This paper uses wavelet analysis to investigate the relationship between the spot exchange rate and  interest rate differential for seven pairs of countries, with a small country, Sweden, included in each case. The key empirical results show that there tends to be a negative relationship between the spot exchange rate (domestic-currency price of foreign currency) and the nominal interest rate differential (approximately the domestic interest rate minus the foreign interest rate) at the shortest time scales, while a positive relationship is shown at the longest time scales. This indicates that among models of exchange rate determination using the asset approach, the sticky-price models are supported in the short-run and flexible-price models in the long-run.

The time-varying behaviour of the market and exchange risk betas of the US sectoral returns are estimated using a random walk process in connection with the Kalman filter. The empirical findings, in general, show that the market risks tend to shrink over longer time horizons, and that during the dot-com bubble burst and during the subprime financial crisis they tended to rise. During these crises they rose most notably in those industries most related to the crisis. Regarding exchange risk, industry returns appear in this study to be positively related to dollar appreciation, but that relationship declines with longer time horizons, in some cases resulting ultimately in a negative relationship between the US dollar and the industry returns. This latter result is consistent with the idea that the effect of a US dollar appreciation on competitiveness of the US exports becomes stronger with the longer time horizons. During the subprime financial crisis, the relation between excess returns and the exchange rate tended to fall, as was notably the case for the Technology sector during the dot-com bubble burst.

This paper examines the causal relationship between the US and Asian equity markets as well as the causal relationship among the Asian equity market themselves (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Korea, and Taiwan). The links between the national stock markets of these economies and the most influential stock market, that of the US, is extensively analyzed, especially in different sample periods including three crisis periods since the late 1990s (the Asian financial crisis, dot com bubble burst, and the subprime financial crisis). This paper shows that the major equity markets in the East Asian region are closely integrated, thereby diminishing the potential for Asian portfolio diversification. The causal linkage of the US equity market to the Asian equity markets does not have notably different patterns depending on whether it is during a crisis period or not. This finding holds for the finest time scale of 1-2 days movements of the stock price indices. The influence of the US equity market is much less at larger time scales throughout all sub-sample periods. The leading role of the US equity market substantially weakens while the interdependence among the Asian equity markets is stronger at longer time scales of 8 to 16 days. A general finding is that there is evidence of varying number of causal relationships among the equity markets in this study as well as changes in directions of causality in different time scales.