using The Fertilizer Index. Hedge ratios and hedging effectiveness are calculated for urea and DAP diammonium phosphate (DAP)) swaps. Urea and DAP swaps perform poorly as a hedging tool over a one-week horizon. As the hedging horizon increases, the hedging effectiveness of swaps improves. The swaps are more effective in mitigating risk across ocean freight routes than across inland routes. The limited hedging effectiveness is due to high spatial basis risk in fertilizer markets.     

International diversification and industry-related labor income risk

Do equity markets help diversifying away industry-related labor income risk? This paper reconsiders the hedging role of stock markets by focusing on international equity diversification, rather than domestic asset allocation, and on industry wage, rather than individual labor income. We compare industry-based portfolio holdings to the one that is optimal for an investor endowed with the average home-country labor income. Our results resurrect the role of equities in hedging wage risk by uncovering remarkable heterogeneity across industries within each investing country. Our analysis also delivers insights concerning the role of occupational pension funds in designing optimal portfolios for their members.     

Cross-Hedging of Exchange-Rate Risk

For currencies with highly developed forward markets a well-known separation theorem holds which implies that international firms fully hedge the exchange rate risk if the forward markets are unbiased. In this paper we present a model of a risk-averse firm when perfect hedging instruments are not available. Instead the firm can cross-hedge the exchange-rate risk by using the forward markets of a third country's currency. We demonstrate that the unbiasedness of all forward markets does not imply full hedge, although the firm has the option to hedge all the risks.     

Export Flexibility And Currency Hedging*

This article studies the behavior of an export‐flexible firm under exchange rate uncertainty. We show that the separation theorem holds if selling exclusively in the domestic market is suboptimal even under the most unfavorable spot exchange rate. Otherwise, the firm's optimal output depends on its preferences and on the underlying uncertainty. We further show that the full‐hedging theorem holds only when the firm always finds it optimal to sell its entire output in the foreign market. Otherwise, export flexibility introduces a convexity into the firm's foreign exchange risk exposure, which calls for the use of currency options for hedging purposes.     

股指期货在风险管理中的应用

股指期货属于金融期货的一种,是以股票市场的股票价格指数为标的物的期货合约.在很多发达的股票市场乃至资本市场中,股指期货扮演着规避风险、套期保值的重要角色.在利用股指期货对股票组合进行套期保值时,可能面临各种风险,其中,基差风险是套期保值者面临的最主要风险.利用向量误差修正模型可以估计最小风险套期保值比,为投资者综合选择风险最小的套期保值策略提供了现实的、可操作的定量分析工具.     

Exports and Indirect Hedging of Foreign Currency Risk

We present a model of a risk-averse competitive exporting firm under exchange rate risk. Direct hedging instruments are not available. However, there are domestic assets whose prices are correlated to the foreign currency. We consider a market for futures contracts in these domestic assets and investigate the firm's indirect hedging and export policy. It is shown that the availability of many financial instruments correlated with foreign exchange may, under some circumstances, provide the same results as a perfect hedge.
JEL Classification Numbers: F21, F31.     

Public versus private risk sharing

Can public income insurance through progressive income taxation improve the allocation of risk in an economy where private risk sharing is incomplete? The answer depends crucially on the fundamental friction that limits private risk sharing in the first place. If risk sharing is limited because insurance markets are missing for model-exogenous reasons (as in Bewley (1986) [8]) publicly provided risk sharing improves on the allocation of risk. If instead private insurance markets exist but their use is limited by limited enforcement (as in Kehoe and Levine (1993) [23]) then the provision of public insurance interacts with equilibrium private insurance, as, by providing risk sharing, the government affects the value of exclusion from private insurance markets and thus the enforcement mechanism of these contracts. We characterize consumption allocations in an economy with limited enforcement and a continuum of agents facing plausible income risk and tax systems with various degrees of progressivity (public risk sharing). We provide conditions under which more publicly provided insurance actually reduces total insurance for agents (excess crowding-out), or under which more public insurance increases total insurance (partial crowding-out).     

Hedging against bunker price fluctuations using petroleum futures contracts: constant versus time-varying hedge ratios

The effectiveness of hedging marine bunker price fluctuations in Rotterdam, Singapore and Houston is examined using different crude oil and petroleum future contracts traded at the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) in London. Using both constant and dynamic hedge ratios, it is found that in and out-of-sample hedging effectiveness is different across regional bunker markets. The most effective futures instruments for out of sample hedging of spot bunker prices in Rotterdam and Singapore are the IPE crude oil futures, while for Houston it is the gas oil futures. Differences in hedging effectiveness across regional markets are attributed to the varying regional supply and demand factors in each market. In comparison to other markets, the cross-market hedging effectiveness investigated in the bunker market is low.     

Bad volatility is not always bad: evidence from the commodity markets

ABSTRACT

Using exchange-traded fund (ETF) options data, we examine the predictive power of variance risk premium on returns of four commodities: crude oil, natural gas, gold and silver. We also analyze the predictive power of upside and downside variance risk premiums using a decomposition model conditional on the direction of the underlying market movement. We find that both the undecomposed and decomposed variance risk premiums are able to predict commodity prices. The decomposed variance risk premiums, however, outperform the undecomposed premium. The importance of upside and downside variance risk premiums differs across markets, related to hedging demand. In energy markets, both upside and downside premiums have strong predictive power, while in precious metal markets, only the upside premium is predictive.     

东亚消费风险分担的度量及潜在福利分析

文章利用1970-2004年的相关数据,度量了东亚13个经济体的消费风险分担的程度以及东亚地区在实现完全风险分担后带来的潜在福利收益.实证结果表明:东亚区域资本市场在平滑GDP冲击方面的作用非常小,对区域借贷市场虽有一定的作用,但较为有限,这说明东亚的消费风险分担程度还相当低;相比OECD国家和欧盟国家,东亚各经济体风险分担的福利收益是比较高的.     

信用风险、出口信用保险和出口贸易关系的研究

文章基于厂商理论对信用风险、出口信用保险与最优出口量之间的关系进行理论分析,论证了信用风险对出口贸易的负面效应,以及政府支持的出口信用保险对外贸出口的推动效应;并通过对中国的出口规模和进口国国家信用之间的关系进行实证检验,验证了信用风险的负面贸易效应,阐明了对于信用评级下调的发达市场以及绝对信用评级较低、人均收入较低的新兴市场,中国不仅需要而且必须加强发挥出口信用保险的功能。     

Risk sharing and industrial specialization in China

We investigate how risk sharing shapes industrial specialization across prefecture-level cities in China. By unbundling the mechanisms of risk sharing, we find that ex ante risk sharing generates a first-order stimulant effect on the geographical concentration of manufacturing industries, particularly for non-state-owned enterprises and cyclical industries. Ex post risk sharing matters only for state-owned enterprises. This result remains robust to instrument variable estimation and controlling for other determinants of industrial specialization. Finally, we show that interregional labor migration (special fiscal transfers) plays an important role in promoting interregional ex ante (ex post) risk sharing. The study implies that much more risk sharing and efficiency gains from industrial specialization would be achieved if capital markets and credit markets are better developed.     

Currency Hedging For Export-Flexible Firms *

This paper examines the production and hedging decisions of a competitive exporting firm under exchange rate uncertainty. The firm possesses export flexibility in that it can distribute its output to either the domestic market or a foreign market, after observing the true realization of the exchange rate. It is shown that the separation theorem does not hold under export flexibility, i.e., the firm's optimal output depends on the firm's preference and on the underlying exchange rate uncertainty. Furthermore, the export- flexible firm underhedges its exchange rate risk exposure in a currency forward market where in the forward exchange rate contains a non-positive risk premium. [D21, F31]     

Futures markets and commodity options: Hedging and optimality in incomplete markets

This paper examines the allocational roles of futures markets and commodity options in multi-good and multi-period economies. In a continuous-time model with time-additive utilities and homogeneous beliefs, trading in “unconditional” futures contracts, the market portfolio and a riskless asset gives any Pareto-optimal allocation. Individuals' optimal holdings of futures contracts in the continuous-time model are related to their consumption bundles and to their risk tolerances. It is shown that both hedging and “reverse hedging” behavior are possible. In the general model with discrete trading, options on portfolios of commodity options are shown to permit any unconstrained Pareto-optimal allocation.     

Public Employment and Regional Risk Sharing*

We provide an empirical analysis of regional risk sharing in Norway over the period 1977–90. The approach of Asdrubali, Sørensen and Yosha (1996) is extended to take public employment into account as a possible shock absorber. The other channels of risk sharing are capital markets and commuting, taxes and transfers, and credit markets. The estimated degree of regional consumption insurance is very high. We cannot reject the hypothesis that there is full interregional risk sharing in the short term. Public employment absorbs up to 25 percent of private sector output shocks in our analyses. Generally, central government insurance against regional shocks is relatively more important, the more permanent the shocks are, and vice versa for market‐based risk‐sharing channels.     

Inflation-hedging properties of regional Chinese real estate market: evidence from 35 cities in China

The housing markets in China have been gaining considerable interest from investors, but the inflation-hedging characteristics of housing remain ambiguous. Based on Chinese city-level data, this study evaluates different inflation-hedging properties in eastern, middle and western real estate markets using panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) models. Findings suggest middle real estate markets afford the best hedging opportunities for expected inflation, which is robust considering housing market heterogeneity, financial crisis and the 2010 purchase restriction order. Moreover, hedging efficacy of anticipated inflation differs between markets with low and high supply–demand ratio.     

Currency Options and Export-Flexible Firms

This paper examines the production and hedging decisions of a globally competitive firm under exchange rate uncertainty. The firm is risk averse and possesses export flexibility in that it can distribute its output to either the domestic market or a foreign market after observing the realized spot exchange rate. To hedge against its exchange rate risk exposure, the firm can trade fairly priced currency call options of an arbitrary strike price. We show that both the separation and the full‐hedging results hold if the strike price of the currency call options is set equal to the ratio of the domestic and foreign selling prices. Otherwise, neither result holds. Specifically, we show that the optimal level of output is always less than that of an otherwise identical firm that is risk neutral. Furthermore, an under‐hedge (over‐hedge) is optimal whenever the strike price of the currency call options is below (above) the ratio of the domestic and foreign selling prices.     

Intraday hedging with financial options: the case of electricity

As market intermediaries, electricity suppliers purchase electricity from the wholesale market or self-generate to deliver their customers. However, electricity suppliers are uncertain about how much electricity their residential customers will use at any hour of the day until they actually turn switches on. While demand uncertainty is a common feature of all commodity markets, suppliers generally rely on storage to manage it. Singularly, electricity suppliers are exposed to joint volumetric and price risk on an hourly basis given the physical attributes of electricity. In the literature on electricity markets, few articles compare the efficiency of forward contracts, options and physical assets (i.e. power plants) within intraday hourly hedging portfolios, whereas electricity markets are precisely hourly markets. We analyse portfolios made of forwards, options and/or power plants for specific hourly clusters (9 am, 12 pm, 18 pm, 9 pm) based on electricity market data from 2013 to 2015 from the integrated German–Austrian spot market. Through a VaR model, we prove that intraday hedging with forwards is structurally inefficient compared to financial options and physical assets, no matter the cluster hour. Moreover, our results demonstrate the contribution of ‘out of the money’ options for all hours within volatile spot markets.