Nominal exchange rates and heterogeneous beliefs

We propose a two-country model with heterogeneous beliefs to understand dynamics of nominal exchange rate. Facing a shock to monetary policy, disagreement between domestic and foreign investors shifts the relative wealth of investors – an essential part of the stochastic discount factor in our model – which then moves the foreign exchange rate. Calibrated to U.S. and U.K. data, our model reveals that dispersion in beliefs predicts the future spot exchange rate, associates with the cross-section of currency risk premia, and comoves with the time-varying volatility in currency returns. Furthermore, our model suggests that domestic investors would hold fewer foreign currency-denominated bonds in countries with greater disagreements on monetary policy.