Variance risk premiums and the forward premium puzzle

Abstract

We provide new empirical evidence that world currency and U.S. stock variance risk premiums have nonredundant and significant predictive power for the appreciation rates of 22 with respect to the U.S. dollar, especially at the four-month and one-month horizons, respectively. The heterogeneous exposures of currencies to the currency variance risk premium are systematically rising along the line of inflation risk. We rationalize these findings in a consumption-based asset pricing model, with local consumption uncertainty and global inflation uncertainty characterized, respectively, by the stock and currency variance risk premiums.