Foreign exchange rate exposure and risk premium in international investments: Evidence from American depositary receipts

We examine how exchange rate changes affect the security returns and how economic and translation exposure components of exchange rate risk are priced across countries. Employing ADRs of four countries, we document four main findings. First, exchange rate changes are negatively related to underlying share returns of ADRs, but positively to ADR returns observed in the U.S. markets. Second, ADR returns are more closely related to local market returns than U.S. market returns, indicating that the local market environment plays a bigger role in determining ADR returns. Third, U.S. and local investors require different risk premiums for exchange rate risk present in ADR investments. Fourth, both the source (economic or translation exposure) and magnitude (high or low) of the exchange risk premium vary across countries. We obtain robust empirical findings for both country ADR portfolios and individual ADRs.