International Shocks on Australia – The Japanese Effect

Although Australia has an equivalently large trading relationship with Japan and the US, current macro models often incorporate only US variables in the external sector of Australia. This paper explores the consequences of including both US and Japanese effects in the international sector of a SVAR model of Australia. The results indicate the significance of the Japanese effects. Excluding Japan results in an overstatement of the impact of US based shocks on the Australian economy. When Japan is included, US based shocks remain dominant in explaining Australian outcomes, but the responses are moderated compared with a model incorporating only a US based external sector. This has important implications for domestic policy responses to international shocks. Without the influence of Japan, domestic monetary policy will over-react to a US based shock.     

Unobservable shocks as carriers of contagion

We propose an identified structural GARCH model to disentangle the dynamics of financial market crises. We distinguish between the hypersensitivity of a domestic market in crisis to news from foreign non-crisis markets, and the contagion imported to a tranquil domestic market from foreign crises. The model also enables us to connect unobserved structural shocks with their source markets using variance decompositions and to compare the size and dynamics of impulses during crises periods with tranquil period impulses. To illustrate, we apply the method to data from the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis which consists of a complicated set of interacting crises. We find significant hypersensitivity and contagion between these markets but also show that links may strengthen or weaken. Impulse response functions for an equally-weighted equity portfolio show the increasing dominance of Korean and Hong Kong shocks during the crises and covariance responses demonstrate multiple layers of contagion effects.     

Exchange rate risk exposure and the value of European firms

This paper presents a new assessment of the exposure of European firms to exchange rate fluctuations which takes into account the potential common drivers of exchange rates and equity market conditions. Using monthly data for European firms from 1999 to 2011, we assess the impact of unexpected fluctuations in the USD, JPY, GBP and CHF against the Euro, and show that the proportion of firms subject to exchange rate risk is considerably larger when estimation accounts for potential common drivers and firm-specific factors than otherwise. Firm exposure to exchange rate risk is affected by the level of international involvement, industry, firm size and country of origin. European firms with largely domestic operations reveal the greatest vulnerability to unexpected exchange rate movements, suggesting an opportunity to improve risk management for these companies.     

MODELLING LARGE OPEN ECONOMIES WITH INTERNATIONAL LINKAGES: THE USA AND EURO AREA

Empirical modelling of the linkages between the euro area and the USA requires an open economy framework. The methodology proposed in this paper achieves identification of a structural vector error correction model by supplementing restrictions from economic theory with assumptions for the direction of causality in cross‐country contemporaneous relationships. Our baseline model assumes contemporaneous causality runs from the USA to the euro area for both output and inflation, with monetary policy domestically focused. The role of the USA as leading the euro area business cycle is reinforced by our results, but strong bidirectional cross‐country interactions are uncovered for inflation and interest rates. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Unravelling financial market linkages during crises

An empirical model of multiple asset classes across countries is formulated in a latent factor framework. A special feature of the model is that financial market linkages during periods of financial crises, including spillover and contagion effects, are formally specified. The model also captures a range of common factors including global shocks, country and market shocks, and idiosyncratic shocks. The framework is applied to modelling linkages between currency and equity markets during the East Asian financial crisis of 1997–98. The results provide strong evidence that cross‐market links are important. Spillovers have a relatively larger effect on volatility than contagion, but both are statistically significant. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Web Of Shocks: Crises Across Asian Real Estate Markets

The behaviour of real estate markets during the 1997–98 Financial crisis in Asian economies has received little attention despite the extensive research on other asset markets over this time. This paper examines the transmission of shocks across national real estate markets prior to and during the Asian crisis using a multivariate latent factor framework. The results reveal that diversification opportunities prior to the crisis are much reduced during the crisis. A comparison with regional equity markets shows that the transmission of shocks differs across the real estate and equity markets, providing evidence that investment in multiple asset classes provides some protection from large market downturns.     

Cojumping: Evidence from the US Treasury bond and futures markets

The basis between spot and future prices will be affected by jump behavior in each asset price, challenging intraday hedging strategies. Using formal cojumping tests this paper considers the cojumping behavior of spot and futures prices in high frequency US Treasury data. Cojumping occurs most frequently at shorter maturities and higher sampling frequencies. We find that the probability of cojumping is altered by the presence of an anticipated macroeconomic news announcement. The probability of cojumping is particularly affected by news surprises in non-farm payrolls, CPI, GDP and retail sales. However, the two cojumping tests are also more likely to provide contradictory results in the presence of surprises in non-farm payrolls. On these occasions the market does not clearly signal its short term pricing behavior.     

Chinese resource demand and the natural resource supplier

This article provides empirical evidence on the effects of Chinese resource demand on the resource-rich natural resource supplier using the example of Australia. A structural VAR model is used to examine the effects of Chinese resource demand, commodity prices and foreign output on the macroeconomy with a formally specified mining and resource export sector. The key findings of the article are that shocks to Chinese demand and commodity prices result in a sustained increase in commodity prices and mining investment and a positive impact on the resource sector. However, these shocks eventually lead to lower real domestic output with factors of production moving out of the nonresource sectors and into the resource sector, resulting in a fall in nonresource sector output which is not fully offset by the rise in resource sector output. The results also indicate some market power by the natural resource supplier.     

Decomposing exchange rate volatility around the Pacific Rim

Volatility in exchange rates is decomposed into components associated with domestic and international concerns for six Pacific Rim currencies. A latent factor model is used to model bilateral exchange rate changes as the weighted sum of three factors; two factors are uniquely associated with each of the currencies involved in the exchange rates and the other represents world shocks common to all exchange rates. The results show that international factors are more important in determining exchange rate volatility for the smaller nations of Australia, Singapore, and New Zealand, than for the larger nations of Japan and Canada.     

Empirical evidence on jumps in the term structure of the US Treasury Market

The dynamics of US Treasury prices may be interrupted by jumps, and cojumps — where these occur simultaneously across the term structure. This paper finds significant evidence of jumps and cojumps in the US term structure using the Cantor-Fitzgerald tick dataset sampled over the period 2002–2006. While cojumping is frequently found in response to scheduled macroeconomic news announcement, around one-fifth of cojumps occur independently of news. The results are discussed in relation to term structure theories, day of the week effects, asymmetric news effects and trading volume.