Spillovers from the USA to stock markets in Asia: a quantile regression approach

This article analyses return spillovers from the USA to stock markets in Asia by means of quantile regressions. Traditional studies consider spillovers as effects of the conditional means of foreign returns onto the conditional means of chronologically succeeding domestic markets’ returns. We, by contrast, study the full range of quantiles of the conditional distribution of the domestic markets’ returns. This enables us to document the detailed structure of spillovers across return quantiles. Generally, we find spillovers from the USA to Asia to be negative. Specifically, however, we reveal an asymmetric structure of spillovers with an increasing negative magnitude from lower to upper return quantiles. Theoretically, this pattern is consistent with an asymmetric overreaction of traders in Asia to news from the US market. Extensions from the baseline model further suggest the presence of contagion throughout the financial crisis of 2007–2008 as well as of calm-down effects over weekends.     

Does the currency board matter? US news and Argentine financial market reaction

Using a Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model, we study the effects of the US monetary policy and macroeconomic announcements on Argentine money, stock and foreign exchange markets over the period January 1998 to July 2007. We show, first, that both types of news have a significant impact on all markets. Second, there are noticeable differences in reaction for different subsamples: Argentine money markets were more dependent on US news under the currency board than after it was abandoned as the floating exchange rate partly absorbs spillover effects from the US. Finally, we find that the US-dollar-denominated assets react less to US news than peso-denominated assets, which suggests that the currency board was not completely credible during its final years.     

The impact of foreign macroeconomic news on financial markets in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland

In this paper, we investigate the effects of euro area and US macroeconomic news on financial markets in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (CEEC-3) from 1999 to 2006. Using a GARCH model, we examine the impact of news on daily returns of 3-month interest rates, stock market indices, exchange rates versus the euro, and the US dollar. First, both US and European macroeconomic news has a significant impact on CEEC-3 financial markets. Second, the process of European integration is accompanied by an increasing importance of euro area news relative to US news. Third, there are country-specific differences: for example, the Czech stock market is relatively more affected by foreign news since the Copenhagen Summit in December 2002. In general, our results support the hypothesis of a deepening euro area influence on the CEEC-3 over time and a corresponding reduction in the relative importance of US shocks.     

THE DYNAMIC RELATION BETWEEN RETURNS,TRADING VOLUME,AND VOLATILITY: LESSONS FROM SPILLOVERS BETWEEN ASIA AND THE UNITED STATES

This paper investigates the dynamic relationship between index returns, return volatility, and trading volume for eight Asian markets and the US. We find cross‐border spillovers in returns to be non‐existent, spillovers in absolute returns between Asia and the US to be strong in both directions, and spillovers in volatility to run from Asia to the US. Trading volume, especially on the Asian markets, depends on shocks in domestic and foreign returns as well as on volatility, especially those shocks originating in the US. However, only weak evidence is found for trading volume influencing other variables. In the light of the theoretical models, these results suggest sequential information arrivals, with investors being overconfident and applying positive feedback strategy. Furthermore, new information causes price volatility to rise due to differences in its interpretation among traders, but the subsequent market reaction takes the form of adjustment in price level, not volatility. Lastly, the intensity of cross‐border spillovers seems to have increased following the 1997 crisis, which we interpret as evidence of increased noisiness in prices and diversity in opinions about news originating abroad. Our findings might also help to understand the nature of financial crises, to predict their further developments and consequences.     

Exploring the interaction between stock price index and exchange rates: an asymmetric threshold approach

This article examines the impact of stock market news on the foreign exchange markets of USA, Canada and UK, employing an innovative extension of the asymmetric threshold model of Apergis and Miller (2006). Under this framework we can disentangle the reaction of foreign exchange market to bad or good news and small or large news of stock returns. Our comprehensive daily data-set spans the period from January 1990 to June 2014. Using a cointegration and error correction model, we document the existence of a causal relationship between stock market and foreign exchange markets. Most interestingly, our results derived from the asymmetric threshold model confirm that the relationship between stock and foreign exchange markets is sensitive to short-term good or bad news and short-term small or large news. Our findings entail significant implications for policymakers, governments, risk managers and international investors.     

Inflation news and stock returns: market direction and flow-through ability

Previous studies of the short-run response of daily stock prices to announcements of macroeconomic news could be biased when responses in different scenarios cancel each other out. In our analysis of inflation news in the Spanish stock market, we consider market direction arguments and implement our study based on the sector of activity to control for the ‘flow-through’ ability of the firms in each industry. In general, our results are quite consistent with the ‘market direction’ and the ‘flow-through’ hypotheses. Unanticipated inflation news implies abnormal returns depending on the direction of the news, the state of the economy and the flow-through ability of the sector. The impact of positive surprises affects the abnormal returns of many more sectors than does the impact of negative surprises, especially in the low states of economy. These significant effects are mainly observed in industries that are characterised by low flow-through ability.     

An empirical investigation of herding in the U.S. stock market

This paper proposes a new empirical testing method for detecting herding in stock markets. The traditional regression approach is extended to a vector autoregressive framework, in which the predictive power of squared index returns for the cross-sectional dispersion of equity returns is tested using a Granger causality test. Macroeconomic news announcements and the aggregate number of firm-level news items are treated as conditioning variables, while the average sentiment of firm-level news is treated as jointly determined. The testing algorithm allows the change points in the causal relationships between the cross-sectional dispersion of returns and squared index returns to be determined endogenously rather than being chosen arbitrarily a priori. Evidence of herding is detected in the constituent stocks of the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the onset of the subprime mortgage crisis, during the European debt and the U.S. debt-ceiling crises and the Chinese stock market crash of 2015. These results contrast with those obtained from the traditional methods where little evidence of herding is found in the US stock market.     

Effects of US interest rates and news on the daily interest rates of a highly indebted emerging economy: evidence from Turkey

It has been widely demonstrated that asset prices react sensitively to macroeconomic news releases both in the industrialized countries and emerging markets. However, there are contradicting results on the effects of changes in interest rates of industrialized countries on asset prices of emerging markets. In heavily indebted economies, in addition to these factors, political news and announcements from international institutions that may increase or decrease concerns about debt sustainability can affect asset prices as well. This potential notwithstanding, there has been relatively limited empirical work on the effects of such variables. The objective of this study is to quantify the impact of all of these factors on interest rates of a highly indebted emerging economy. Using daily post-crisis data of the Turkish economy we show that both good and bad political news, International Monetary Fund announcements, and European Union related news significantly affected secondary market government securities yields, whereas volatility of yields was affected mainly by bad news releases. Changes in US Treasury bond rates and ‘appetite’ for risk of foreign investors did not affect government securities yields in the period analysed.     

Return spillovers around the globe: A network approach

We study the connectedness of a sample of 40 stock markets across five continents using daily closing prices and return spillovers based on Granger causality. All possible 1560 return spillovers between 40 markets create a complex network of relationships between equity markets around the world. Apart from analyzing the topological and time-varying properties of the created networks, we also identify the determinants of the connectedness of equity markets over time. Adjusting for non-synchronous trading, our modelling approach leads to evidence that the probability of return spillover from a given stock market to other markets increases with market volatility and market size and decreases with higher foreign exchange volatility. We empirically show that the temporal proximity between closing hours is important for information propagation; therefore, choosing markets that trade during similar hours bears an additional risk to investors because the probability of return spillovers increases.     

Impacts of China's crash on Asia-Pacific financial integration: Volatility interdependence,information transmission and market co-movement

This paper examines the price and volatility dynamics between China and major stock markets in the Asia-Pacific, investigating the effects of the Chinese stock market crash (2015–2016) for the first time. Employing the Bayesian VAR and BEKK GARCH, we observe that price and volatility spillover behaviours are different during the stable and stress periods. Particularly, price spillovers from China to other regional markets are more significant during a bullish period, showing that ‘good news’ emanating from China has strong impacts on its neighbours during better market condition. In the turbulent period, we observe strong shock spillover effects and enhanced volatility spillovers from China to most Asia-Pacific stock markets. This is because China, as an important trading partner and strategic financial centre shows to exert significant influence on the Asia-Pacific region through various economic channels. We also find that the Asia-Pacific stock markets spill over their shocks to China during the crisis, indicating that China is becoming more integrated with the regional financial markets.     

The impact of news,oil prices,and global market developments on Russian financial markets1

This paper analyses the impact of news, oil prices, and international financial market developments on daily returns on Russian bond and stock markets. First, regarding returns, energy news affects returns, while news from the war in Chechnya is not significant. Market volatility does not appear to be sensitive to either type of news. Second, a significant effect of the growth in oil prices on Russian stock returns is detected. Third, the international influence on Russian financial markets depends upon the degree of financial liberalization. The higher the degree of financial liberalization, the stronger is the impact of US stock returns on Russian financial markets. In addition, banking reform and interest rate liberalization efforts seem to dictate the globalization of Russian stock markets, while it is the progress in liberalizing securities markets and non‐bank financial institutions that matters more for the globalization of Russian bond markets.     

FINANCIAL CRISES AND INTERNATIONAL STOCK MARKET VOLATILITY TRANSMISSION

This paper examines the interplay between stock market returns and their volatility, focusing on the Asian and global financial crises of 1997–98 and 2008–09 for Australia, Singapore, the UK, and the US. We use a multivariate generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (MGARCH) model and weekly data (January 1992–June 2009). Based on the results obtained from the mean return equations, we could not find any significant impact on returns arising from the Asian crisis and more recent global financial crises across these four markets. However, both crises significantly increased the stock return volatilities across all of the four markets. Not surprisingly, it is also found that the US stock market is the most crucial market impacting on the volatilities of smaller economies such as Australia. Our results provide evidence of own and cross ARCH and GARCH effects among all four markets, suggesting the existence of significant volatility and cross volatility spillovers across all four markets. A high degree of time‐varying co‐volatility among these markets indicates that investors will be highly unlikely to benefit from diversifying their financial portfolio by acquiring stocks within these four countries only.     

Monetary Policy Announcements,Communication, and Stock Market Liquidity

Using the high‐quality intraday transaction data from 2001–2012, we investigate changes in stock market liquidity in response to the monetary policy announcements of the Bank of Korea (BOK). We find that liquidity impairment associated with informed trading occurs prior to the announcements but it disappears subsequent to the global financial crisis. In addition, liquidity impairment appears to become more severe with insufficient experts' predictability and accuracy rather than with policy rate change itself and unscheduled announcements. Finally, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements, changes in the Volatility Index (VIX), and trading by foreign investors play a limited role in explaining stock market liquidity changes. Overall, results indicate that central bank communication plays a significant role in reducing liquidity impairment by enhancing the predictability of policy actions, and therefore, mitigating information asymmetry.     

A first look at Brexit and global equity markets

Global equity markets fell by nearly 5% overall on 24 June 2016 following news of the Brexit referendum result. Although nearly all EU stock market indices experienced additional significantly negative abnormal returns, especially poor performance was registered by the debt-ridden PIIGS group (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain). In this article, we identify a systematic tendency for more severe stock market responses to be concentrated amongst countries with higher debt to GDP ratios. This effect endures even after controlling for the degree of openness, EU membership and for being part of the PIIGS group.     

The Pricing of Italian Equity Returns

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between common risk factors and average returns for Italian stocks. Our research has identified the Italian stock market's economic variables by using the results from factor analyses and time series regressions. We study several multi‐factor models combining the relevant macroeconomic variables with the mimicking equity portfolios SMB (small minus big) and HML (high minus low) proposed by Fama and French (1993). The key question we want to ask ourselves, is whether the influential role of the size and book‐to‐market equity factors in explaining average stock returns can stand up well when competing with some macroeconomic factors. In other words, do stock returns carry some risk premium that is independent of either the market return or the economic forces that underlie the common variation in returns? Our empirical work estimates risk premiums using both traditional two‐pass procedures and one‐pass (full information) methodologies. We show that only the market index and variables linked to interest rate shifts are consistently priced in the Italian stock returns. The role of other factors, and in particular both the size and the price‐to book ratio, are crucially dependent on the estimation procedure. (J.E.L.: G11, G12).     

Volatility spillovers and macroeconomic announcements: evidence from crude oil markets

The paper applies an event study methodologyaims to investigate the macroeconomic announcements effects on Standard&Poor’s500 and oil prices. Our results provide evidence for a significant impact of the US macroeconomic news on oil prices. This impact is split into two components, namely the direct effect (common response) and indirect effect (volatility transmission). Altogether our results show that the volatility transmission is bidirectional. Not only a significant volatility transmission from the oil market to the US stock market is revealed, but also a high volatility transmission is recorded from the oil market to the stock market especially after the release of consumption indicators.     

Intraday Stock Market Behavior After Shocks: The Importance of Bull and Bear Markets in Spain

The stock market behavior after different shocks has been analyzed from different points of view, but none has considered, as in this work, the possibility of combining different procedures, intraday returns over six days, and different phases of the markets in the Spanish stock market. The inconclusive results that we find following the previous empirical methodologies make way to interesting results when bull and bear markets are considered. We find that positive shocks are much more important than negative shocks, especially in downward trends where we find a significant overreaction effect that can be associated with the pessimism prevailing in a bear market after the “dead cat bounce” which represents those positive shocks.     

How stock markets react to regulatory sanctions? Evidence from France

Our study of how the stock market reacts to sanction announcements by the French financial regulator from 2004 to 2017 finds that the market reacts negatively when a sanction is announced in the press. Cross-sectional regression models show that the penalties are too low to influence market reactions. Our results suggest that after the financial crisis of 2008, a plethora of news on financial wrongdoings has desensitized markets to announcements of sanctions against large companies.     

News and correlations of CEEC-3 financial markets

We employ DCC-MGARCH models to investigate conditional correlations between six CEEC-3 financial markets. In general, the highest correlations exist between Hungary and Poland in foreign exchange and stock markets. Short-term money markets are somewhat isolated from each other. We find that the associations of CEEC-3 exchange rates versus euro are weaker than those versus the US dollar. The persistence of the effect of shocks on the time-varying correlations is strongest for foreign exchange and stock markets, indicating a tendency toward contagion. In searching for the origins of financial market volatility in the CEEC-3, we uncover some evidence of Granger-causality on the foreign exchange markets. Finally, using a pool model, we investigate the impact of euro area, US, and CEEC-3 news on the correlations. Apart from ECB monetary policy news, we observe no broad effects of international news on correlations; instead, local news exerts an influence, which suggests a dominance of country- or market-specific circumstances.     

Volatility Spillovers and Contagion from Mature to Emerging Stock Markets

This paper models volatility spillovers from mature to emerging stock markets, tests for changes in the transmission mechanism during turbulences in mature markets, and examines the implications for conditional correlations between mature and emerging market returns. Tri‐variate GARCH–BEKK models of returns in mature, regional emerging, and local emerging markets are estimated for 41 emerging market economies (EMEs). Wald tests suggest that mature market volatility affects conditional variances in many emerging markets. Moreover, spillover parameters change during turbulent episodes. In the majority of the sample EMEs, conditional correlations between local and mature markets increase during these episodes. While conditional variances in local markets rise as well, volatility in mature markets rises more, and this shift is the main factor behind the increase in conditional correlations. With few exceptions, conditional beta coefficients between mature and emerging markets tend to be unchanged or lower during turbulences.