We develop here a framework for examining behavior of ex ante excess returns and the level of
the exchange rate. Our set-up will consider a home and a foreign country. In the empirical work of
section 2, we always take the U.S. as the home country (as does the majority of the literature), and
consider other major economies as the foreign country. Let t j + i be the home one-period nominal interest
for deposits in period t j + that pay off in period t j + +1 and *
t j + i is the corresponding foreign interest
rate. t s denotes the log of the foreign exchange rate, expressed as the U.S. dollar price of foreign
currency. The excess return on the foreign deposit held from period t j + to period t j + +1, inclusive of
currency return is given by: