Research:
The Risky Capital of Emerging Markets
The Risky Capital of Emerging Markets
(with Espen Henriksen and Ina Simonovska)
NBER Working Paper No. 20769, revised April 2024, R&R at the Journal of Finance
We build a panel of stock market returns across 37 developed and developing countries spanning five decades. We document: (1) higher and more volatile returns in poorer over richer countries; (2) higher returns in countries with more sensitive dividends to changes in global predictable growth. We quantitatively explore whether consumption-based long-run risk can reconcile these patterns. When we estimate the parameters that govern the U.S. investor's consumption growth and each market's dividend growth process, the model generates higher risk premia in emerging over developed markets, and predicts levels and volatilities of stock market returns that are at par with data.
De-dollarization? Not so fast
Economics Letters, March 2024. (with Jon Hartley)
De-dollarization refers to the reduction of the reliance of foreign countries on the US dollar. This phenomenon generates concern about the U.S. dollar as a global currency. We construct new data on the currency denomination of central bank currency reserves, foreign exchange transaction volume, denomination of global debt securities, and the invoicing of trade. This paper presents empirical evidence suggesting that these concerns are misplaced, finding US dollar dominance remains unchanged up through late 2023, nearly two years after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and several years after the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile euro and renminbi influence have since declined. These findings have implications for reserve currency resilience, U.S. dollar dominance, U.S. sanctions policy, international spillovers of U.S. monetary policy, and U.S. government borrowing costs.
Links:
