The convenience yield that foreign investors derive from holding U.S. Treasurys causes a failure of Covered Interest Rate Parity by driving a wedge between the yield on the foreign bonds and the currency-hedged yield on the U.S. Treasury bonds. Even before the 2007-2009 financial crisis, the...

We develop a theory that links the U.S. dollar's valuation in FX markets to the convenience yield that foreign investors derive from holding U.S. safe assets. We show that this convenience yield can be inferred from the Treasury basis: the yield gap between U.S. government and currency-hedged...

We build a model of the global financial cycle with one key ingredient: the demand for safe dollar assets. The model matches patterns of dollar borrowing and currency mismatch, the U.S. external balance sheet, low U.S. interest rates and exorbitant privilege, spillovers of the U.S. monetary...

We characterize the relation between exchange rates and their macroeconomic fundamentals without committing to a specific model of preferences, endowment or menu of traded assets. When investors can trade home and foreign currency risk-free bonds, the exchange rate appreciates in states that are...

We introduce safe asset demand for dollar-denominated bonds into a tractable incomplete-market model of exchange rates. The convenience yield on dollar bonds enters as a stochastic wedge in the Euler equations for exchange rate determination. This wedge reduces the pass-through from marginal...

Since 1980, foreign investors have timed their purchases and sales of U.S. Treasurys to yield particularly low returns. Their annual dollar-weighted returns, measured by IRRs, are around 3% lower than a buy-and-hold strategy over the same horizon. In comparison, the IRRs achieved by domestic...