NBER Publications by Adrien Verdelhan

How much of carry trade excess returns can be explained by the presence of disaster risk? To answer this question, we propose a simple structural model that includes both Gaussian and disaster risk premia and can be estimated even in samples that do not contain disasters. The model points to a novel estimation procedure based on currency options with potentially different strikes. We implement this procedure on a large set of countries over the 1996--2008 period, forming portfolios of hedged and unhedged carry trade excess returns by sorting currencies based on their forward discounts. We find that disaster risk premia account for about 25% of expected carry trade excess returns in advanced countries.

We identify a 'slope' factor in exchange rates. High interest rate currencies load more on this slope factor than low interest rate currencies. As a result, this factor can account 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 the global risk factor. We show that our slope factor is a global risk factor. By investing in high interest rate currencies and borrowing in low interest rate currencies, US investors load up on global risk, particularly during bad times.

To measure the wealth-consumption ratio, we estimate an exponentially affine model of the stochastic discount factor on bond yields and stock returns. We use that discount factor to compute the no-arbitrage price of a claim to aggregate US consumption. Our estimates indicate that total wealth is much safer than stock market wealth. The consumption risk premium is only 2.2 percent, substantially below the equity risk premium of 6.9 percent. As a result, our estimate of the wealth-consumption ratio is much higher than the price-dividend ratio on stocks throughout the post-war period. The high wealth-consumption ratio implies that the average US household has a lot of wealth, most of it human wealth. A variance decomposition of the wealth-consumption ratio shows less return predictability ove...

We find that the US consumption growth beta of an investment strategy that goes long in high interest rate currencies and short in low interest rate currencies is larger than one. These consumption beta estimates are statistically significant, contrary to what is claimed by Burnside (2007). With these consumption betas, the Consumption-CAPM can account for the average return on this investment strategy of 5.3 percent per annum with a market price of consumption growth risk that is about 5 percent per annum, lower than the price of consumption risk implied by the US equity premium over the same sample. When we formally estimate the model on currency portfolios in a two-step procedure, our estimate of the price of consumption risk is significantly different from zero, even after accounting f...