Amir Akbari - Research

Working Papers

Firm Foreign Activity and the Geography of Exchange Rate Risk, (with Francesca Carrieri)

Abstract: Globally-focused firms, more than domestic ones, are the key drivers of foreign exchange rate (FX) risk. They explain a larger fraction of the factors’ variation and have higher FX exposure, specifically during the home currency depreciation. Their exposure is higher in countries more dependent on the export sector and to neighbors’ currencies, in line with gravity effects. Consistent with the geography of FX risk, those in the core of the global trade network are less exposed, especially to relatively close currencies, reflecting diversification benefits. Overall, we find the economic origins of FX risk pricing in the trade channel over investment.

Accepted for presentation in: Northern Finance Association annual meeting (NFA), Montreal, Canada, 2024, Global Finance Conference, Treviso, Italy; China International Conference in Finance (CICF), Shanghai, China, 2023; Conference of the French Finance Association (AFFI), Bordeaux, France, 2023; Southern Finance Association (SFA), Key West, US, 2022; International Risk Management Conference (IRMC), Bari, Italy, 2022; Asia FA, Hong Kong, 2022; US. Midwest Finance Association (MFA), Chicago, US, 2022

Cyclicality in the Prices of Risk: What More Can We Learn from Explainable AI?, (with Francesca Carrieri)

Abstract: We uncover the temporal patterns of the prices of risk through industry portfolios with varying sensitivities to the economic and financial cycles. Conditioning on the highs and lows of the cycles is key for statistical significance of the intertemporal component. Unlike market risk, its price decreases during an economic downturn but increases under tight funding conditions. Predictive machine learning models and their SHAP values suggest that a limited number of firm characteristics convey the most informative signals about asset risk premia. Valuation ratios are more important determinants for Cyclical relative to Defensive industries, whereas Return characteristics become crucial during recessions.

Accepted for presentation in: Financial Management Association (FMA), Grapevine, US 2024

The Real Effects of Protecting Biodiversity (with Lilian Ng, Man Duy Pham, and Jing Yu)

[Revision Resubmitted to the Review of Finance]

Abstract: Protected areas are increasingly recognized as the central instrument in biodiversity conservation. However, their broader implications for corporate behavior and financial performance remain underexplored. This study examines how proximity to newly designated protected areas shapes establishment-level environmental, operational, and financial outcomes from 1990 to 2021. We find that nearby establishments significantly reduce toxic emissions, driven not by cleaner technologies but by production cutbacks and workforce contraction. Heightened regulatory oversight, as reflected in enforcement activity, is a key mechanism that constrains operations and contributes to declines in profitability and stock valuations. These results underscore the environmental benefits of conservation but also reveal the material costs imposed on affected firms. As global conservation initiatives expand, our findings show that biodiversity-related regulatory exposure constitutes a material financial risk that should be incorporated into policy design, corporate strategy, and capital allocation decisions.

Accepted for presentation in: Special Issue on Biodiversity and Natural Resource Finance Workshop, Cambridge, UK 2024; Conference on Biodiversity and Natural Resource Finance, London, UK 2025

Corporate Biodiversity Exposure and the Informativeness of Earnings Announcements (with Lilian Ng, Tracy Wang, Nathan Zhu)

Abstract: Biodiversity loss is increasingly recognized as a material financial risk, yet its governance implications for capital markets remain underexplored. We examine whether corporate biodiversity exposure (CBE), defined as the extent to which a firm’s polluting facilities are located near conservation-priority areas, impairs the market’s interpretation of earnings news. We argue that CBE generates location-based interpretive frictions that weaken the information content of earnings announcements. Consistent with this prediction, firms with higher CBE exhibit significantly weaker earnings response coefficients, indicating reduced earnings informativeness. Exploiting the staggered expansion of protected areas, a stacked difference-in-differences design establishes causality. The magnitude of this effect varies systematically with governance institutions: it is amplified in institutional settings that heighten ecological and regulatory uncertainty, such as states with weaker species protection, lower biodiversity ratings, non-attainment air quality designations, limited biodiversity-related media coverage, or low population density. In contrast, it is mitigated at the firm level where stronger information environments, supported by biodiversity disclosure, institutional ownership, analyst coverage, media attention, or NGO activism, reduce interpretation costs. Overall, our findings reveal a distinct informational channel through which biodiversity exposure constrains price discovery and underscore the role of governance and disclosure in managing nature-related financial risks.

Published Work

Global Risk and Market Conditions,** (with Francesca Carrieri)

[International Review of Economics and Finance, 2023, 83(1),51--70, doi:10.1016/j.iref.2022.08.012]

Abstract: In a large sample of developed and emerging markets, we show in a conditional setting that globally traded assets such as currencies and international bonds can proxy for global state variables. We find that, differently from market risk, intertemporal risk matters particularly at times when global markets are not in normal economic conditions. Relying on time-variation for prices of risk helps us capture the hedging component, especially the negative one, stemming from proxies like the yen and global sovereign bonds. Our results show that global uncertainty measured by realized world volatility is an important channel for intertemporal risk.

Accepted for presentation in: Telfer Accounting and Finance Conference Ottawa, Candada 2016; Financial Management Association International (FMA), Florida, USA 2015; European Finance Association (EFA), Vienna, Austria 2015; International Conference of the French Finance Association (AFFI), Cergy, France 2015; European Financial Management Association (EFMA), Breukelen, Netherlands 2015; Midwest Finance Association (MFA), Chicago, USA 2015

**An earlier version of the paper, previously circulated as "Pricing Together Developed and Emerging Markets with Multiple Risk Factors".

Can Cross-Border Funding Frictions Explain Financial Integration Reversals?, (with Francesca Carrieri and Aytek Malkhozov)

[Review of Financial Studies, 2022,35:1,394-437, doi:10.1093/rfs/hhab009 ]

Abstract: We show that constraints on using leverage for foreign positions can act as an international investment barrier. Guided by an international CAPM with leverage constraints, we use observed stock prices to measure the variation in the magnitude and the implicit cost of such cross-border funding barriers. Our measure helps explain the dynamics of global market integration and, in particular, its reversals documented in the literature but not explained by other international investment barriers. We confirm our results using alternative financial integration measures, international capital flows, and institutional portfolio holdings.

Accepted for presentation in: Western Finance Association (WFA), California, US 2019; West Coast Workshop in International Finance (WCWIF), Seattle, US 2019; EMG-ECB Workshop on International Capital Flows, London, UK 2018; Fed/UMD Short-Term Funding Markets Conference, Washington DC, USA 2018; Annual Financial Market Liquidity Conference, Budapest, Hungary2017; Financial Management Association International (FMA), Boston, USA 2017; Northern Finance Association (NFA), Halifax, Canada 2017; International Workshop on Financial System Architecture & Stability (IWFSAS), Montreal, Canada 2017; International Finance and Banking Society (IFABS), Oxford, UK 2017;

Government Real Estate Interventions and the Stock Market, (with Karolina Krystyniak)

[International Review of Financial Analysis, forthcoming, doi:10.1016/j.irfa.2021.101742]

Abstract: We study the spillover of government interventions in the real estate market to the stock market. We find that the more active mutual funds decreased ownership in equities with no short-term reversal. Furthermore, they increased ownership in the finance sector stocks without significant changes to their real estate equity holdings. The interventions affecting the riskiness of the finance sector stocks triggered a larger trading response than the ones focused on the real estate sector stocks’ cash flows. Overall, the spillover of the housing market shocks to the stock market seems to be materialized mostly through the discount rate channel.

Drivers of Economic and Financial Integration: A Machine Learning Approach, (with Lilian Ng, Bruno Solnik)

[Journal of Empirical Finance, 2021, 61: 82-102. doi:10.1016/j.jempfin.2020.12.005 ]

Abstract: We propose a new approach to identify drivers of global market integration using an advanced machine learning technique. We differentiate across economic and financial integration as well as across emerging and developed countries. Our approach allows for nonlinear relationships, corrects for over-fitting, and is less prone to noise. Moreover, it is able to tackle a large number of highly correlated explanatory variables and controls for multicollinearity. Results suggest that general economic growth, increasing international trade, and contained population growth have helped emerging countries to catch up to the level of the economic integration of developed countries. However, slow financial development and a high level of investment riskiness have hindered the speed of emerging countries' financial integration. Furthermore, the results suggest that integration is a gradual process and is not driven by cyclical or transitory events.

International Market Integration: A Survey, (with Lilian Ng)

[Asia Pac J Financ Stud, 2020, 49: 161-185. doi:10.1111/ajfs.12297 , Lead Article]

Abstract: Market integration is a canonical topic in international finance. The question of whether and to what extent markets are integrated with the global economy has motivated one of the largest literature in this field. Given this vast body of research, this survey shall only focus on the theoretical and empirical studies on one aspect of market integration -- the {\it equity} market integration. It reviews the evolution of various approaches employed in studying market integration. This survey discusses the recent empirical findings on cross-sectional and time-series dynamics of integration across developed and emerging markets. It also describes the empirical estimation of three current measures of market integration and discusses their usefulness as well as limitations. Finally, the survey provides a few future directions for this line of research.

Emerging Markets are Catching Up: Economic or Financial Integration? , (with Lilian Ng and Bruno Solnik)

[Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 2020, 55(7), 2270-2303. doi:10.1017/S0022109019000681]

data and code

Abstract: We propose a simple metric to measure two aspects of integration, namely economic and financial integration, and then examine their short- and long-run dynamics using a smooth-transition dynamic conditional correlation model that allows for trends in correlation while controlling for volatility. Developed countries exhibit greater degrees of financial and economic integration than emerging countries, but the integration gap is smaller for economic than for financial integration. While the financial integration gap between developed and emerging markets remains large throughout the sample period, emerging economies have caught up with their developed counterparts in economic integration in recent years.

Accepted for presentation in: Northern Finance Association (NFA), Vancouver, Canada 2019; Telfer Annual Conference on Accounting and Finance, Ottawa, Canada 2019 ; Financial Management Association (FMA), San Diego, US 2018; China International Conference in Finance (CICF), Tianjin, China 2018; Asian Finance Association (AsianFA) 2018, Tokyo, Japan 2018; Finance Down Under, Melbourne, Australia 2018; FMA Asia Pacific, Hong Kong, 2018; Conference on Asia-Pacific Financial Markets, Seoul, Korea 2017

Publication in Other Disciplines

Covid-19 pandemic and periodontal practice: the immunological, clinical and economic points of view (with Meshkat Naeimi Darestani, Siamak Yaghobee, Mina Taheri, and Solmaz Akbari),

[Journal of BioMed Research International, 2022, 2022:3918980. doi:10.1155/2022/3918980]

Dental Service Utilization and the COVID- 19 Pandemic, a Micro-Data Analysis (with Mohammad Khami, Amine Beymouri, and Solmaz Akbari)

[Journal of BioMed Central (BMC) Oral Health, 2024, 24(1), 1-9. doi:10.1186/s12903-023-03740-215; European Financial Management Association (EFMA), Breukelen, Netherlands 2015

Working Papers

Published Work

Publication in Other Disciplines