The Danish stock and bond markets: comovement,return predictability and variance decomposition

VAR models of the kind developed by Shiller and Beltratti [J. Monetary Econ. 30 (1992) 25] and Campbell and Ammer [J. Finance 48 (1993) 3] are used to analyze the Danish stock and bond markets and their comovement. In contrast to these papers, however, VAR parameter estimates are bias-adjusted and VAR generated statistics, including their standard errors and confidence intervals, are computed using bootstrap simulation. In addition, we modify the Campbell–Ammer variance decomposition such that it can handle returns from a long-term coupon bond. Some parts of the results for the Danish stock and bond markets are quite similar to the US results reported by Shiller and Beltratti and Campbell and Ammer, but other parts stand in sharp contrast to the results for the US. The most important differences between the US and Denmark are that in Denmark news about higher future inflation lead to an increase in expected future stock returns, and that excess stock return news and excess bond return news are negatively correlated.     

Correlations in price changes and volatility across international stock markets

The short-run interdependence of prices and price volatilityacross three major international stock market is studied. Dailyopening and closing prices of major stock indexes for the Tokyo,London, and New York stock markets are examined. The analysisutilizes the autoregressive conditionally heteroskedastic (ARCH)family of statistical models to explore these pricing relationship.Evidence of price volatility spillovers from New York to Tokyo,London to Tokyo, and New York to London is observed, but noprice volatility spillover effects in other directions are foundfor the pre-October 1987 period.     

On the reversal of return and dividend growth predictability: A tale of two periods

A disconcerting, albeit generally accepted, finding is that aggregate stock returns are predictable by dividend yield but dividend growth is unpredictable. I show that part of this lack of dividend growth predictability stems from how dividend growth is constructed. I then show a dramatic reversal of predictability in the 134 years during 1872–2005: stock returns are largely unpredictable in the first seven decades, but become predictable in the postwar period; dividend growth is strongly predictable in the prewar years but this predictability disappears in the postwar years. New evidence on the predictability of long-run returns and dividend growth is also shown.     

Investor attention,psychological anchors,and stock return predictability

Motivated by psychological evidence on limited investor attention and anchoring, we propose two proxies for the degree to which traders under- and overreact to news, namely, the nearness to the Dow 52-week high and the nearness to the Dow historical high, respectively. We find that nearness to the 52-week high positively predicts future aggregate market returns, while nearness to the historical high negatively predicts future market returns. We further show that our proxies contain information about future market returns that is not captured by traditional macroeconomic variables and that our results are robust across G7 countries. Comprehensive Monte Carlo simulations and comparisons with the NYSE/Amex market cap index confirm the significance of these findings.     

Stock return predictability and the adaptive markets hypothesis: Evidence from century-long U.S. data

This paper provides strong evidence of time-varying return predictability of the Dow Jones Industrial Average index from 1900 to 2009. Return predictability is found to be driven by changing market conditions, consistent with the implication of the adaptive markets hypothesis. During market crashes, no statistically significant return predictability is observed, but return predictability is associated with a high degree of uncertainty. In times of economic or political crises, stock returns have been highly predictable with a moderate degree of uncertainty in predictability. We find that return predictability has been smaller during economic bubbles than in normal times. We also find evidence that return predictability is associated with stock market volatility and economic fundamentals.     

Habit formation,surplus consumption and return predictability: International evidence

On an international post World War II dataset, we use an iterated GMM procedure to estimate and test the Campbell and Cochrane (1999, By force of habit: a consumption-based explanation of aggregate stock market behavior. Journal of Political Economy 107, 205–251.) habit formation model with a time-varying risk-free rate. In addition, we analyze the predictive power of the surplus consumption ratio for future stock and bond returns. We find that, although there are important cross-country differences and economically significant pricing errors, for the majority of countries in our sample the model gets empirical support in a variety of different dimensions, including reasonable estimates of risk-free rates. Further, for the majority of countries the surplus consumption ratio captures time-variation in expected returns. Together with the price-dividend ratio, the surplus consumption ratio contains significant information about future stock returns, also during the 1990s. In addition, in most countries the surplus consumption ratio is also a powerful predictor of future bond returns. Thus, the surplus consumption ratio captures time-varying expected returns in both stock and bond markets.     

Liquidity and short-run predictability: Evidence from international stock markets

This study investigates the determinants of short-run predictability in international stock markets, where predictability is defined as the accuracy of the best-combined daily forecasts. Contrary to popular belief, illiquid markets, characterized by high transaction costs and large price impact, are not necessarily highly predictable. Instead, markets with larger trading volume are more predictable, especially after the global financial crisis and in emerging markets. Those with larger market capitalization, steeper upward trends, and positively skewed returns are less predictable. Company financial strength has limited influence. During the COVID-19 pandemic the markets have become more predictable, with stronger price trends. Emerging markets are less predictable when relatively over- or undervalued.     

Category-specific EPU indices,macroeconomic variables and stock market return predictability

This paper mainly investigates whether the category-specific EPU indices have predictability for stock market returns. Empirical results show that the content of category-specific EPU can significantly predict the stock market return, no matter the individual category-specific EPU index or the principal component of category-specific EPU indices. In addition, the information of category-specific EPU indices can also have higher economic gains than traditional macroeconomic variables, even considering the trading cost and different investor risk aversion coefficients. During different forecasting windows, multi-period forecast horizons and the COVID-19 pandemic, we find the information contained in category-specific EPU indices can have better performances than that of the macroeconomic variables. Our paper tries to provide new evidence for stock market returns based on category-specific EPU indices.     

Stock markets,credit markets,and technology-led growth

The high-tech sector accounts for the majority of corporate innovation in modern economies. In a sample of 38 countries, we document a strong positive relation between the initial size of the country's high-tech sector and subsequent rates of GDP and total factor productivity growth. We also find a strong positive connection between a country's equity (but not credit) market development and the size of its high-tech sector. Our main difference-in-differences estimates show that better developed stock markets support faster growth of innovative-intensive, high-tech industries. The main channels for this effect are higher rates of productivity and faster growth in the number of new high-tech firms. Credit market development fosters growth in industries that rely on external finance for physical capital accumulation but is unimportant for growth in innovation-intensive industries. These findings show that stock markets and credit markets play important but distinct roles in supporting economic growth. Stock markets are uniquely suited for financing technology-led growth, a particularly important concern for advanced economies.     

Adjusted dividend-price ratios and stock return predictability: Evidence from China

This paper examines the predictive ability of dividend-price ratios on stock returns in the Chinese A-share market. The results show that in both the in-sample and out-of-sample settings, stock returns are positively predicted by the raw dividend-price ratio and multiple adjusted dividend-price ratios over the 2002–2018 period, especially for the pre-2008 period. However, this predictive power disappeared after the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) released the unique Semi-Mandatory Dividend Rule (the Rule) in 2008, and this sudden decrease in predictive ability has shown no signs of reversing. Tests using the event-study methodology show a reduction in the positive relation between dividend-price ratios and stock returns in the short term, indicating that the Rule has an adverse impact on the signaling effect of dividend announcements. We further demonstrate that the interference of the Rule with the information conveyed by the dividends explains the disappearance of the predictive power of dividend-price ratios. For firms with insufficient cash flow, dividends provide a negative signal of the firms' value after the enactment of the Rule instead of a positive signal of strong future cash flows. Consequently, the Rule has a negative impact on the efficiency of the cash-flow channel for predicting returns and buries the predictive power of dividend-price ratios.     

Intra- and inter-regional return and volatility spillovers across emerging and developed markets: Evidence from stock indices and stock index futures

We provide empirical evidence on the patterns of intra- and inter-regional transmission of information across 10 developed and 11 emerging markets in Asia, the Americas, Europe and Africa using both stock indices and stock index futures. The main transmission channels are examined in the period from 2005 to 2014 through the analysis of return and volatility spillovers around the most recent crises based on the generalized vector autoregressive framework. Our findings demonstrate that markets are more susceptible to domestic and region-specific volatility shocks than to inter-regional contagion. A novel result reported in our study is a difference in patterns of international signals transmission between models employing indices and futures data. We conclude that futures data provide more efficient channels of information transmission because the magnitude of return and volatility spillovers across futures is larger than across indices. Our findings are relevant to practitioners, such as stock market investors, as well as policy makers and can help enhance their understanding of financial markets interconnectedness.     

Decomposing the VIX: Implications for the predictability of stock returns

The VIX index is not only a volatility index but also a polynomial combination of all possible higher moments in market return distribution under the risk-neutral measure. This paper formulates the VIX as a linear decomposition of four fundamentally different elements: the realized variance (RV), the variance risk premium (VRP), the realized tail (RT), and the tail risk premium (TRP), respectively. Using an innovative and nonparametric tail risk measure, we find that approximately one-third of the VIX's formation is attributed to the TRP. In addition to VRP, RT and TRP are crucial components for predicting future returns on equity portfolios.     

Illiquidity,return and risk in G7 stock markets: Interdependencies and spillovers

Trading activity in G7 stock markets reflects not only the macroeconomic and financial impact of these G7 economies in international economic growth, but also their financial interdependence. While this nexus of major stock markets has been explored in terms of volatility and return spillovers, there has been no combined analysis of return, volatility and illiquidity spillovers. We study illiquidity spillovers because they are transmissions of trading activity and, thereof, transmissions of information and market sentiment. We find that the dynamics of international stock markets are characterized by persistent illiquidity and also that illiquidity shocks are significantly correlated across markets. Furthermore, we discover Granger causal associations between risk, return and illiquidity across G7 stock market and also within each stock market. Our findings bear significance for the regulation of international financial markets and also for international portfolio diversification.     

Crude oil price volatility and equity return predictability: A comparative out-of-sample study

We evaluate the predictive power afforded by crude oil price volatility relative to widely used variables in the financial literature, such as the dividend yield, earnings-to-price ratio, the default yield spread as well several crude oil price-based variables. From a statistical viewpoint, predictions employing the suggested crude oil price volatility-based measures display a similar pattern as predictions using dividend ratios and interest rates, namely, they have relatively weak out-of-sample power. However, we find that gains in utility for an investor that uses predictions produced under the model employing crude oil price log-realized semivolatilities are statistically significant higher than an investor relying on predictions produced under the competitors as well as the historical average benchmark. We discuss and explain the reasons for our results. Overall, we argue that it is hard not to justify more attention to crude oil price semivolatilities relative to widely used financial and macroeconomic variables.     

Negative earnings,positive earnings and stock return predictability: An empirical examination of market timing

We examine the predictive ability of earnings-price ratios or yields for the S&P 500 index. We decompose the aggregate earnings-price ratio into its positive and negative components (“winners” vs “losers”) and find that the negative component has the most predictive ability. We also find that the earnings-price measures forecast both future returns and earnings growth. Our models display substantial variation in explanatory power over time with forecast power resurfacing in the latter 1990s. We conclude that to the extent that earnings-price yields predict future S&P 500 returns, the negative earnings component is the driving factor.     

Risk,return, and liquidity during Ramadan: Evidence from Indonesian and Malaysian stock markets

Indonesia and Malaysia are common in religion; however, the two countries have different developments in their equity markets. This study investigates the risk, return, and liquidity during Ramadan for the Indonesia and Malaysia stock markets. We find that the volatility is higher around Ramadan for the Indonesia stock market, while displays dynamic patterns in different phases around the month of Ramadan for Malaysia. Despite the changing risk during Ramadan, the risk-adjusted return remains unchanged. Furthermore, this study finds that the liquidity in most stock index markets of the two countries is higher around Ramadan. These findings support the notion that Ramadan affects investors’ risk-taking attitude and facilitates the trade in stocks.     

Order price clustering,size clustering,and stock price movements: Evidence from the Taiwan Stock Exchange

This paper examines order price clustering, size clustering, and stock price movements in an active emerging country’s equities market, the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE). We first explore the relationships between investor types and order price/size clustering. Next, we investigate the joint determinants of the round-price and round-size orders based on daily and intraday data analyses. Finally, we look at the relationships among investor types, round prices/sizes, and stock price movements. The findings reveal that all investor types exhibit price and size clustering phenomena. After controlling for other factors, institutional investors have a relatively lower level of size clustering when compared with individuals. Our results confirm the price resolution hypothesis, whereby the levels of daily price and size clustering increase with firm risk, and the probability of a round-price or round-size order increases as transitory volatility rises. Partially consistent with the negotiation hypothesis, the probability of a round-price or round-size order increases when order competition turns fiercer. Mutual funds exhibit stronger quarter-end and session-end effects than do other investors. We also detect strategic trading behaviors, showing that the probability of an order with a tail price of one (nine) increases when buy (sell) order competition is fiercer. Lastly, stocks with mutual funds’ round-price or round-size buy (sell) orders experience rising (falling) future stock returns.     

Risk and return: Long-run relations,fractional cointegration,and return predictability

Univariate dependencies in market volatility, both objective and risk neutral, are best described by long-memory fractionally integrated processes. Meanwhile, the ex post difference, or the variance swap payoff reflecting the reward for bearing volatility risk, displays far less persistent dynamics. Using intraday data for the Standard & Poor's 500 and the volatility index (VIX), coupled with frequency domain methods, we separate the series into various components. We find that the coherence between volatility and the volatility-risk reward is the strongest at long-run frequencies. Our results are consistent with generalized long-run risk models and help explain why classical efforts of establishing a naïve return-volatility relation fail. We also estimate a fractionally cointegrated vector autoregression (CFVAR). The model-implied long-run equilibrium relation between the two variance variables results in nontrivial return predictability over interdaily and monthly horizons, supporting the idea that the cointegrating relation between the two variance measures proxies for the economic uncertainty rewarded by the market.     

Stock returns,trading volume,and volatility: The case of African stock markets

The presence of the African Stock Markets (ASMs) in the global frontier markets indices confirms their global portfolio diversification role. This study investigates the asymmetric and intertemporal causality among the stock returns, trading volume, and volatility of eight ASMs. Results based on the linear model reveal that return generally Granger cause trading volume. However, evidence from the quantile regression shows that lagged trading volume has a negative causal effect on returns at low quantiles and positive causal effects at high quantiles. This evidence is consistent with volume-return equilibrium models, disposition and overconfidence models, and information asymmetry models. The positive causal effects of volatility on volume support the dispersion of beliefs model. In contrast, intertemporal evidence of contemporaneous and lagged causal relationships from trading volume to volatility supports the mixture of distribution hypothesis, sequential information acquisition hypothesis, and dynamic efficient market hypothesis. Volume-return and return-volume causality dynamics are quantile-specific and therefore driven by market conditions. However, the volume-volatility causality is dependent on volatility regimes. The linear model results confirm how model misspecification can distort and even reverse empirical evidence relative to nonlinear models.     

Exchange-rate return predictability and the adaptive markets hypothesis: Evidence from major foreign exchange rates

This study examines return predictability of major foreign exchange rates by testing for martingale difference hypothesis (MDH) using daily and weekly nominal exchange rates from 1975 to 2009. We use three alternative tests for the MDH, which include the wild bootstrap automatic variance ratio test, generalized spectral test, and Dominguez–Lobato consistent tests. We evaluate time-varying return predictability by applying these tests with fixed-length moving sub-sample windows. While exchange rate returns are found to be unpredictable most of times, we do observe a number of episodes of statistically significant return predictability. They are mostly associated with the major events such as coordinated central bank interventions and financial crises. This finding suggests that return predictability of foreign exchange rates occurs from time to time depending on changing market conditions, consistent with the implications of the adaptive markets hypothesis.