1. Excess Returns and Real Exchange Rates 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: