[This article investigates the existence of discontinuities in the sample path of exchange rates and of a stock market index. Maximum-likelihood estimation of a mixed jump-diffusion process reveals that exchange rates exhibit systematic discontinuities, even after allowing for conditional heteroskedasticity in the diffusion process. The results are much more significant in the foreign exchange market than in the stock market, which suggests differences in the structure of these markets. Finally, this jump component is shown to explain some of the empirically observed mispricings in the currency options market.]

Measures of volatility implied in option prices are widely believed to be the best available volatility forecasts. In this article, we examine the information content and predictive power of implied standard deviations (ISDs) derived from Chicago Mercantile Exchange options on foreign currency futures. The article finds that statistical time-series models, even when given the advantage of 'ex post' parameter estimates, are outperformed by ISDs. ISDs, however, also appear to be biased volatility forecasts. Using simulations to investigate the robustness of these results, the article finds that measurement errors and statistical problems can substantially distort inferences. Even accounting for these, however, ISDs appear to be too variable relative to future volatility.

[Researchers have long known about backfill bias in hedge fund databases. The most common treatments include either retaining all backfilled returns or truncating a fixed number of returns from each return series. However, we show that truncation largely preserves backfilled returns and document that either of these backfill treatments can lead to biased empirical findings, including cross-sectional results. Thus, our findings show that the best practice for empirical tests is to remove returns prior to the listing date. Because most databases do not have listing dates, we propose a novel method to infer unavailable listing dates.]

Standard credit risk models cannot explain the observed clustering of default, sometimes described as “credit contagion.” This paper provides the first empirical analysis of credit contagion via direct counterparty effects. We find that bankruptcy announcements cause negative abnormal equity returns and increases in CDS spreads for creditors. In addition, creditors with large exposures are more likely to suffer from financial distress later. This suggests that counterparty risk is a potential additional channel of credit contagion. Indeed, the fear of counterparty defaults among financial institutions explains the sudden worsening of the credit crisis after the Lehman bankruptcy in September 2008.

This paper examines the benefits from currency hedging, both for speculative and risk minimization motives, in international bond and equity portfolios. The risk-return performances of globally diversified portfolios are compared with and without forward contracts. Over the period 1974 to 1990, inclusion of forward contracts results in statistically significant improvements in the performance of unconditional portfolios containing bonds. Conditional strategies are also implemented, both in sample and out of sample, and are shown to both significantly improve the risk-return tradeoff of global portfolios and to outperform unconditional hedging strategies.

This paper reexamines the evidence on purchasing power parity in the long run. Previous studies have generally been unable to reject the hypothesis that the real exchange rate follows a random walk. If true, this implies that purchasing power parity does not hold. In contrast, this paper casts serious doubt on this random walk hypothesis. The results follow from more powerful estimation techniques, applied in a multilateral framework. Deviations from purchasing power parity, while substantial in the short run, appear to take about three years to be reduced in half.

This paper examines the pricing of exchange rate risk in the U.S. stock market, using two factor and multi-factor arbitrage pricing models. Evidence is presented that the relation between stock returns and the value of the dollar differs systematically across industries. The empirical results, however, do not suggest that exchange risk is priced in the stock market. The unconditional risk premium attached to foreign currency exposure appears to be small and never significant. As a result, active hedging policies by financial managers cannot affect the cost of capital, and other reasons must explain why firms decide to hedge.

In portfolio analysis, uncertainty about parameter values leads to suboptimal portfolio choices. The resulting loss in the investor's utility is a function of the particular estimator chosen for expected returns. So, this is a problem of simultaneous estimation of normal means under a well-specified loss function. In this situation, as Stein has shown, the classical sample mean is inadmissible. This paper presents a simple empirical Bayes estimator that should outperform the sample mean in the context of a portfolio. Simulation analysis shows that these Bayes-Stein estimators provide significant gains in portfolio selection problems.

This article investigates the existence of discontinuities in the sample path of exchange rates and of a stock market index. Maximum-likelihood estimation of a mixed jump-diffusion process reveals that exchange rates exhibit systematic discontuinities, even after allowing for conditional heteroskedasticity in the diffusion process. The results are much more significant in the foreign exchange market than in the stock market, which suggests differences in the structure of these markets. Finally, this jump component is shown to explain some of the empirically observed mispricings in the currency options market.

Long‐term estimates of expected return on equities are typically derived from U.S. data only. There are reasons to suspect that these estimates are subject to survivorship, as the United States is arguably the most successful capitalist system in the world. We collect a database of capital appreciation indexes for 39 markets going back to the 1920s. For 1921 to 1996, U.S. equities had the highest real return of all countries, at 4.3 percent, versus a median of 0.8 percent for other countries. The high equity premium obtained for U.S. equities appears to be the exception rather than the rule.