The interbank market during a crisis

The autumn of 1998 provides a setting in which to test the performance of the interbank market during a potential financial crisis. This period witnessed Russia's effective default on its sovereign bonds and the near collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. Despite these negative shocks to bank capital and increased uncertainty in financial markets, the federal funds market still effectively channeled liquidity to those institutions in need at rates consistent with Federal Reserve intentions. Further, risk premiums on overnight lending were largely unaffected and lending volumes increased, suggesting that the federal funds market performed well during this period.     

从金融危机看宏观型对冲基金的本质

国际资本自由流动是宏观型对冲基金的温床。尽管国际上受美金融危机发生的具体原因千差万别,但共同的特点是有意、无意地扩大宏观经济基本面的失衡,然后借助金融市场的瞬间强制调整,获取巨额利润。宏观型对冲基金作为盈利组织无可厚非,关键是要避免宏观经济的严重失衡。     

New empirical evidence from assessing financial market integration,with application to Saudi Arabia

We examine whether data frequency, day of the week and econometric methodology matter in analyzing financial market integration. As case study, we investigate equity market comovements between Saudi Arabia and a set of international economies. Our findings take the literature forward and indicate that cross-market linkages are weak and subsample-dependent regardless of whether data are daily, weekly (whatever the weekday) or monthly and whatever the econometric approach. The results are relevant for investors who want to be more informed of promising investment opportunities, and for financial makers to take necessary policies to hedge against the effects of shocks.     

Financial Returnees as New Agents in East Asia: The Case of Korean Private Equity Funds

Although the standing of Anglo-American capitalism has been badly damaged by the global economic crisis, the return of the state in emerging markets is by no means assured. Over the past decade, financial processes originating in Anglo-American markets, such as derivatives, hedge funds and mergers and acquisitions (M&A), have made quiet headway in emerging markets. One of the transmission channels is financial returnees, defined as elites returning to domestic finance from either global finance abroad or from foreign financial institutions in their home countries. Many financial returnees pursue business agendas that parallel the Anglo-American model, while portraying themselves as local for domestic constituencies. These actions are now especially visible in the rise of private equity funds in emerging markets. This article defines the concept of a financial returnee and charts the impact of these individuals in importing the Anglo-American private equity model to Asia with Korea as the primary case study. Once foreign-controlled, the private equity industry in Korea is now domestically-run and financial returnees have been integral in this sector's short but important history.     

Modelling the dependence structures of Australian iTraxx CDS index

In contrast to market expectations, the correlation between credit default swap (CDS) spreads and their respective stock prices in Australia was found to be positive. The global financial crisis (GFC) affected the nonlinear association between the two asset classes with firms experiencing financial distress and stock prices plummeting. CDSs issuers reacted to such exogenous shocks by increasing their risk premiums on their spreads, reflecting the increased inherent risk. By splitting the data into pre- and post-GFC contexts and by employing the use of Archimedean copulas, we observe a negative co-movement in the post-GFC period. This finding is robust to several equity indices. Overall, such result is critical for investors engaging in arbitrageur activities.     

Short-termism of long-term investors? The investment behaviour of Dutch insurance companies and pension funds

Countercyclical investment strategies of large institutional investors such as insurance companies and pension funds can support financial stability, while procyclical investment behaviour is considered as destabilizing at a macro level. Yet, there is limited understanding of how insurance companies and pension funds invest during market shocks, such as the global financial crisis. Investigating the equity and fixed income portfolios of Dutch non-life insurers, life insurers and pension funds, we find evidence for procyclical behaviour by insurance companies (both life and non-life). For pension funds, we find evidence for countercyclical behaviour during market upturns.     

Debt markets and corporate debt structure in an emerging market: The South African example

This is a first attempt at gauging the effects of corporate public debt issuance on the debt structure, risk profile and valuation of firms in an emerging market. We find that financial services firms, along with government institutions, are important early supporters of an organized public debt market. Firms in this market use equity, public debt and private debt funds simultaneously as need be. Consistent with predictions of the corporate debt structure literature, public debt-issuing firms are larger, older, more profitable, and less informational opaque than non-public debt-issuing firms. Moreover, public debt-issuing firms experience significant reductions in both overall and systematic risks, and incur lower cost of capital following issuance than non-public debt issuers. These and other findings of the study suggest deepening national debt markets can be a fruitful financial market development exercise for emerging markets.     

“私募股权基金的基金”的差异化发展——基于政府财政资金运用研究

在后金融危机时代,随着政府财政职能的不断完善和创新以及国家财政收入持续增长,科学合理的使用国家和地方财政资金,将对提高财政资金管理水平和使用效率,促进私人资本投资活动、扩大政府资金影响力、减轻政府负担以及转变职能等方面都具有重要意义.成熟的私募股权基金市场,是政府实现其政策的重要工具之一,其中“私募股权基金的基金”(PEFOF)为政府财政投资提供了不错的选择,也是政府设立并按照市场化运作的引导基金.本文将对政府财政投资PEFOF在投资标的差异化、投资额度及使用条件差异化、投资对象与投资策略差异化、投资模式及投资区域差异化等方面进行了分析与研究,提出加快发展我国政府财政资金PEFOF的建议与对策.     

国际对冲基金的中国资产配置研究

"热钱"进入的状况和影响目前正在受到国内各界的广泛关注。文章借用以指数收益推算要素敞口的方法,研究了"热钱"的典型代表———国际对冲基金在中国金融市场上的投资活动和资产分布。从全球对冲基金行业来看,尚不存在大规模投资于中国大陆市场的迹象。全球对冲基金业绩仅与中国股票市场存在较微弱的正相关关系。就大中华区而言,大陆股票、香港股票和台湾股票市场是这一地区对冲基金的主要活动场所。没有发现对冲基金在行业意义上进入中国债券、期货和房地产市场的证据。文章还分析了国际对冲基金进入中国的主要渠道和目前国内对对冲基金的监管现状,并提出有关政策建议。     

宏观型对冲基金动向及其对中国金融稳定的影响

近年来,宏观型对冲基金加快了策略转型和运作方式调整,表现为进一步分化为中小型化和专业化,其结构性变化是投资者中的机构投资者显著增加,大型金融机构也相继设立了机构内对冲基金;在投资策略方面,为了减少风险暴露,宏观型对冲基金正在寻找与各国政府意愿和金融市场走势更加协调的投资策略;这些新的变化对于各国金融稳定提出了新的挑战。目前,中国的经济金融形势十分有利于对冲基金实施多头策略,因此,如何有序开放金融市场和金融业及有效阻止对冲基金可能给中国金融体系造成的冲击是中国应当考虑和关注的问题。     

Hedging and diversification across commodity assets

ABSTRACT

We investigate the conditional cross effects and volatility spillover between equity markets and commodity markets (oil and gold), Fama and French HML and SMB factors, volatility index (VIX) and bonds using different multivariate GARCH specifications considering the potential asymmetry and persistence behaviours. We analyse the dynamic conditional correlation between the US equity market and a set of commodity prices and risk factors to forecast the transmission of shock to the equity market firstly, and to determine and compare the optimal hedge ratios from the different models based on the hedging effectiveness of each model. Our findings suggest that all models confirm the significant returns and volatility spillovers. More importantly, we find that GO-GARCH is the best-fit model for modelling the joint dynamics of different financial variables. The results of the current study have implications for investors: (i) the equity market displays inverted dynamics with the volatility index suggesting strong evidence of diversification benefit; (ii) of the hedging assets gold appears the best hedge for the US equity market as it has a higher hedge effectiveness than oil and bonds over time; and (iii) despite these important results, a better hedge may be obtained by using well-selected firm sized and profitability-based portfolios.     

Optimal gasoline hedging strategies using futures contracts and exchange-traded funds

This article employs a variety of econometric models (including OLS, VEC/VAR, DCC GARCH and a class of copula-based GARCH models) to estimate optimal hedge ratios for gasoline spot prices using gasoline exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and gasoline futures contracts. We then compare their performance using four different measures from the perspective of both their hedging objectives and trading position using four different measures: variance reduction measure, utility-based measure and two tail-based measures (value at risk and expected shortfall). The impact of the 2008 financial market crisis on hedging performance is also investigated. Our findings indicate that, in terms of variance reduction, the static models (OLS and VEC/VAR) are found to be the best hedging strategies. However, more sophisticated time-varying hedging strategies could outperform the static hedging models when the other measures are used. In addition, ETF hedging is a more effective hedging strategy than futures hedging during the high-volatility (crisis) period, but this is not always the case during the normal time (post-crisis) period.     

The anatomy of returns from moving average trading rules in the Russian stock market

This paper examines the profitability of index trading strategies that are based on dual moving average crossover (DMAC) rules in the Russian stock market over the 2003–2012 period. It contributes to the existing technical analysis (TA) literature by comparing for the first time in emerging markets the relative performance of individual stocks’ trading portfolios with that of trading strategies for the index that consists of the same stocks (i.e., the most liquid stocks of the Moscow Exchange). The results show that the best trading strategies of the in-sample period can outperform buy-and-hold strategy during the subsequent out-of-sample period, although with low statistical significance. In addition, we document the benefits of using DMAC combinations that are much longer than those employed in previous TA literature. Moreover, the decomposition of the full-sample-period performance into separate bull- and bear-period performances shows that the outperformance of the best past index trading strategies over is mostly attributable to the fact that they managed to stay mostly out of the stock market during a dramatic crash caused by the global financial crisis.     

Overall effects of financial liberalization: financial crisis versus economic growth

ABSTRACT

The contribution of this work consists firstly in decomposing the effect of financial liberalization into a global direct positive effect on growth and an indirect negative effect via financial fragility and crisis. We show that the aggregate positive effect of financial liberalization outweighs the negative partial or temporary effect. Secondly, contrary to previous works, we distinguish many types of financial reforms. We found that equity market liberalization is the most important component in reducing economical costs associated with financial crisis. Thus, equity market liberalization is the most important favoring growth. Interest rate liberalization enhances significantly the probability of crisis leading to a short-run indirect effect more important than other financial reforms. Thirdly, we improved our work by addressing model uncertainty using Bayesian Model Averaging techniques to choose appropriate indicators for model crisis specification.     

Volatility transmission to the fine wine market

The goal of this paper is to explore volatility transmission from various markets to the fine wine market. Knowledge of these channels for transmitting volatility to the wine market allows practitioners to anticipate the future volatility and the consequences of a shock on the wine market, to develop their investment strategy and diversify their risk. We especially analyse the impact of U.S. markets (i.e. art, commodities, credit, financial and real estate) during the 2007–2017 period. We shed additional light on how the volatility of the fine wine market varies during an extended period including a financial crisis. Our results indicate that, in the short-term, volatility is transmitted with a negative effect through the financial and commodity markets and with a positive effect through the art, residential real estate, and credit default markets. In the long-term, the wine market is impacted by all other markets. We show that correlations are time-varying.     

Equity market and foreign capital

Abstract .  I present a model that demonstrates that the market mechanism is not always effective in stabilizing an open equity market. Foreign capital inflows create multiple equilibria in the equity market, which may simultaneously trigger a currency crisis as well as an equity market crash even if the equity market is well developed.     

The Role of Hedge Funds in International Financial Markets

This paper analyses the risk and return characteristics of a wide universe of hedge funds in the period 1990–2000. Most major categories of hedge funds are found to have outperformed (often by a considerable margin) the performance of traditional asset classes. The potential impact of hedge fund trading on market spreads and volatilities is examined especially in the period 1998, so as to provide some guidelines in terms of regulation of such funds. It is shown, however, that despite hedge fund difficulties in that period, the inclusion of hedge funds in investor portfolios definitely moves the efficiency frontier outwards, and allows significantly higher levels of returns for given levels of risk. This is primarily because of the low level of correlation of certain hedge fund styles, especially arbitrage strategies, with other hedge fund styles and with traditional assets.
(J.E.L.: G10, G11, G14, G23).     

Pension funds' allocations to hedge funds: an empirical analysis of US and Canadian defined benefit plans

This article investigates the characteristics of US and Canadian pension funds that allocate assets to hedge funds. The typical pension fund that invests in hedge funds is a large sophisticated pension fund that diversifies its portfolio across numerous classes of investments, private equity in particular, uses a core-satellite organization and has access to low delegation costs for alternative assets. Moreover, we find that pension funds investing in hedge funds significantly obtained higher global returns.     

Dynamic hedge ratio for stock index futures: application of threshold VECM

This study represents one of the first papers in stock-index-futures arbitrage literature to investigate the effects of arbitrage threshold on stock index futures hedging effectiveness by using threshold vector error correction model (hereafter threshold VECM). Moreover, in contrast to prior studies focusing on examining case studies involving mature stock markets, this study not only adopts US S&P 500 stock market as the sample but also adds an analysis of one emerging stock market, Hungarian BSI and examines the differences between them. Finally, this investigation employs a rolling estimation process to examine the impact of arbitrage threshold behaviours on the setting of futures hedging ratio. The empirical findings of this study are consistent with the following notions. First, arbitrage behaviour reduces co-movement between futures and spot markets and increases the volatility of both futures and spot markets. Second, this article denotes the outer regime of futures-spot market for the case of Hungarian BSI (US S&P 500) as a crisis (an unusual) condition. Moreover, arbitrage threshold behaviours make remarkable (unremarkable) shift on optimal hedge ratio between two different market regimes for the case of Hungarian BSI (US S&P 500). Finally, the framework involving regime-varying hedge ratio designed in this study provides a more efficient futures hedge ratio design for Hungarian BSI stock market, but not for US S&P 500 stock market.     

Interdependence and Contagion in Global Asset Markets

We assess interdependence and contagion across three asset classes (bonds, stocks, and currencies) for over 60 economies over the period 1998–2011. Using a global VAR, we test for changes in the transmission mechanism—both within and cross‐market changes—during periods of global financial turbulence. Contagion effects within‐market are notable in Latin American and Emerging Asian equities. In addition, in times of financial crisis, we find that US equity shocks lead to risk aversion by investors in equities and currencies globally and in some emerging market bonds. Euro area shocks are significant mainly within the bond market.