ASYMMETRIC COVARIANCE,VOLATILITY, AND THE EFFECT OF NEWS

We propose that covariance (rather than beta) asymmetry provides a superior framework for examining issues related to changing risk premiums. Accordingly, we investigate whether the conditional covariance between stock and market returns is asymmetric in response to good and bad news. Our model of conditional covariance accommodates both the sign and magnitude of return innovations, and we find significant covariance asymmetry that can explain, at least in part, the volatility feedback of stock returns. Our findings are consistent across firm size, firm leverage, and temporal and cross‐sectional aggregations.     

Industry‐Specific Human Capital,Idiosyncratic Risk,and the Cross‐Section of Expected Stock Returns

Human capital is one of the largest assets in the economy and in theory may play an important role for asset pricing. Human capital is heterogeneous across investors. One source of heterogeneity is industry affiliation. I show that the cross‐section of expected stock returns is primarily affected by industry‐level rather than aggregate labor income risk. Furthermore, when human capital is excluded from the asset pricing model, the resulting idiosyncratic risk may appear to be priced. I find that the premium for idiosyncratic risk documented by several empirical studies depends on the covariance between stock and human capital returns.     

Optimal portfolio choice for investors with industry-specific labor income risks

We study optimal investment decisions for long-horizon investors with industry-specific labor income risks. We find that in addition to the volatility of labor income growth, the correlation between labor income and risky asset returns is another important factor that affects the optimal portfolio decisions and may provide a plausible explanation for the mixed empirical evidence of the relationship between labor income risk and portfolio holdings. Depending on its relative covariance with stock and bond returns, labor income may help resolve or deepen the asset allocation puzzle.     

Time varying consumption covariance and dynamics of the equity premium: Evidence from the G7 countries

We examine implications of time-varying correlation and covariance between excess equity returns and consumption growth for the equity premium of the G7 countries. We find that the correlation and covariance are higher when there is a negative shock to labor income and a positive shock to returns. The combined effect is that the correlation and covariance are countercyclical and so is the equity premium. We test asset pricing models with time-varying consumption risk and find that the conditional price of risk is generally positive. These results survive several robustness checks. Our results highlight the importance of labor income for understanding dynamics of the equity premium.     

Firm size and volatility analysis in the Spanish stock market

Using Spanish stock market data, this paper examines volatility spillovers between large and small firms and their impact on expected returns. By using a conditional capital asset pricing model (CAPM) with an asymmetric multivariate GARCH-M covariance structure, it is shown that there exist bidirectional volatility spillovers between both types of companies, especially after bad news. After estimating the model, a positive and significant price of risk is obtained. This result is consistent with the volatility feedback effect, one of the most popular explanations of the asymmetric volatility phenomenon, and explains why risk premiums are much more sensitive to negative return shocks coming from the whole market or other related markets.     

INTERTEMPORAL ASSET PRICING WITHOUT CONSUMPTION DATA: EMPIRICAL TESTS

In this paper I conduct tests of an intertemporal asset pricing model using variables that forecast stock returns as the risk factors. I document that the forecasting variables are priced so that expected excess returns are related to their conditional covariances with the forecasting variables. The variability in the covariance risk fails to explain the cross-sectional and time-series variation in expected stock returns. Evidence rejects restrictions on the prices of covariance risk imposed by the model with constant volatilities. I also find that an extended model that allows time-varying conditional volatilities is misspecified.     

Linkages between Indian and US financial markets: impact of global financial crisis and Eurozone debt crisis

This paper examines inter-linkages between Indian and US equity, foreign exchange and money markets using the vector autoregressive-multivariate GARCH-BEKK framework. We investigate the impact of global financial crisis (GFC) and Eurozone debt crisis (EZDC) on the conditional volatility and conditional correlation estimates derived from the multivariate GARCH model for Indian and US financial markets. Our results indicate that there is significant bidirectional causality-in-mean between the Indian stock market returns and the Rs./USD market returns, and significant unidirectional causality-in-mean from the US stock market returns to the Indian stock market returns. As regards volatility spillovers, we find that volatility in the Indian stock market rises in response to domestic as well as US financial market shocks but Indian financial market shocks do not impact the US markets. Further, impact of the recent crisis episodes on the covariance matrix is found to be significant. We find that volatility in the Indian and US financial markets significantly amplified during GFC. The conditional correlations across asset markets were significantly accentuated in the wake of the two crisis episodes. The impact of GFC on cross-market conditional correlations is higher for majority of the asset market pairs in comparison to the EZDC.     

Optimal Portfolio Choice for Long-Horizon Investors with Nontradable Labor Income

This paper examines how risky labor income and retirement affect optimal portfolio choice. With idiosyncratic labor income risk, the optimal allocation to stocks is unambiguously larger for employed investors than for retired investors, consistent with the typical recommendations of investment advisors. Increasing idiosyncratic labor income risk raises investors' willingness to save and reduces their stock portfolio allocation towards the level of retired investors. Positive correlation between labor income and stock returns has a further negative effect and can actually reduce stockholdings below the level of retired investors.     

The risk–return relations in the Singapore stock market

This paper examines the risk–return relations in the Singapore stock market for the period April 1986 to December 1998. Though beta is significantly related to realized returns, the explanatory power is low. Adding other stock characteristics such as skewness and kurtosis provides limited incremental benefits. However, when a conditional framework based on up and down markets is introduced, the explanatory power increases more than 100 times and there is a significant positive (negative) relation between beta and returns when the market excess returns are positive (negative). The same relation applies when unsystematic risk, total risk and kurtosis are added separately to the beta–return relation during up and down markets with increased explanatory power. Our results indicate that other stock characteristics in addition to beta are also important in pricing risky assets and investors do not hold diversified portfolios. Our results are also checked and compared with another conditional model with time-varying betas conditional on a set of economic variables.     

Are conditional illiquidity risks priced in China? A cross-sectional test

In this study, we theoretically derive conditional illiquidity risks from the conditional liquidity-adjusted capital asset pricing model (CLCAPM) that we propose by incorporating funding illiquidity into the LCAPM, and we examine whether they are priced empirically in China's A-share market. We provide new evidence of the positive premiums of conditional illiquidity risks even after controlling for mispricing signals and sentiment. The finding suggests that conditional illiquidity risk could be an alternative channel to explain the cross-section of stock returns. Moreover, investors could obtain higher premiums as compensation for their tolerance of more highly conditional illiquidity risks during high market volatility (low market returns) periods.     

Time Variation in the Covariance between Stock Returns and Consumption Growth

The conditional covariance between aggregate stock returns and aggregate consumption growth varies substantially over time. When stock market wealth is high relative to consumption, both the conditional covariance and correlation are high. This pattern is consistent with the “composition effect,” where agents' consumption growth is more closely tied to stock returns when stock wealth is a larger share of total wealth. This variation can be used to test asset‐pricing models in which the price of consumption risk varies. After accounting for variations in this price, the relation between expected excess stock returns and the conditional covariance is negative.     

International asset returns and exchange rates

We present a consumption-based international asset-pricing model to study global equity premiums, the US riskfree rate and the cross section of international asset returns. The model entails idiosyncratic, country-specific consumption risk, which helps explain the magnitude of global equity premiums. It also features country-specific habit formation, which helps explain the level of the interest rate on the US short-term Treasury bills traded by domestic and international investors. We find that the model explains approximately 40–50% of the cross section of currency and equity premiums as well as expected returns from value and growth portfolios of at least a dozen countries. Changes in real exchange rates are responsible for explaining approximately half of the cross section of international asset returns.     

Yield curves and international equity returns

This paper examines empirical evidence on the international transmission of shocks to financial asset markets. The relationships between yield curves and risk premiums of stocks for eight industrialized countries are examined. Only the stocks of the three largest economies: Germany, Japan, and the USA, show negative risk premiums during periods preceded by the inverted yield curves of their respective government bonds. This is not the case for stocks of the five smaller countries in the sample. However, four of the five smaller countries have negative risk premiums in periods preceded by inverted German or US yield curves. This is consistent with the view that a world risk factor, captured by major country yield curves, affects the pricing of assets in smaller economies. The consumption CAPM is unable to explain the phenomenon of the negative risk premiums. In almost all cases the conditional covariance between consumption growth and the risk premiums is statistically indifferent from zero.     

Corporate governance and market segmentation: evidence from the price difference between Chinese A and H shares

This paper empirically examines whether the price difference between Chinese A shares, which are traded in the domestic market, and their matching H shares, which are traded in the Hong Kong market, can be explained by firms’ corporate governance characteristics. We find that the A- to H-share price premiums are higher for firms in which the controlling shareholders and corporate insiders have greater potential to expropriate wealth from outside investors. This result is robust when we use a variety of corporate governance variables specific to listed Chinese companies to explain the A-share price premiums and when we control for differences between domestic and foreign investors in required returns, degree of speculative trading, liquidity, information, and demand elasticity. Our findings highlight the important role of corporate governance in explaining the price difference in segmented stock markets.     

Testing stock market linkages for Poland and Hungary: A multivariate GARCH approach

This paper examines the linkages between the emerging stock markets in Warsaw and Budapest and the established markets in Frankfurt and the U.S. By using a four-variable asymmetric GARCH-BEKK model, we find evidence of returns and volatility spillovers from the developed to the emerging markets. However, as the estimated time-varying conditional covariances and the variance decompositions indicate limited interactions among the markets, the emerging markets are weakly linked to the developed markets. The implication is that foreign investors may benefit from the reduction of risk by adding the stocks in the emerging markets to their investment portfolio.     

Why do closed-end country funds trade at enormous premiums during currency crises?

We investigate the response of US traded country fund premiums to currency crises in related foreign (local) markets. Our analysis includes 25 currency crises over the past decade involving 18 funds investing in 12 emerging markets, and 7 funds investing in 6 developed markets. We find that fund premiums and the volatility of the premiums increase dramatically in response to a currency crisis, both for emerging and developed markets funds, and that these effects dissipate slowly over time. Our results show that country fund shares and net asset values (NAVs) have differential risk exposures and that these differences are exacerbated during a crisis. While the NAV returns show sensitivity to changes in the local market index, share returns are sensitive to changes in both local and world market indices. Therefore, in response to a currency crisis, when local stock markets decrease in value, fund NAVs react more strongly than their share prices which have a strong global component. We also show that the high premiums observed during currency crises are not due to the reluctance of investors to trade and realize losses.     

Ownership Restrictions and Stock Prices: Evidence from Chinese Markets

In this paper, I test a one-period capital asset pricing model (CAPM) under share ownership restrictions to explain differences in prices and expected excess returns between the classes of shares that can be bought and traded by domestic and foreign investors, respectively, in the Chinese stock markets. I find that cross-sectional variability in the spread between the expected domestic and foreign share excess returns is related to differences in individual shares' market betas. The empirical results are by and large consistent with the CAPM. After the betas are controlled for, idiosyncratic variance and firm size have no effect.     

Asset pricing in China's domestic stock markets: Is there a logic?

China's stock markets have grown rapidly since their inception and have become an increasingly important emerging market for international investors. However, there are few systematic studies on how asset prices are formed in Chinese domestic equity markets; popular financial media even depict the market as irrational. In this paper, we study the asset pricing mechanism in the nascent Chinese stock markets, with the objective of identifying variables that capture the cross-sectional variation in average stock returns. We focus on the effects of various market imperfections in China. We find that while the market risk (beta) is not priced, there is a significantly negative relationship between firm-specific risk and expected returns. Chinese investors are willing to pay a significant premium for more liquid stocks or for dividend-paying stocks. Furthermore, investors value local A-shares more if there are offshore counterparts (e.g., B- and H-shares) for foreigners, implying that a Chinese firm with a foreign shareholder base has a lower cost of capital, ceteris paribus. Lastly, as with U.S. and other mature markets, firm size and the book-to-market ratio are systematically related to stock returns. Given market imperfections, stocks are priced rather rationally in China, despite the widespread perception to the contrary.     

The pricing of sentiment risk in European stock markets

This paper studies whether sentiment is rewarded with a significant risk premium in the European stock markets. We examine several sentiment proxies and identify the Economic Sentiment Indicator from the EU Commission as the most relevant sentiment proxy for our sample. The analysis is performed for the contemporaneous excess returns of EA-11 stock markets in the period from February 1999 to September 2015. We apply a conditional multi-beta pricing model in order to track the variation of the sentiment risk premium over time. The results demonstrate a positive significant relationship between sentiment and contemporaneous excess returns which is consistent with previous studies. The calculated sentiment risk premium is significant as well but negative implying that an investment in EA-11 countries over the examined time period – that is bearing sentiment risk – would have been unattractive to the investors on average.     

Local risk factors in emerging markets: Are they separately priced?

We provide new evidence on the pricing of local risk factors in emerging stock markets. We investigate whether there is a significant local currency premium together with a domestic market risk premium in equity returns within a partial integration asset pricing model. Given previous evidence on currency risk, we conduct empirical tests in a conditional setting with time-varying prices of risk. Our main results support the hypothesis of a significant exchange risk premium related to the local currency risk. Exchange rate and domestic market risks are priced separately for our sample of seven emerging markets. The empirical evidence also suggests that although statistically significant, local currency risk is on average smaller than domestic market risk but it increases substantially during crises periods, when it can be almost as large as market risk. Disentangling these two factors is thus important in tests of international asset pricing for emerging markets.