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Currency Redenomination Risk

Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 2024 59(6), 2838-2868 open access
A eurozone exit or breakup exposes bondholders to currency redenomination risk. I quantify redenomination risk since the sovereign debt crisis: It contributes substantially to credit spreads around changes in government in France and Italy. Bond prices suggest that markets have priced a potential Italian exit as isolated, and a French one as a breakup. Unlike conventional default risk, redenomination risk can be negative depending on the strength of the national “shadow” currency. Countries with strong shadow currencies earn breakup-insurance premia from the eurozone analog of “exorbitant privilege.” Yield effects are quantitatively large for implied exit probabilities as low as 1%.

Scale or Yield? A Present-Value Identity

Review of Financial Studies 2024 37(3), 950-988 open access
We propose a loglinear present-value identity in which investment (“scale”), profitability (“yield”), and discount rates determine a firm’s market-to-book ratio. Our identity reconciles existing influential market-to-book decompositions and facilitates novel insights from three empirical applications: (1) Both investment and profitability are important contributors to the value spread and stock return news variance. (2) Any cross-sectional return predictability has a mirror image in cash-flow fundamentals, providing asset pricing theories with additional moments to match. (3) The investment spread significantly improves the predictability of time-series variation in the value premium and justifies the poor performance of value in recent years.

The Quanto Theory of Exchange Rates

American Economic Review 2019 109(3), 810-843 open access
We present a new identity that relates expected exchange rate appreciation to a risk-neutral covariance term, and use it to motivate a currency forecasting variable based on the prices of quanto index contracts. We show via panel regressions that the quanto forecast variable is an economically and statistically significant predictor of currency appreciation and of excess returns on currency trades. Out of sample, the quanto variable outperforms predictions based on uncovered interest parity, on purchasing power parity, and on a random walk as a forecaster of differential (dollar-neutral) currency appreciation.