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Essays on international portfolio allocation and risk sharing

Kucuk Tuger, Hande (2011) Essays on international portfolio allocation and risk sharing. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis contributes to the theoretical literature that analyses the link between international asset trade and international risk sharing. Despite the massive increase in cross-border asset trade since the 1990's, consumption risk sharing across countries remains limited. In standard international business cycle models, efficient risk sharing requires that consumption should be higher in the country where it is cheaper to consume, implying a high positive correlation between relative consumption and real exchange rate, which is strongly rejected in the data. Recent contributions show that it is possible to account for this so-called 'consumption-real exchange rate anomaly' in models with goods and financial market frictions where international asset trade is restricted to a single non-contingent bond. Chapter 1 analyses whether this class of models can account for the anomaly under a richer asset market structure where agents can trade in domestic and foreign currency bonds. Even such a small departure from the single bond economy implies too much risk sharing compared to the data although the number of assets that can be traded is less than the number of shocks affecting each economy. Introducing demand shocks alongside sector-specific productivity shocks can improve the performance of the model only under specific parameter and monetary policy settings. Chapter 2 extends this analysis to study the implications of international trade in equities, portfolio transaction costs and recursive utility. Chapter 3 studies the interaction between monetary policy and foreign currency positions in more detail. Different monetary policy regimes can lead to different foreign currency positions by changing the cyclical properties of the nominal ex- change rate. These external positions, in turn, affect the cross-border transmission of monetary policy shocks via a valuation channel. The way export prices are set has important implications for optimal foreign currency positions and the valuation channel when prices are sticky and financial markets are incomplete. Chapter 4 compares the international transmission of uncertainty shocks under alternative asset markets with an emphasis on the behaviour of net foreign assets, exchange rate and currency risk premium and shows that a model with restricted asset trade performs better than a model with complete financial integration in matching certain aspects of the data regarding the dynamics of these variables in response to increased macroeconomic uncertainty.

Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information: © 2011 Hande Kucuk Tuger
Library of Congress subject classification: H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
Sets: Departments > Economics
Supervisor: Benigno, Gianluca
URI: http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/145

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