Factors Affecting the Exchange Rate Risk Premium

The objective of this work is to identify and examine the risk premium of the exchange rate; then, to determine the factors that cause it, and to measure its variance by using a GARCH-M model. Some theoretical models are developed by taking the exchange rate risk premium as dependent variable and other macrovariables, political events, and market conditions as independent ones. There are three different exchange rates ($/€, $/£, and ¥/$) used, here, for the measurement of the risk premium and the empirical test of the model. The empirical results show that the variances of our macro-variables, the policy variables (interest rates and money supply), the price of oil, the war in Iraq, the European debt crisis, and other factors have a significant effect on the risk premium. Also, the conditional variances of the stock markets risk premium are having a highly significant effect on the exchange rate risk premia. The empirical results show that the foreign exchange market is not very efficient and the monetary policy not very effective.