Puerto Rico's COFINA Bonds: Hold or Fold?
Citation:
Sunderam, Adi, Luis M. Viceira, and Aldo Sesia. "Puerto Rico's COFINA Bonds: Hold or Fold?" Harvard Business School Case 218-023, September 2017. (Revised January 2018.) View Details|
Chapter Spain and the Euro. The First Ten Years 2010 The Euro as a Reserve Currency for Global Investors |
Abstract
This article explores the demand for the euro for risk management purposes and the evidence of stock market integration in the euro area. We define a reserve currency as one that investors demand either because it helps them hedge real interest risk and inflation risk, or because it helps them reduce the volatility of their portfolio of stocks and bonds because its return is negatively correlated with the returns on those assets. This article re-examines the role of the euro as a reserve currency in the sense of Campbell, Viceira, and White (2003), updating their evidence, and reviews the evidence of Campbell, Serfaty-de Medeiros, and Viceira (2010) in detail. Consistent with the intuition that an integrated capital market is one in which there is a common discount factor pricing securities, we also investigate whether stocks in the euro area have moved from a regime in which national stock markets were priced with discount rates that were predominantly country specific, to a regime in which national stock markets are predominantly priced by a euro area-wide common discount rate. We adopt the beta decomposition approach of Campbell and Vuolteenaho (2004) and Campbell, Polk, and Vuolteenaho (2010) to test for capital market integration and find robust evidence of increased capital market integration in the euro zone and, consequently, improved risk sharing among euro zone economies.
Keywords: Volatility; Inflation and Deflation; Capital Markets; Currency; Stocks; Financial Markets; Financing and Loans; Investment Return; Investment Portfolio; Risk Management;
Citation:
Viceira, Luis M., and Ricardo Gimeno. "The Euro as a Reserve Currency for Global Investors." Chap. 4 in Spain and the Euro. The First Ten Years, 149–178. Madrid, Spain: Banco de España, 2010.
