Puzzle In International Finance Research Articles

International Risk-Sharing and the Transmission of Productivity Shocks

A central puzzle in international finance is that real exchange rates are volatile and, in stark contradiction to efficient risk-sharing, negatively correlated with cross-country consumption ratios. This paper shows that a standard international business cycle model with incomplete asset markets augmented with distribution services can account quantitatively for these properties of real exchange rates. Distribution services, intensive in local inputs, drive a wedge between producer and consumer prices, thus lowering the impact of terms-of-trade changes on optimal agents' decisions. This reduces the price elasticity of tradables separately from assumptions on preferences. Two very different patterns of the international transmission of positive technology shocks generate the observed degree of risk-sharing: one associated with improving, the other with deteriorating terms of trade and real exchange rate. In both cases, large equilibrium swings in international relative prices magnify consumption risk due to country-specific shocks, running counter to risk sharing. Suggestive evidence on the effect of productivity changes in U.S. manufacturing is found in support of the first transmission pattern, questioning the presumption that terms-of-trade movements in response to supply shocks invariably foster international risk-pooling.

Exchange rates and fundamentals: evidence on the economic value of predictability

A major puzzle in international finance is the well-documented inability of models based on monetary fundamentals to produce better out-of-sample forecasts of the nominal exchange rate than a naive random walk. While this literature has generally employed statistical measures of forecast accuracy, we investigate whether there is any economic value to the predictive power of monetary fundamentals for the exchange rate. We find that, in the context of a simple asset allocation problem, the economic value of exchange rate forecasts from a fundamentals model can be greater than the economic value of random walk forecasts across a range of horizons.

External Habit Formation and the Home Bias Puzzle

The equity home bias, the observed lack of international diversification in equity portfolios, is a persistent puzzle in international finance. We propose an explanation for this puzzle based on external habit formation preferences. Agents' utility depends on the difference between consumption and a slow-moving subsistence level. The subsistence level, or external habit, is a backward-looking moving average of national aggregate consumption. We assume that a small group of agents holds primarily domestic securities. We can think of these agents as small business owners who are forced to hold domestic assets for agency reasons. If the remaining agents have external habit formation utility, then they will mimic the domestic bias of this small group. We perform a calibration using consumption and asset return moments from several countries and show that this effect can potentially explain a large aggregate holding of domestic assets. The model performs especially well in explaining high equity home bias in small countries, where the observed lack of international diversification is most puzzling.