[Although weather has been shown to affect financial markets and financial decision making, a still open question is the channel through which such influence is exerted. By employing a multiple price list method, this paper provides direct experimental evidence that sunshine and good weather promote risk-taking behavior. This effect is present whether relying on objective measures of meteorological conditions or subjective weather assessments. Finally, employing a psychological test, we find evidence that weather may affect individual risk tolerance through its effect on mood.]

We document that the first and third cross-sectional moments of the distribution of GDP growth rates made by professional forecasters can predict equity excess returns, a finding that is robust to controlling for a large set of well-established predictive factors. We show that introducing time-varying skewness in the distribution of expected growth prospects in an otherwise standard endowment economy can substantially increase the model-implied equity Sharpe ratios, and produce a large amount of fluctuation in equity risk premiums.

We document that the currency denomination of the debt of large firms in developed countries is strongly associated with the geographical distribution of their sales. Furthermore, those firms exhibit significant home currency bias and international currency bias in borrowing: controlling for the geography of sales, they borrow more in their home currency and the two most traded currencies, the US dollar and the euro. We also show that the firms’ debt currency denomination choices are associated with export invoicing currency patterns in a way consistent with a currency hedging mechanism. In particular, firms domiciled in countries that invoice a larger share of their exports in either their home currency or in a vehicle currency exhibit a weaker connection between the currency denomination of their debt and the geography of their sales. Moreover, firms in countries that invoice more of their exports in an international currency are characterized by stronger international currency bias in debt issuance.

We document that the first and third cross-sectional moments of the distribution of GDP growth rates made by professional forecasters can predict equity excess returns, a finding that is robust to controlling for a large set of well-established predictive factors. We show that introducing time-varying skewness in the distribution of expected growth prospects in an otherwise standard endowment economy can substantially increase the model-implied equity Sharpe ratios, and produce a large amount of fluctuation in equity risk premiums. Received May 6, 2013; accepted January 26, 2016 by Editor Geert Bekaert.

Although weather has been shown to affect financial markets and financial decision making, a still open question is the channel through which such influence is exerted. By employing a multiple price list method, this paper provides direct experimental evidence that sunshine and good weather promote risk-taking behavior. This effect is present whether relying on objective measures of meteorological conditions or subjective weather assessments. Finally, employing a psychological test, we find evidence that weather may affect individual risk tolerance through its effect on mood.

We characterize the equilibrium of a two-country, two-good economy in which agents have opposite preference bias toward one of the two consumption goods and fear model misspecification. We document that disagreement about endowments' growth prospects is a persistent endogenous outcome of this class of economies.

There is an extensive economics and finance literature that addresses the potential benefits of financial integration. If on the one hand there is consensus on the significant inherent gain that may be attained in terms of portfolio diversification, decreased cost of equity capital, and reduced financing constraints, on the other hand, economics modeling has typically stumbled in the prediction of negligible welfare gains. Although the models adopted so far in the literature are able to accurately characterize the joint behavior of a large set of economic variables, they are typically silent about how closely they can track stock markets dynamics. Equivalently, it is still not clear what are the welfare benefits of financial integration when one wants to explain simultaneously prices and quantities. In order to address this point, we propose a general equilibrium model that is able to simultaneously explain: (i) the volatility of exchange rate and stochastic discount factors; and both (ii) the volatility of net exports and (iii) the amount of cross-country correlation and persistence of consumption growth rates. In our economy agents have risk-sensitive preferences in the sense of Hansen and Sargent (1995). This implies that investors have a preference for the timing of the resolution of uncertainty. We conduct our analysis for the case in which consumption is a Cobb-Douglas aggregation of domestic and foreign goods, both of which are tradable. Furthermore we let the dynamics of the growth rate of the endowments of ∗ Both authors are affiliated with the University

ABSTRACT Focusing on data from the United States and the United Kingdom, we document that both the anomaly identified by Backus and Smith, which concerns the low correlation between consumption differentials and exchange rates, and the forward premium anomaly, which concerns the tendency of high interest rate currencies to appreciate, have become more severe over time. Taking into account different capital mobility regimes, we show that these anomalies turn into general equilibrium regularities in a two‐country and two‐good economy with Epstein and Zin preferences, frictionless markets, and correlated long‐run growth prospects.

We propose an equilibrium model that can explain a wide range of international finance puzzles, including the high correlation of international stock markets, despite the lack of correlation of fundamentals. We conduct an empirical analysis of our model, which combines cross-country-correlated long-run risk with Epstein and Zin preferences, using U.S. and U.K. data, and show that it successfully reconciles international prices and quantities, thereby solving the international equity premium puzzle. These results provide evidence suggesting a link between common long-run growth perspectives and exchange rate movements.

The slope carry takes a long (short) position in the long-term bonds of countries with steeper (flatter) yield curves. The traditional carry takes a long (short) position in countries with high (low) short-term rates. We document that: (i) the slope carry return is slightly negative (strongly positive) in the pre (post) 2008 period, whereas it is concealed over longer samples; (ii) the traditional carry return is lower post-2008; and (iii) expected global growth and inflation declined post-2008. We connect these findings through an equilibrium model in which countries feature heterogeneous exposure to news shocks about global output and global inflation .