This paper provides an empirical test of the scapegoat theory of exchange rates (Bacchetta and van Wincoop 2004, 2011). This theory suggests that market participants may at times attach significantly more weight to individual economic fundamentals to rationalize the pricing of currencies, which...

How did the Subprime Crisis, a problem in a small corner of U.S. financial markets, affect the entire global banking system? To shed light on this question we use principal components analysis to identify common factors in the movement of banks' credit default swap spreads. We find that fortunes...

A large literature suggests that standard exchange rate models cannot outperform a random walk forecast and that the forward rate is not an optimal predictor of the spot rate. However, there is evidence that the term structure of forward premia contains valuable information for forecasting...

Recent research has reported that both the federal funds rate futures market and the federal funds target contain valuable information for explaining the behavior of the US effective federal funds rate. A parallel literature on interest rate modelling has recorded evidence that the dynamics of...