The Arbitrage Pricing Theory and Foreign Exchange Risk Premia

This study explores the nature of the spot foreign exchange risk premium. Employing Ross's Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) as a vehicle, it tests the hypothesis that cross‐sectional differences in pure currency returns depend on measures of systematic (covariance) risk. These tests have greater power, in the sense of an enhanced ability to reject the hypothesis, since they explicitly allow for the possibility that idiosyncratic risk is priced. A battery of tests is unable to reject the hypothesis that expected exchange returns can be explained by a single‐factor APT. One implication of these results is that official intervention in exchange markets is unnecessary and undesirable.