We identify a "slope" factor in exchange rates. High interest rate currencies load more on this slope factor than low interest rate currencies. This factor accounts for most of the cross-sectional variation in average excess returns between high and low interest rate currencies. A standard, no-arbitrage model of interest rates with two factors--a country-specific factor and a global factor--can replicate these findings, provided there is sufficient heterogeneity in exposure to global or common innovations. We show that our slope factor identifies these common shocks, and we provide empirical evidence that it is related to changes in global equity market volatility. By investing in high interest rate currencies and borrowing in low interest rate currencies, U.S. investors load up on global risk. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

In this paper, we identify jumps in U.S. Treasury-bond (T-bond) prices and investigate what causes such unexpected large price changes. In particular, we examine the relative importance of macroeconomic news announcements versus variation in market liquidity in explaining the observed jumps in the U.S. Treasury market. We show that while jumps occur mostly at prescheduled macroeconomic announcement times, announcement surprises have limited power in explaining bond price jumps. Our analysis further shows that preannouncement liquidity shocks, such as changes in the bid-ask spread and market depth, have significant predictive power for jumps. The predictive power is significant even after controlling for information shocks. Finally, we present evidence that post-jump order flow is less informative relative to the case where there is no jump at announcement.

Long Run Risk, the Wealth-Consumption Ratio, and the Temporal Pricing of Risk by Ralph S. J. Koijen, Hanno Lustig, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh and Adrien Verdelhan. Published in volume 100, issue 2, pages 552-56 of American Economic Review, May 2010

We find that deviations from the covered interest rate parity (CIP) condition imply large, persistent, and systematic arbitrage opportunities in one of the largest asset markets in the world. Contrary to the common view, these deviations for major currencies are not explained away by credit risk or transaction costs. They are particularly strong for forward contracts that appear on banks' balance sheets at the end of the quarter, pointing to a causal effect of banking regulation on asset prices. The CIP deviations also appear significantly correlated with other fixed income spreads and with nominal interest rates.