Recent crises have seen very large spikes in asset price risk without dramatic shifts in fundamentals. We propose an explanation for these risk panics based on selfful filling shifts in risk made possible by a negative link between the current asset price and risk about the future asset price....

In this paper, we examine formally Keynes' idea that higher order beliefs can drive a wedge between an asset price and its fundamental value based on expected future payoffs. In a dynamic noisy rational expectations model, higher order expectations add an additional term, which we call the...

There has been a long debate about whether speculators are stabilizing or not. We consider a model where speculators have a stabilizing role in normal times, but may also provoke large risk panics. The very feature that makes arbitrageurs liquidity providers in normal times, namely their...

Two well-known, but seemingly contradictory, features of exchange rates are that they are close to a random walk while at the same time exchange rate changes are predictable by interest rate differentials. In this paper we investigate whether these two features of the data may in fact be...

While empirical evidence finds only a weak relationship between nominal exchange rates and macroeconomic fundamentals, forex markets participants often attribute exchange rate movements to a macroeconomic variable. The variables that matter, however, appear to change over time and some variable...

We develop a simple general equilibrium framework to study the effect of the exchange rate system on trade and welfare. An important feature of the model is deviations from purchasing power parity, caused by rigid price setting in buyers' currency. We find the following. First, exchange rate...

How large are potential benefits from global risksharing? In order to answer this question we propose a new methodology that is closely connected with the empirical growth literature. We obtain estimates of residual risk (growth uncertainty) at various horizons from regressions of...