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Does Incomplete Spanning in International Financial Markets Help to Explain Exchange Rates?

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  • Hanno Lustig
  • Adrien Verdelhan

Abstract

Compared to the predictions of complete market models, actual exchange rates are puzzlingly smooth and only weakly correlated with macro-economic fundamentals, suggesting that market incompleteness plays a key role in exchange rate dynamics. Incompleteness in international financial markets introduces a stochastic wedge between the growth rates of marginal utility at home and abroad, and the change in the exchange rate. We derive a preference-free upper bound on the effects of the FX wedges. Even if domestic agents can invest only in the foreign risk-free asset, incomplete spanning fails to simultaneously match the exchange rate volatility, cyclicality and the FX risk premia in the data.

Suggested Citation

  • Hanno Lustig & Adrien Verdelhan, 2016. "Does Incomplete Spanning in International Financial Markets Help to Explain Exchange Rates?," NBER Working Papers 22023, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22023
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    Cited by:

    1. Zhengyang Jiang & Arvind Krishnamurthy & Hanno Lustig, 2021. "Foreign Safe Asset Demand and the Dollar Exchange Rate," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 76(3), pages 1049-1089, June.
    2. Adams, Jonathan J. & Barrett, Philip, 2021. "Why are countries’ asset portfolios exposed to nominal exchange rates?," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 110(C).
    3. Lewis, Karen K. & Liu, Edith X., 2017. "Disaster risk and asset returns: An international perspective," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 108(S1), pages 42-58.
    4. Gurdip Bakshi & Mario Cerrato & John Crosby, 2016. "Studying the Implications of Consumption and Asset Return Data for Stochastic Discount Factors in Incomplete International Economies," Working Papers 2017_01, Business School - Economics, University of Glasgow.
    5. Florez-Orrego, Sergio & Maggiori, Matteo & Schreger, Jesse & Sun, Ziwen & Tinda, Serdil, 2023. "Global Capital Allocation," SocArXiv 5s6n3, Center for Open Science.
    6. Nessrine Hamzaoui & Boutheina Regaieg, 2016. "The Glosten-Jagannathan-Runkle-Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedastic approach to investigating the foreign exchange forward premium volatility," International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, Econjournals, vol. 6(4), pages 1608-1615.
    7. Jonathan J Adams & Philip Barrett, 2017. "Resolving International Macro Puzzles with Imperfect Risk Sharing and Global Solution Methods," Working Papers 001003, University of Florida, Department of Economics.

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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • F31 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Foreign Exchange
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates

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