This paper studies variance risk premiums in the Treasury market. We first develop a theory to price variance swaps and show that the realized variance can be perfectly replicated by a static position in Treasury futures options and a dynamic position in the underlying. Pricing and hedging is robust even in the underlying jumps. Using a large options panel data set on Treasury futures with different tenors, we report the following findings: First, the term structure of implied variances is downward sloping across maturities and increases in tenors. Moreover, the slope of the term structure is strongly linked to economic activity. Second, returns to the Treasury variance swap are negative and economically large. Shorting a variance swap produces an annualized Sharpe ratio of almost two and the associated returns cannot be explained by standard risk factors. Finally, the returns remain highly statistically significant even when accounting for transaction costs and margin requirements.

We show that the cross-sectional dispersion of conditional foreign exchange (FX) correlation is countercyclical and that currencies that perform badly (well) during periods of high dispersion yield high (low) average excess returns. We also find a negative cross-sectional association between average FX correlations and average option-implied FX correlation risk premiums. Our findings show that while investors in spot currency markets require a positive risk premium for exposure to high dispersion states, FX option prices are consistent with investors being compensated for the risk of low dispersion states. To address our empirical findings, we propose a no-arbitrage model that features unspanned FX correlation risk.

We document that a trading strategy that is short the U.S. dollar and long other currencies exhibits significantly larger excess returns on days with scheduled Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements. We show that these excess returns (i) are higher for currencies with higher interest rate differentials vis‐à‐vis the United States, (ii) increase with uncertainty about monetary policy, and (iii) increase further when the Federal Reserve adopts a policy of monetary easing. We interpret these excess returns as compensation for monetary policy uncertainty within a parsimonious model of constrained financiers who intermediate global demand for currencies.