Currency Hedging for International Stock Portfolios

Frans de Roon, Theo Nijman and B.J.M. Werker

ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam

Abstract: This paper tests whether hedging currency risk improves the performance of international stock portfolios. We use a generalized performance measure which allows for investor-dependencies such as different utility functions and the presence of nontraded risks. In addition we show that an auxiliary regression, similar to the Jensen regression, provides a wealth of information about the optimal portfolio holdings for investors for the non mean-variance case. This is analogous to the information provided by the Jensen regression about optimal portfolio holdings for the mean-variance case. Our empirical results show that static hedging with currency forwards does not lead to improvements in portfolio performance for a US investor that holds a stock portfolio from the G5 countries. On the other hand, hedges that are conditional on the current interest rate spread do lead to significant performance improvements. Also, when an investor has a substantial exogenous exposure to one of the currencies, currency hedging clearly improves his portfolio performance. While these results hold for investors with power utility as well as with mean-variance utility functions, the optimal hedge ratios for these investors are different.

Keywords: currency risk; forwards; hedging; international asset pricing; portfolio choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G3 G31 M (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-05-24
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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