Essays on International Finance and Currency Economics

Abstract

My dissertation consists of three chapters which address questions in international finance and currency economics. Chapter 1 studies the persistence of covered interest rate parity (CIP) deviations. Since global financial crisis (GFC), the CIP deviations have implied a persistent dollar financing premium for banks versus other major currencies. In this paper, I decompose the CIP deviation into three parts: credit spread differential between U.S. and non- U.S. economies, bank’s default premium, and the liquidity needs of global banks. Then I empirically examine whether the data accords with the model predictions, and find that the relative significance of each component in CIP deviation has changed over time, as default premium was the dominant driver around GFC, credit spread differential has been catching up significantly in recent years. In chapter 2, we use a joint model of macroeconomic and term structure dynamics to estimate the term premia and inflation risk premia embedded in the euro area and U.S. sovereign bonds yields. We find that the fall in real risk premia has been the primary driver of declining yields, given ECB assets purchases and forward guidance which lowered the uncertainty over the projected path of short-term rates. In addition, contrary to the Federal Reserve, the ECB’s new strategy review has yet to lift inflation expectations in our sample period with financial markets expecting inflation to remain below 2 percent. We subsequently build a model of the term premia to forecast the euro area 10-year yield curve and find that yields will likely remain depressed over the medium-term under various scenarios. In chapter 3, we examine the economic determinants of the foreign exchange uncertainty with a focus on options prices. FX option prices theoretically contain information over and above that is included in the spot exchange rate markets, as they reflect the market’s perception of the uncertainty surrounding future exchange rate developments. However, little research efforts have been devoted to examine the economic determinants of the FX uncertainty with a focus on options prices. This paper addresses this issue using the option data by characterizing the economic determinants of FX market un- certainty. In a data-rich environment containing a large number of macroeconomic variables, we find that shocks of output and income variables, as well as monetary and credit variables generate significant and consistent impacts on the general risk sentiment and tail risk in the FX market. Shrinkage method of group LASSO also selects macroeconomic fundamentals and financial variables to have consistent impacts on FX market uncertainties. Besides the standard linear analyses, we adopt the neural network method to examine the non-linear association between economic determinants and FX option volatility. The results connect the time-varying FX market risks at both short and long term with macroeconomic fundamentals, and may in addition suggest that financial uncertainty co-movements also exist in currency markets.