A Study on the Long-Run Consumption Risk in Foreign Currency Risk Premia

장기소비 위험을 이용한 통화포트폴리오 수익률에 관한 연구

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to suggest a risk factor that significantly explains foreign currency risk premia. In recent years, some studies have found that the performance of the simultaneous consumption risk model improves considerably when tested on foreign currency portfolios, which are constructed based on the international interest rates differentials. However, this paper focuses on the long-run consumption risk factor. In our empirical research, we found that the real excess returns of high interest rate currency portfolios depreciate on average, when the future American long-run consumption growth rate appears low. This makes the high interest rate currency portfolios have relatively high risk premia. Meanwhile, the real excess returns of low interest rate currency portfolios appreciate on average, under the same conditions, which results in relatively low risk premia for these portfolios. Therefore, this long-run consumption risk factor might explain why low interest rate currencies do not appreciate as much as the interest rate differential, and why high interest rate currencies do not depreciate as much as the interest rate differential. Research design, data, methodology - In our explanation, we provide new evidence on the success of long-run consumption risks in currency risk premia by focusing on the long-run consumption risks borne by American representative investors. To uncover the hidden link between exchange rates and long-run consumption growth, we set the eight currency portfolios as our basic assets, which have been built based on the foreign interest rates of eighty countries. As these eight currency portfolios are rebalanced every year, the first group always contains the lowest interest rate currencies, and the last group contains the highest interest rate currencies. Against these basic eight currency portfolios, we estimate the long-run consumption risk model. We use recursive utility framework and the stochastic discount factor that depends on the present value of expected future consumption growth rates. We find that our model is optimized in the two-year period of constructing the durable consumption expectation factor. Our main results surprisingly surpass the performance of the existing benchmark simultaneous consumption model in terms of R², relatively risk aversion coefficient γ, and p-value of J-test. Results - The performance of our model is superior. R², relatively risk aversion coefficient γ, and p-value of J-test of our long-run durable consumption model are 90%, 93%, and 65.5%, respectively, while those of EZ-DCAPM are 87%, 113%, and 62.8%, respectively. Thus, we can speculate that the risk premia in foreign currency markets have been determined by the long-run consumption risk. Conclusions - The aggregate long-run consumption growth risk explains a large part of the average change in the real excess returns of foreign currency portfolios. The real excess returns of high interest rate currency portfolios depreciate on average when American long-run consumption growth rate is low, and the real excess returns of low interest rate currency portfolios appreciate under the same conditions. Thus, the low interest rate currency portfolios allow investors to hedge against aggregate long-run consumption growth risk.