While a decline in the market value of sovereign assets (below a benchmark level of liabilities) can trigger sovereign distress/default risk, volatility in sovereign assets can increase the risk premium on domestic debt and credit spread on external debt. These can escalate the probability of...

Our paper investigates whether the valuation effect caused by a large risk premium and a low risk-free rate can help to explain the enormous US current account and trade deficit observed in the past decade. To answer this question, we set up an endowment growth model in which investors are...

This study proposes that heterogeneous household portfolio choices within a country and across countries offer an explanation for global imbalances. We construct a stochastic growth multi-country model in which heterogeneous agents face the following restrictions on asset trade. First, the...

We assess the impact of media sentiment on international equity prices using more than 4.5 million Reuters articles published across the globe between 1991 and 2015. News sentiment robustly predicts daily returns in both advanced and emerging markets, even after controlling for known...

We provide evidence that international equity investors are compensated for bearing currency risk. Three factors --- a global equity factor denominated in local currencies, and two currency factors, dollar and carry --- account for a wide cross-section of equity returns from 46 developed and...

This paper reviews the empirical literature on heterogeneous beliefs and asset price dynamics that challenges the traditional rational agent framework. Emphasis is given to the validation and estimation of (dynamic) heterogeneous agent models that have their roots in the agent-based literature....

This paper examines the presence and the determinants of exchange risk premia in stock returns using firm level data from South Korea. We conduct empirical asset pricing tests based on cross-sectional data sorted by firm characteristics such as firm size, liquidity, foreign ownership, and...

External imbalance is a central variable in international economics and recent research shows it is priced in currency portfolios. But Ang et al. (2017), among others, show that with a small and time-varying cross section, tests with individual assets are preferable. We find testing with...

This paper analyzes how limits to the complexity of statistical models used by market participants can shape asset prices. We consider an economy in which agents can only entertain models with at most k factors, where k may be distinct from the true number of factors that drive the economy’s...

The risk factors in many consumption-based asset pricing models display statistically weak correlation with the returns being priced. Some GMM-based procedures used to test these models have very low power to reject proposed stochastic discount factors (SDFs) when they are mis-specified and the...