The US Dollar/Euro Exchange Rate: Structural Modeling and Forecasting During the Recent Financial Crises

The paper investigates the determinants of the US dollar/euro within the framework of the asset pricing theory of exchange rate determination, which posits that current exchange rate fluctuations are determined by the entire path of current and future revisions in expectations about fundamentals. In this perspective, we innovate by conditioning on Fama-French and Carhart risk factors, which directly measures changing market expectations about the economic outlook, on new financial condition indexes and macroeconomic variables. The macro-finance augmented econometric model has a remarkable in-sample and out-of-sample predictive ability, largely outperforming a standard autoregressive specification. We also document a stable relationship between the US dollar/euro Carhart momentum conditional correlation (CCW) and the euro area business cycle. CCW signals a progressive weakening in economic conditions since June 2014, consistent with the scattered recovery from the sovereign debt crisis and the new Greek solvency crisis exploded in late spring/early summer 2015. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.