We examine the connection between exchange rates and foreign direct investment that arises when globally integrated capital markets are subject to informational imperfections. These imperfections cause external financing to be more expensive than internal financing, so that changes in wealth...

Three surveys of exchange rate expectations allow us to measure directly the expected rates of return on yen versus dollars. Expectations of yen appreciation against the dollar have been (1) consistently large, (2) variable, and (3) greater than the forward premium, implying that investors were...

This paper develops a general framework for analyzing corporate risk management policies. We begin by observing that if external sources of finance are more costly to corporations than internally generated funds, there will typically be a benefit to hedging: hedging adds value to the extent that...

We explore two theories that have been advanced to explain the patterns in U.S. catastrophe reinsurance pricing. The first is that price variation is tied to demand shocks, driven in effect by changes in actuarially expected losses. The second holds that the supply of capital to the reinsurance...

We apply the method of constrained asset share estimation (CASE) to test the mean-variance efficiency (MVE) of the stock market. This method allows conditional expected returns to vary in unrestricted ways, given investor preferences. We also allow conditional variances to follow an ARCH...

We explore the interaction between exchange rates, institutional investor currency flows and exchange-rate fundamentals. We find that these flows are highly correlated with contemporaneous and lagged exchange rate changes, and that they carry information for future excess currency returns. This...

Investor confidence and risk tolerance are important concepts that investors are constantly trying to gauge. Yet these concepts are notoriously hard to measure in practice. Most attempts rely on price or return data, but these run into trouble when trying to disentangle whether an observed price...

Japan's outflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) have increased dramatically in recent years, to the point where Japan has become the world's largest overseas direct investor. This paper documents the increase in Japanese FDI, as well as its breakdown across industries and countries....

Techniques of regulated Brownian motion are used to analyze the behavior of the exchange rate when official policy reaction functions are subject to future stochastic changes. We examine exchange-rate dynamics in alternative cases where the authorities promise (i) to confine a floating rate...

When central banks are about to relinquish control over their exchange rate and enter into a currency union, the reptutational costs to devaluation are very low. As with any finite-horizon game, the endpoint affects the earlier expectations of private agents, here causing them to demand higher...