On the impact of macroeconomic news surprises on Treasury-bond returns

This paper investigates the impact of surprises associated with monthly macroeconomic news releases on Treasury-bond returns, by paying particular attention to the moment at which the information is published in the month. Implementing an event study on intraday data, we show that (1) the main bond market movers are based on economic activity and inflation indicators, (2) long-maturity bonds are slightly more impacted by surprises than short-maturity ones, and (3) the bond market is more sensitive to negative surprises than to positive ones. Finally, we find evidence of an empirical monotonic relationship between the surprises’ impact and their corresponding news’ publication date and/or their sign.     

The joint response of stock and foreign exchange markets to macroeconomic surprises: Using US and Japanese data

This paper investigates the joint response of stock and foreign exchange (FX) market returns to macroeconomic surprises, employing a system method of estimation that allows for the cross-country and cross-market interaction for asset returns and risk premia. Using US and Japanese data, we find that US stock markets are asymmetrically responsive to domestic developments in output growth and interest rates but are not influenced by macroeconomic surprises from Japan. The surprise in the FX market seems to affect stock markets in the US and Japan, respectively. In particular, we find that the interest rate surprise in the US and inflation surprise in Japan tend to overstate the impact that these surprises would have on the respective stock market. The impact of the surprises would appear smaller if macroeconomic developments induced by the FX market were incorporated into the model.     

Some Tests of the Risk-Return Relationship Using Alternative Asset Pricing Models and Observed Expected Returns

This study examines the performance of three asset pricing models: the CAPM, the APT and the UAPT using observed expected returns from a three-phase dividend discount model with Value Line analyst estimates of future company-level earnings, dividends and growth rates. Our study is the first we know of to test the three major asset pricing models using observed expected returns. Our results are similar to prior research using ex post (realized) returns in that we find that the UAPT using macroeconomic factors is the best performing model, followed by the APT and the CAPM. However, our results also suggest that the importance of macroeconomic factors is much greater to expected returns than to realized returns, and the corresponding R2 values for models using expected returns are much higher than for models using realized returns. Combining our results for the UAPT with those of Marston and Harris (1993) for the CAPM suggests that these models are more successful in tests using observed expected returns than in tests using realized returns as proxies for expected returns. Unit root tests suggest that monthly observed expected returns follow the classic random walk without drift model while monthly realized returns do not.     

Twitter investor sentiment and corporate earnings announcements

We examine the impact of firm-specific investor sentiment (FSIS) on stock returns for negative and positive earnings surprises. Using a measure constructed from firm-specific tweets, we find that FSIS has a greater impact on stock returns for negative relative to positive earnings surprises. We further show that the impact of FSIS is greater for firms whose valuation is uncertain and difficult to arbitrage. Moreover, we provide evidence of return reversals over post-announcement periods. Our results highlight the importance of FSIS around earnings announcements.     

Intraday Seasonalities and Macroeconomic News Announcements

Using a data set consisting of more than five years of 5‐minute intraday stock index returns for major European stock indices and US macroeconomic surprises, conditional means and volatility behaviour in European markets were investigated. The findings suggest that the opening of the US stock market significantly raises the level of volatility in Europe, all markets responding in an identical fashion. Furthermore, US macroeconomic surprises exert an immediate and major impact on both the European stock markets’ intraday returns and volatilities. Thus, high frequency data appear to be critical for the identification of news impacting the markets.     

Industry Cost of Equity Capital: UK Evidence

Abstract:  This paper explores the industry cost of equity capital for the UK. We replicate the Fama and French (1997) US analysis for UK industries, but additionally investigate the industry cost of equity capital obtained from a conditional CAPM, the Cahart (1997) four factor model, and the Al-Horani, Pope and Stark (2003) R&D model. In line with the Fama-French US results, the out of sample performance of all the models is disappointing Whilst the FF3F model has a somewhat higher explanatory power than the CAPM in terms of explaining past returns, the SMB and HML factor slopes show considerable variability through time. However, all our models of the cost of equity capital in the UK outperform a simple 'beta one' model, a result that has implications for the regulatory process. There is also some evidence to suggest that a conditional CAPM may be of interest to regulators. The new R&D model of Al-Horani et al. clearly has potential, in that over the limited period for which data is available it yields return errors not dissimilar to those found under the FF3F model, but exhibits slope coefficients on the fourth R&D factor that seem to be relatively stable.     

Joint Estimation of Factor Sensitivities and Risk Premia for the Arbitrage Pricing Theory

The APT is represented as a multivariate regression model with across-equations restrictions. Both observed and unobserved (latent) macroeconomic factors are included, thus generalizing and unifying two previous strands of literature. Large portfolios representing unobserved factors are treated as endogenous, and nonlinear 3SLS estimates are shown to differ sharply from estimates that ignore this endogeneity. Using monthly stock returns and six factors, we cannot reject January effects. The following results are invariant with respect to the inclusion of January effects: we reject the CAPM in favor of the APT; however, we cannot reject the APT restrictions on the linear factor model.     

On the differences in measuring SMB and HML in the UK – Do they matter?

The Fama–French (FF) three factor model expands the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) to include two additional factors to the market factor – SMB, employed to capture a firm size effect in returns and HML employed to capture book-to-market effects in returns. In the UK, different researchers use different ways of calculating SMB and HML in the context of empirical applications of the three factor model, or extensions of it, perhaps because they believe the differences in the construction of the SMB and HML factors to be relatively unimportant from an empirical standpoint. We investigate whether indeed factor construction methods are unimportant. Our conclusion is that they do matter.     

US macroeconomic surprises and the emerging-market sovereign CDS market

Our primary aim is to examine whether US macroeconomic surprises affect the slope of the term structure of ‘sovereign credit default swap’ (SCDS) spreads in emerging markets. Our empirical results show that positive (negative) US macroeconomic surprises are likely to reduce (increase) the term structure slope of SCDS spreads in emerging countries. We find that the slope values in emerging markets are positively related to future market returns over 1- and 2-day horizons. Our results provide general support for the future informational role played by SCDS spreads for the national stock market within emerging markets.     

The price and volume response to earnings announcements in the corporate bond market

We examine abnormal returns and trading activity in bond markets around earnings announcements. Previous work provides mixed evidence on the relative impact of positive and negative surprises and the degree of response in investment-grade and speculative-grade bonds. We find that these announcements convey value-relevant information for both positive and negative earnings surprises in both investment and speculative-grade bonds. We also document significant heterogeneity in the response across industries, with muted responses in both abnormal returns and trading activity for bonds of firms in the financial and utilities industries.     

The impact of monetary policy surprises on asset return volatility: the case of Germany

This paper investigates the impact of monetary policy surprises by the FED or Bundesbank/ECB on the return volatility of German stocks and bonds using a GARCH-M model. We show that stock return volatility is susceptible to monetary policy surprises in the United States, whereas monetary policy surprises in the Euro zone matter for bond return volatility. These findings are robust for other Euro zone stock markets, but not significant for other Euro zone bond markets. The empirical evidence also suggests that monetary policy surprises have larger effects on German stock return volatility in bear markets than in bull phases. Moreover, our results support the claim that stock return volatility can be negatively correlated with stock returns, contradicting predictions made by many asset pricing models (e.g., CAPM or ICAPM) and the empirical finding of an insignificant relationship often reported in the literature.

CAPM for estimating the cost of equity capital: Interpreting the empirical evidence

We argue that the empirical evidence against the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) based on stock returns does not invalidate its use for estimating the cost of capital for projects in making capital budgeting decisions. Because stocks are backed not only by projects in place, but also by the options to modify current projects and undertake new ones, the expected returns on stocks need not satisfy the CAPM even when expected returns of projects do. We provide empirical support for our arguments by developing a method for estimating firms' project CAPM betas and project returns. Our findings justify the continued use of the CAPM by firms in spite of the mounting evidence against it based on the cross section of stock returns.     

Low frequency effects of macroeconomic news on government bond yields

Are macroeconomic releases important drivers of Treasury bond yields? We develop a two-step regression strategy that fully exploits the available high-frequency market reaction data to identify the impact of macroeconomic releases and to quantify the effects at lower frequencies. While macroeconomic surprises explain only one tenth of the daily variation in bond yields, their explanatory power improves substantially at lower frequencies, accounting for one third of quarterly variations. The finding is explained by the persistent effects that macroeconomic surprises exert on bond yields, and a less persistent impact of residual factors, which tend to average out when focusing on longer-horizon changes.     

An empirical investigation of stock market behavior in the Middle East and North Africa

This paper analyzes excess market returns in the relatively understudied financial markets of nine Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries within the context of three variants of the Capital Asset Pricing Model: the static international CAPM; the constant-parameter intertemporal CAPM; and a Markov-switching intertemporal CAPM which allows for the degree of integration with international equity markets to be time-varying. On the whole we find that: (1) Israel and Turkey are most strongly integrated with world financial markets; (2) in most other MENA markets examined there is primarily local pricing of risk and evidence of a positive risk-return trade-off; and (3) there is substantial time variation in the weights on local and global pricing of risk for all of these markets. Our results suggest that investment in many of these markets over the sample studied would have provided returns uncorrelated with global markets, and thus would have served as financial instruments with which portfolio diversification could have been improved.     

Stock Market Returns and Economic Fundamentals in an Emerging Market: The Case of Korea

This paper investigates the feedback relationship between stock market returnsand economic fundamentals in an emerging market. Starting from an intertemporalconsumption-based CAPM (CCAPM), we obtain a restricted VAR model for stockreturns and macroeconomic variables. We then apply this model to Korea and findstatistically significant departures from the restrictions implied by CCAPM.Consequently, an unrestricted VAR model is used to analyze the variations of expectedand unexpected returns in the Korean stock market. It is shown that the expectedmarket returns vary with a set of macroeconomic variables, and that thepredictable component is substantial. Reflecting richer dynamics in the data,relative to the usual single equation modeling in the literature, the estimatedVAR model shows considerable predictive ability for both real economic activityand real returns. Using the model for a variance decomposition of unexpectedreturns, we find that, although we cannot directly observe the market's revisionof expected future dividend growth, we can estimate a large part of therevision with the news in the expected industry output growth from our VAR model.Finally, we also find that economic fundamentals can explain only a smallportion of the variation in unexpected returns in the Korean stock market.     

Nominal Interest Rates and the News

This paper provides new estimates of the impact of monetary policy actions and macroeconomic news on the term structure of nominal interest rates. The key novelty is to parsimoniously capture the impact of news on all interest rates using a simple no‐arbitrage model. The different types of news are analyzed in a common framework by recognizing their heterogeneity, which allows for a systematic comparison of their effects. This approach leads to novel empirical findings. First, monetary policy causes a substantial amount of volatility in both short‐term and long‐term interest rates. Second, macroeconomic data surprises have small and mostly insignificant effects on the long end of the term structure. Third, the term‐structure response to macroeconomic news is consistent with considerable interest‐rate smoothing by the Federal Reserve. Fourth, monetary policy surprises are multidimensional while macroeconomic surprises are one‐dimensional.     

Do relative leverage and relative distress really explain size and book-to-market anomalies?

In a capital asset pricing model (CAPM) framework, Ferguson and Shockley [2003. Equilibrium “anomalies”. Journal of Finance 58, 2549–2580] propose two factors constructed on relative leverage and relative distress, and show that the two factors subsume Fama and French's [1993. Common risk factors in the returns on stocks and bonds. Journal of Financial Economics 33, 3–56] factors constructed on size and book-to-market (BM) in explaining the cross-sectional average returns of the 25 size-BM portfolios. Based on tests on individual securities, we find that all factors fail to fully explain the common asset-pricing anomalies. In the spirit of Merton's [1973. An intertemporal capital asset pricing model. Econometrica 41, 867–887] intertemporal CAPM, we propose an augmented five-factor model, which incorporates Ferguson and Shockley's [2003. Equilibrium “anomalies”. Journal of Finance 58, 2549–2580] factors into the Fama–French three-factor model. The empirical results show that a simple conditional version of the augmented model is able to explain most well-known asset-pricing anomalies.     

A Multivariate Test of a Dual-Beta CAPM: Australian Evidence

I apply a multivariate one‐step testing procedure to investigate a dual‐beta CAPM. I begin by establishing that there is no statistical relation between beta and returns for the standard CAPM. I then re‐cast the one‐step test to accommodate a dual‐beta CAPM under bull and bear market conditions. When the excess market return is negative (positive), I find strong evidence of a negative (positive) relation between beta and returns. The strength of my results suggests that the success of the model is not crucially dependent on the argument for beta instability.     

Currency risk premia and uncovered interest parity in the International CAPM

Zero-investment uncovered interest parity (UIP) portfolio positions provide perfect factor-mimicking portfolios for currency risk in the International CAPM context. Their returns are the currency risk premia. Since the UIP positions on average provide low returns, the currency risk premia must be low so that currency risk appears not to be priced in an unconditional model. However, previous research has shown that UIP returns are predictable and may be quite substantial conditionally. We use this observation to generate a specific conditional version of the International CAPM. A GMM approach shows that the conditional model performs well, while the unconditional International CAPM is (marginally) rejected. The paper thus argues that previous rejections of the International CAPM stem from the fact that currency risk premia are by nature low over extended periods of time and do not provide evidence against the International CAPM.     

US macroeconomic news effects around the US and European financial crises: Evidence from Brazilian and Mexican equity indices

We examine the intraday index return and volatility responses of two Latin American equity markets to US macroeconomic news releases around the periods of the US and European financial crises. We find that while index return is more sensitive than volatility to macroeconomic news in general, the five-minute Brazilian and Mexican index volatilities respond especially strongly to US news surprises, with the Brazilian response being more pronounced, especially during the expansion period. Among the macroeconomic indicators tested, FOMC rate decisions exhibit the highest impact on volatility, and there is evidence of asymmetric response to positive versus negative news.