We examine intra-market return comovement within each of 33 economies’ stock exchanges from 1995 through 2013 using a model-free comovement gauge. We find that the stability of international macroeconomic trilemma policies, the number of crises, and the extent of turnover overshadow the empirical relevance of many variables previously thought to be important for intra-market comovement, including country risk, corruption, and investor protections. We also use a much longer historical sample of U.S. firms to examine compositional explanations of the well-known U.S. comovement decline and to decompose the comovement into trend and cycle. Our findings challenge the compositional explanations of the decline; additionally, they suggest that the most recent uptick reflects short-term conditions, rather than a trend reversal.

In this paper, we examine the foreign exchange exposure of a sample of U.S. and Japanese banking firms. Using daily data, we construct estimates of the exchange rate sensitivity of the equity returns of the U.S. bank holding companies and compare them to those of the Japanese banks. We find that the stock returns of a significant fraction of the U.S. companies move with the exchange rate, while few of the Japanese returns that we observe do so. We next examine more closely the sensitivity of the U.S. firms by linking the U.S. estimates cross-sectionally to accounting-based measures of currency risk. We suggest that the sensitivity estimates can provide a benchmark for assessing the adequacy of existing accounting measures of currency risk. Benchmarked in this way, the reported measures that we examine appear to provide a significant, though only partial, picture of the exchange rate exposure of U.S. banking institutions. The cross-sectional evidence is also consistent with the use of foreign exchange contracts for the purpose of hedging.