Recent studies have shown that disaster risk can generate asset return moments similar to those observed in the U.S. data. However, these studies have ignored the cross-country asset pricing implications of the disaster risk model. This paper shows that standard U.S.-based disaster risk model...

During the period following October 1979 through 1982, the U.S. Federal Reserve allowed interest rates to fluctuate widely, in contrast to its previous policy of targeting these rates in the 1970. The policy was abandoned in 1982 in favor of an operating procedure that reduced the variation in...

The relationship between foreign exchange intervention and monetary policy underlies the question of whether sterilized interventions can affect the exchange rate. In this paper, I examine this relationship using data on U.S. foreign exchange interventions from 1985 to 1990, recently made...

This paper provides a framework for evaluating how market participants' beliefs about foreign exchange target zones change as they learn about central bank intervention policy. In order to examine this behavior, we first generalize the standard target zone model to allow for intra-marginal...

Financial markets have become increasingly global in recent decades, yet the pricing of internationally traded assets continues to depend strongly upon local risk factors, leading to several observations that are difficult to explain with standard frameworks. Equity returns depend upon both...

This paper presents a new explanation for the negative correlation between ex post real interest rates and inflation found in earlier empirical studies. We begin by showing that there is a strong negative correlation between the permanent movements in ex post real interest rates and inflation....

International consumption risk sharing studies have largely ignored their models' counterfactual implications for asset returns although these returns incorporate direct market measures of risk. In this paper, we modify a canonical risk-sharing model to generate more plausible asset return...

This paper develops a framework for analyzing the effects upon rates when occasional central bank interventions try to keep rates near target levels. Interestingly, the threat of capital gains or losses induced by this stochastic intervention policy helps contain rates within implicit boundaries...

Societies have incentives to design institutions that allow central bank secrecy. This paper illustrates these incentives in two ways. First, if society tries to constrain secrecy in one way, central bankers will try to regain lost effectiveness by building up secrecy in other ways. Therefore,...

We develop an international financial market model in which domestic and foreign residents differ in their beliefs about the information content in public signals. We determine how informational advantages by domestic investors in the interpretation of home public signals impact equity markets....