We have attempted to test the existence of time-varying risk premia in foreign exchange markets under two models that we have developed in this dissertation. This first one is an extension to Lucas's general equilibrium model of international finance. By assumption of the Cobb- Douglas utility function of the consumers we are able to derive a closed form for the risk premia in the foreign exchange markets on the setting of a two-country economy model. We used White's test and Engle's test for homoscedasticity and used White's heteroscedasticity-consistent variance-covariance matrix to derive the correct standard errors. The time varying risk premium is tested jointly with the efficiency of the foreign exchange market, i.e., whether the forward exchange rates are unbiased predictors of the future spot exchange rates. The empirical findings indicate that the notion of market efficiency is rejected and there is no risk premium for any of the three cases we studied. In the monetary approach, however, we test the existence of time- varying risk premia alone. By PPP and an extension to the uncovered interest parity we introduced the risk premia into our monetary approach to foreign exchange rate determination. The forward premium is used as a driving force of the risk premium. A rational expectation hypothesis is made and the forward solution derived. Since it is a non-linear single equation model and there is evidence of heteroscedasticity we used GMM estimators and the corresponding variance-covariance matrix and found that there is constant risk premia in the case of Germany and Japan but not in the case of Canada. We also did an empirical study of monetary model with the formation of risk premium derived before. The findings we have is that there is time-varying risk premium in the case of Germany but not in the cases of Japan and Canada. Since our monetary model relaxes the restriction imposed on the semi-elasticity of interest rate the empirical results are based on a more general setting than most of the monetary models of foreign exchange rates. The conflicting empirical results from the two attempts are attributed to the different setting of the models. Extensions to the current data will test whether the conclusion we have drawn is valid.

Recent empirical work indicates that, in a variety of financial markets, both conditional expectations and conditional variances of returns are time- varying. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether these joint fluctuations of conditional first and second moments are consistent with the Sharpe-Lintner-Mossin capital-asset-pricing model. We test the mean-variance model under several different assumptions about the time-variation of conditional second moments of returns, using weekly data from July 1974 to December 1986, that include returns on a portfolio composed of dollar, Deutsche mark, Sterling, and Swiss franc assets, together with the US stock market. The model is estimated constraining risk premia to depend on the time-varying conditional covariance matrix of the residuals of the expected returns equations. The results indicate that estimated conditional variances cannot explain the observed time-variation of risk premia. Furthermore, the constraints imposed by the static CAPH are always rejected.

For about three decades until the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), Covered Interest Parity (CIP) appeared to hold quite closely—even as a broad macroeconomic relationship applying to daily or weekly data. Not only have CIP deviations significantly increased since the GFC, but potential macrofinancial drivers of the variation in CIP deviations have also become significant. The variation in CIP deviations seems to be associated with multiple factors, not only regulatory changes. Most of these do not display a uniform importance across currency pairs and time, and some are associated with possible temporary considerations (such as asynchronous monetary policy cycles).

This paper analyzes ex-ante returns to forward speculation and asks if these returns can be explained by models of a foreign exchange risk premium. After presenting evidence that both nominal and real expected speculative profits are non-zero, the paper examines if real returns to forward speculation are consistent with consumption-based models of risk premia. Estimates of the conditional covariance between real speculative returns and real consumption growth are presented and, like ex-ante returns to forward speculation, they exhibit statistically significant fluctuations over time and often change sign.