Abstract This paper examines the persistence of real exchange rates across 151 countries. We employ univariate time series techniques on a country-by-country basis allowing for deterministic structural breaks and nonlinearities in the adjustment process. Our findings suggest that bilateral exchange rates display higher rates of persistence than multilateral exchange rates, with the latter (former) exhibiting half-lives of less than 1 (2) year(s). Assessing country results by stage of economic development, we find that industrial countries display higher levels of exchange rate inertia than developing countries. We retrieve evidence indicating that higher inflation, nominal exchange rate volatility, trade openness and proximity to reference country are associated with faster rates of real exchange rate convergence. Conversely, international financial integration is found to only play a role at the country group level, with differential effects across cohorts.

Using global data on aggregate stock markets, this paper finds that the capital asset pricing model fares much better than suggested previously. At shorter time horizons, our results also show that the positive risk-reward relation can collapse during times of high volatility. Compared to other countries, we retrieve evidence of lower systematic risks across frontier equity portfolios. We find that countries characterized by higher levels of openness, exchange rate volatility, and larger economic size are exposed to higher systematic covariances with the world stock market. Conversely, we obtain an inverse link between international reserves and systematic risks in national equity.