US and Domestic Market Gains and Asian Investors’ Overconfident Trading Behavior

We find that subsequent to both US and domestic market gains, both Asian individual and institutional investors increase their trading and that this effect is more pronounced in bull markets, in periods of relatively favorable investor sentiment, in periods of extremely high market returns, and in markets with short‐sale constraints. We also find that individual investors trade more in response to market gains than institutional investors. Moreover, we find that further integration of Asian stock markets with US stock markets after the Asian financial crisis in 1998 is an important reason for Asian investors’ response to US market gains.     

Equilibrium moment restrictions on asset returns: normal and crisis periods

Empirically, the covariance between stock returns varies with their volatility. We seek a robust theoretical explanation of this. With minimal assumptions, we model stochastic properties of equilibrium returns which result from the interaction between inter-temporal traders and noisy, price-sensitive short-term traders. The inter-temporal traders can have arbitrary investment rules, preferences and information. In all cases we find a set of restrictions between second moments of equilibrium returns. With two assets there is also a bound on the correlation between asset returns. Estimation with second moments of global stock returns supports our theoretical framework. Higher volatility in at least one market can increase comovement among markets. With globalization, covariances between two stock markets can also affect covariances between two other stock markets. We also find that the changes in trader behavior between normal and crisis periods lead to changes in the moment restrictions between asset returns.     

The comovement of US and German bond markets

We use a vector-autoregression, with parameter estimates corrected for small-sample bias, to decompose US and German unexpected bond returns into three ‘news’ components: news about future inflation, news about future real interest rates, and news about future excess bond returns (term premia). We then cross-country correlate these news components to see which component is responsible for the high degree of comovement of US and German bond markets. For the period 1975-2003 we find that inflation news is the main driving force behind this comovement. When news is coming to the US market that future US inflation will increase, there is a tendency that German inflation will also increase. This is regarded bad news for the bond market in both countries whereby bond prices are bid down leading to immediate negative return innovations and changing expectations of future excess bond returns. Thus, comovement in expected future inflation is the main reason for bond market comovement.     

The Comovement of US and UK Stock Markets

US and UK stock returns are highly positively correlated over the period 1918–99. Using VAR‐based variance decompositions, we investigate the nature of this comovement. Excess return innovations are decomposed into news about future dividends, real interest rates, and excess returns. We find that the latter news component is the most important in explaining stock return volatility in both the USA and the UK and that stock return news is highly correlated across countries. This is evidence against Beltratti and Shiller's (1993) finding that the comovement of US and UK stock markets can be explained in terms of a simple present value model. We interpret the comovement as indicating that equity premia in the two countries are hit by common real shocks.     

Asian Economic Integration and Stock Market Comovement

Using daily returns from 1988 to 1998, we investigate to what degree twelve equity markets in Asia are integrated with Japan's equity market and examine the factors that affect the level of economic integration. We find that the equity markets of Australia, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Singapore are highly integrated with the stock market in Japan. There is also evidence that these Asian markets become more integrated over time, especially since 1994. A higher import share as well as a greater differential in inflation rates, real interest rates, and gross domestic product growth rates have negative effects on stock market comovements between country pairs. Conversely, increased export share by Asian economies to Japan and greater foreign direct investment from Japan to other Asian economies contribute to greater comovement.     

Stock and Bond Return Comovement as a Different Way to Assess Information Content: The Case of Debt Covenant Violation Disclosures

We propose a supplementary way to assess the information content of a financial statement disclosure based on the comovement of asset returns in different markets in response to information that has price implications for both. The influence of a signal that strongly influences at least two asset markets measures a dimension of information content less clearly reflected in single‐market responses. We apply our method to debt covenant violation (DCV) disclosures. These are the outcome of a debt renegotiation when the covenant promises in a debt agreement to manage the agency costs of debt are broken. We find that stock and bond return comovement is highest one day before DCV disclosure and differs depending on whether the debt covenant is waived or not waived. We find that stock and bond return comovement in the days following a DCV disclosure decreases more for non‐waiver disclosures than for waiver disclosures. This supports the theory that a non‐waiver outcome shifts control rights and bargaining power to the creditors. Consistent with this theory, single‐market tests show that bonds with a non‐waiver disclosure versus a waiver disclosure earn positive excess returns following a DCV disclosure whereas the reverse is true for stocks.     

Diversification,rationality and the Asian economic crisis

We examine the reaction of world equity markets to the 1997 Asian Crisis. Correlations across the markets increased dramatically during the economic crisis but only during a relatively short period around the crisis. After the crisis, the benefits of international diversification improved substantially but did not return to the levels existing before the crisis. We then examine whether the market reactions to the crisis can be explained by economic fundamentals. We find that virtually all of the variation in returns across markets can be explained by these factors. The reaction of markets to the Asian Crisis was rational.     

ROBUSTNESS OF THE HEADQUARTERS‐CITY EFFECT ON STOCK RETURNS

Recent studies report that U.S. firms headquartered near each other experience positive comovement in their stock returns, a finding suggestive of local biases in equity trading activity. We investigate the robustness of these findings and find that including additional pricing factors in models for monthly stock returns materially reduces the magnitude of the headquarters‐city effect in stock returns. Additionally, we find that an implicit null hypothesis of zero local return comovement is inappropriate as there is positive comovement between a stock's return and returns on portfolios of stocks from nonheadquarters cities, on average. Nevertheless, results benchmarked against estimates based on resampling methods indicate a significant and robust headquarters‐city effect in stock returns.     

The Core,Periphery, and Beyond: Stock Market Comovements among EU and Non‐EU Countries

Using linear and nonlinear correlations, copulas, quantile dependence and lower tail dependence, we find that (1) equity markets of the advanced European Union (EU) countries comove more closely with each other than with the peripheral economies, (2) comovements with non‐EU countries are lower, (3) relative comovement structure before, during, and after the global financial crisis has been very stable, and (4) the level of comovements remained virtually the same between the crisis and post‐crisis periods. Our results are robust to controlling for Fama‐French, U.S. and global risk factors, as well as monetary policy, market interest rates, exchange rates, and uncertainty.     

Information, Trading, and Volatility: Evidence from Weather-Sensitive Markets

We find that trading‐ versus nontrading‐period variance ratios in weather‐sensitive markets are lower than those in the equity market and higher than those in the currency market. The variance ratios are also substantially lower during periods of the year when prices are most sensitive to the weather. Moreover, the comovement of returns and volatilities for related commodities is stronger during the weather‐sensitive season, largely due to stronger comovement during nontrading periods. These results are consistent with a strong link between prices and public information flow and cannot be explained by pricing errors or changes in trading activity.     

Foreign Investment in Emerging Markets: International Diversification or Familiarity Bias?

This study empirically tests whether foreign investors take advantage of international diversification when investing in emerging Asian markets. Using the 2007–2008 financial crisis as identification, we find that firms with higher foreign ownership had better stock returns during the financial crisis. Moreover, the diversification effect exists in five out of the eight emerging markets and is stronger in markets with a lower dynamic conditional correlation with the global market index. We also find that foreign investors prefer firms with a lower international sales ratio. In conclusion, the evidence consistently suggests that foreign investors take advantage of diversification effects.     

Attention allocation and international stock return comovement: Evidence from the Bitcoin market

We employ extreme Bitcoin returns as exogenous shock events to investigate the impact of investor attention allocation on worldwide stock return comovement. We find that (1) these shock events decrease worldwide stock return comovement, (2) there is an asymmetric effect in which a crash shock event has a greater impact on return comovement than a jump shock event, and (3) the impact of these shock events on equity comovement is more pronounced in emerging markets. Our results suggest that identifying extreme Bitcoin returns will benefit portfolio construction. Our results may be of considerable interest to investors, as well as to academics interested in portfolio diversification, asset comovement, and cryptocurrencies.     

Momentum Strategies: Evidence from Pacific Basin Stock Markets

We investigate the profitability of momentum investment strategy in six Asian stock markets. Unrestricted momentum investment strategies do not yield significant momentum profits. Although we find that a diversified country‐neutral strategy generates small but statistically significant returns during 1981–1994, when we control for size and turnover effects we find that the country‐neutral profits dissipate. Our evidence suggests that the factors that contribute to the momentum phenomenon in the United States are not prevalent in the Asian markets.     

Comovement,information production,and the business cycle

Recent theoretical research suggests that information production is a positive externality of aggregate economic activity (Veldkamp, 2005). Both the quantity and quality of information increase during periods of economic expansion and decrease during periods of contraction. Based on this insight, we hypothesize and confirm that time-varying information production drives the comovement patterns observed in stock returns. We examine stock return comovement in 36 countries from 1980 to 2007 and show that, consistent with the theory, comovement patterns are countercyclical; that is, when information production is high (low), comovement is low (high). We also find that the relation between comovement and the business cycle is stronger in countries that experience large intertemporal swings in information production. Finally, we show that the relation between business cycle and comovement is stronger in poor countries, countries with less developed financial markets, and countries with weaker accounting and transparency standards. These results suggest that financial development and transparency are conducive to a steady flow of financial information over the business cycle.     

Does Corporate Headquarters Location Matter for Stock Returns?

We document strong comovement in the stock returns of firms headquartered in the same geographic area. Moreover, stocks of companies that change their headquarters location experience a decrease in their comovement with stocks from the old location and an increase in their comovement with stocks from the new location. The local comovement of stock returns is not explained by economic fundamentals and is stronger for smaller firms with more individual investors and in regions with less financially sophisticated residents. We argue that price formation in equity markets has a significant geographic component linked to the trading patterns of local residents.     

Does Voluntary Disclosure Improve Stock Price Informativeness?

According to theory, comovement in stock prices reflects comovement in the fundamental factors underlying the values of stocks. Recent theory contends that stock price comovement can be driven by information markets or the informational opacity of the firm. To the extent that voluntary disclosure reduces information acquisition cost and enhances firm transparency, we predict that enhanced voluntary disclosure reduces stock price comovement. We provide evidence in support of this prediction using analyst evaluation of firm disclosure policy. Overall, our evidence supports the effectiveness of firm disclosure policy in increasing the amount of firm‐specific information contained in stock returns.     

Multivariate FIAPARCH modelling of financial markets with dynamic correlations in times of crisis

This paper applies the vector AR-DCC-FIAPARCH model to eight national stock market indices' daily returns from 1988 to 2010, taking into account the structural breaks of each time series linked to the Asian and the recent Global financial crisis. We find significant cross effects, as well as long range volatility dependence, asymmetric volatility response to positive and negative shocks, and the power of returns that best fits the volatility pattern. One of the main findings of the model analysis is the higher dynamic correlations of the stock markets after a crisis event, which means increased contagion effects between the markets. The fact that during the crisis the conditional correlations remain on a high level indicates a continuous herding behaviour during these periods of increased market volatility. Finally, during the recent Global financial crisis the correlations remain on a much higher level than during the Asian financial crisis.     

THE COMOVEMENTS OF STOCK,BOND, AND CDS ILLIQUIDITY BEFORE,DURING, AND AFTER THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS

Using both marketwide and firm-level illiquidity measures of the stock, bond, and credit default swap markets, we find that comovements of illiquidity across markets increase significantly during the recent global financial crisis. Moreover, the degree of comovement remains significantly higher in the postcrisis period and regulatory period than in the precrisis period. Specifically, the distribution of firm-level comovements is notably different before and after the crisis (e.g., a much larger portion of firms with positive pairwise correlations between illiquidity measures in the postcrisis period than in the precrisis period). Our results provide suggestive evidence of the financial crisis effects and the subsequent postcrisis regulations on the comovements of illiquidity across markets.     

Do bears and bulls swim across oceans? Market information transmission between greater China and the rest of the world

This study investigates returns and volatilities transmission across Greater China’s four emerging stock markets and three developed international markets, Tokyo, London, and New York. Using daily open and close price data from 1994 to 2001, we provide empirical evidence that the overnight returns on all the Greater China stock indices can be estimated by using information from at least one of the three developed markets’ daytime returns. The contemporaneous return spillovers are in general unidirectional from more advanced major international markets to the Chinese markets. However, split-sample analysis suggests that there is also evidence of bi-directional return spillovers after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. We also find that there are no one-period lagged return spillover effects from the three advanced markets to the Chinese markets, except for Taiwan. Finally, Mainland China’s two stock markets are not affected by contemporaneous nor delayed “bad news”.     

Communication and Comovement: Evidence from Online Stock Forums

We study investor communication and stock comovement using a novel data set from an active online stock forum in China. We find substantial comovement among the returns of a stock and its “related stocks,” which are frequently discussed in the subforum dedicated to the given stock. Comovement is greater when the discussion of related stocks is more intensive. Further, the effect of communication on comovement is stronger for stocks associated with higher information uncertainty. Codiscussed stocks are more actively traded and experience more correlated trading. A trading strategy that exploits communication‐driven comovement generates abnormal returns. Our findings highlight the impact of investor communication on asset comovement.