The Effects of Liberalisation on Market and Currency Risk in the European Union

This paper investigates the effects of liberalisation on the pricing of market and currency risk for a number of financial markets in the European Union (EU). An International Asset Pricing Model with a multivariate GARCH‐in‐Mean specification and time‐varying prices of risk is used for the four markets with the largest capitalisation in the EU. Only one price of market risk exists and international investors are rewarded for their exposure to currency risk. The evidence shows that all prices of risk are time‐varying and have been decreasing during the process of liberalisation. There is also evidence that markets react to period of uncertainty in the process toward the completion of liberalisation. In addition, the operation of the European Monetary System has generated lower covariances. As a consequence, total risk premia have declined in the last decade.     

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.     

The pricing of exchange rate risk and stock market segmentation: The Canadian case

Empirical evidence by Eun and Resnick (1988), among others, has demonstrated the significance of exchange rate risk in the international asset allocation and they have noted that the risk is nondiversifiable. Yet, exchange rate risk was found by Jorion (1991) to be a risk factor that is not priced in the U.S. stock market. This study reexamines such counterintuitive results using data from the Toronto Stock Exchange. The evidence here weakly supports the pricing of the exchange rate risk. Further, the sample period in this study coincides with Jorion's to ensure that both studies examine the pricing of the exchange rate risk in the same global economic environment. The significant pricing of exchange rate risk in Canada and the insignificant pricing in the U.S. imply the possibility of market segmentation.     

Production-based measures of risk for asset pricing

A stochastic discount factor for asset returns is recovered from equilibrium marginal rates of transformation inferred from producers’ first-order conditions. The marginal rate of transformation implies a novel macro-factor asset pricing model that does a reasonable job explaining the cross-sectional variation in average stock returns with plausible parameter values. Using a flexible representation of firms’ production technology, producers’ ability to transform output across states of nature is estimated to be high, in contrast with what is typically assumed in standard aggregate representations of firms’ production technology.     

Evaluating international consumption risk sharing gains: An asset return view

International consumption risk sharing studies often generate counterfactual implications for asset return behavior with potentially misleading results. We address this contradiction using data moments of consumption and asset returns to fit a canonical international consumption risk sharing framework. Introducing persistent consumption risk, we find that its correlation across countries is more important for risk sharing than that of transitory risk. To identify these risk components, we jointly exploit the comovement of equity returns and consumption. This identification implies high correlations in persistent consumption risk, suggesting a strong degree of existing risk sharing despite low consumption correlations in the data.     

Risk measure pricing and hedging in incomplete markets

This article attempts to extend the complete market option pricing theory to incomplete markets. Instead of eliminating the risk by a perfect hedging portfolio, partial hedging will be adopted and some residual risk at expiration will be tolerated. The risk measure (or risk indifference) prices charged for buying or selling an option are associated to the capital required for dynamic hedging so that the risk exposure will not increase. The associated optimal hedging portfolio is decided by minimizing a convex measure of risk. I will give the definition of risk-efficient options and confirm that options evaluated by risk measure pricing rules are indeed risk-efficient. Relationships to utility indifference pricing and pricing by valuation and stress measures will be discussed. Examples using the shortfall risk measure and average VaR will be shown. The work of Mingxin Xu is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant SES-0518869. I would like to thank Steven Shreve for insightful comments, especially his suggestions to extend the pricing idea from using shortfall risk measure to coherent ones, and to study its relationship to utility based derivative pricing. The comments from the associate editor and the anonymous referee have reshaped the paper into its current version. The paper has benefited from discussions with Freddy Delbaen, Jan Večeř, David Heath, Dmitry Kramkov, Peter Carr, and Joel Avrin.     

International tests of a five-factor asset pricing model

Average stock returns for North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific increase with the book-to-market ratio (B/M) and profitability and are negatively related to investment. For Japan, the relation between average returns and B/M is strong, but average returns show little relation to profitability or investment. A five-factor model that adds profitability and investment factors to the three-factor model of Fama and French (1993) largely absorbs the patterns in average returns. As in Fama and French, 2015, Fama and French, 2016, the model's prime problem is failure to capture fully the low average returns of small stocks whose returns behave like those of low profitability firms that invest aggressively.     

Financial integration and the price of world covariance risk: Large- vs. small-cap stocks

We investigate whether recent country-level evidence of global pricing is particular to large-cap stocks. Specifically, we examine cross-country return correlations and conduct asset pricing tests on three size-based stock portfolios for nine developed countries over the period from 1980 to 2004. We find that large-cap stocks realize significant comovements across countries, whereas small-cap stocks realize smaller average correlations (relative to both large-cap stocks and small-cap stocks across countries). More important, asset pricing tests suggest that while large-cap stocks are priced globally, global pricing is rejected for most small-cap stocks. Finally, the evidence indicates that financial integration deepened in recent years primarily for large-cap stocks. Overall, the results suggest that the global pricing pertains chiefly to large-cap stocks.     

The world ex ante risk premium: an empirical investigation

A number of recent papers have focused on testing the linearity restrictions implied by international asset pricing models. The tests, however, have not addressed an additional restriction implied by the models; namely, that the risk premium on the world portfolio is positive. This study provides a direct assessment of this restriction. The evidence indicates that the ex ante world market risk premium can be negative. The results are robust to market proxies that are hedged and unhedged with respect to currency risk. Subperiod analysis indicates that the rejection of the positive risk premium restriction is driven by the first half of the sample period.     

Interest Rate Risk of European Financial Corporations

We investigate the interest rate exposure of large European financial corporations' equity returns. For the period from January 1982 to March 1995 we estimate multifactor index models to examine the sensitivity of equity returns to market index returns and domestic as well as global interest rate movements. In addition, we specify an APT‐model to test whether an exposure to interest rate movements is rewarded in the cross‐section of expected returns. In the four European markets both domestic and global interest rate shifts constitute driving forces of stock returns beyond the influence of the domestic market indices. However, the exposure to interest rate movements does not seem to be rewarded in the same fashion among the markets.     

Liquidity risk and arbitrage pricing theory

Classical theories of financial markets assume an infinitely liquid market and that all traders act as price takers. This theory is a good approximation for highly liquid stocks, although even there it does not apply well for large traders or for modelling transaction costs. We extend the classical approach by formulating a new model that takes into account illiquidities. Our approach hypothesizes a stochastic supply curve for a securitys price as a function of trade size. This leads to a new definition of a self-financing trading strategy, additional restrictions on hedging strategies, and some interesting mathematical issues.Received: 1 November 2003, Mathematics Subject Classification: 60G44, 60H05, 90A09JEL Classification: G11, G12, G13Umut Çetin: This work was performed while Dr. Çetin was at the Center for Applied Mathematics, Cornell UniversityPhilip Protter: Supported in part by NSF grant DMS-0202958 and NSA grant MDA-904-03-1-0092 The authors wish to thank M. Warachka and Kiseop Lee for helpful comments, as well as the anonymous referee and Associate Editor for numerous helpful suggestions, which have made this a much improved paper.     

A behavioural model of investor sentiment in limit order markets

By incorporating behavioural sentiment in a model of a limit order market, we show that behavioural sentiment not only helps to replicate most of the stylized facts in limit order markets simultaneously, but it also plays a unique role in explaining those stylized facts that cannot be explained by noise trading, such as fat tails in the return distribution, long memory in the trading volume, an increasing and non-linear relationship between trade imbalance and mid-price returns, as well as the diagonal effect, or event clustering, in order submission types. The results show that behavioural sentiment is an important driving force behind many of the well-documented stylized facts in limit order markets.     

Downside risk of international stock returns

This paper investigates the downside risk exposure of international stock returns in 14 major industrialized economies around the world. For the period 1975–2010, we find that differences in returns on value and growth portfolios can be rationalized by assets’ reagibilities to market’s downside shocks. International value stocks are particularly sensitive to market’s permanent downside shocks, while international growth stocks are particularly sensitive to market’s temporary downside shocks. In line with recent evidence for the US, risk associated with unfavorable changes in market’s cash-flow innovations carries a premium which is pervasive and statistically significant.     

Modeling Conditional Skewness in Stock Returns

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new GARCH-in-Mean (GARCH-M) model allowing for conditional skewness. The model is based on the so-called z distribution capable of modeling skewness and kurtosis of the size typically encountered in stock return series. The need to allow for skewness can also be readily tested. The model is consistent with the volatility feedback effect in that conditional skewness is dependent on conditional variance. Compared to previously presented GARCH models allowing for conditional skewness, the model is analytically tractable, parsimonious and facilitates straightforward interpretation.Our empirical results indicate the presence of conditional skewness in the monthly postwar US stock returns. Small positive news is also found to have a smaller impact on conditional variance than no news at all. Moreover, the symmetric GARCH-M model not allowing for conditional skewness is found to systematically overpredict conditional variance and average excess returns.     

Foreign exchange risk and the cross-section of stock returns

We examine the relation between the cross-section of US stock returns and foreign exchange rates during the period from 1973 to 2002. We find that stocks most sensitive to foreign exchange risk (in absolute value) have lower returns than others. This implies a non-linear, negative premium for foreign exchange risk. Sensitivity to foreign exchange generates a cross-sectional spread in stock returns unexplained by existing asset-pricing models. Consequently, we form a zero-investment factor related to foreign exchange-sensitivity and show that it can reduce mean pricing errors for exchange-sensitive portfolios. One possible explanation for our findings includes Johnson's [2004. Forecast dispersion and the cross-section of expected returns. Journal of Finance, 59, 1957–1978] option-theoretic model in which expected returns are decreasing in idiosyncratic cashflow volatility.     

Transmission of movements in stock markets

The paper analyses the relationships between three stock markets: New York, Tokyo and Frankfurt. The non-simultaneity of the trading times in these three markets determines the results of cross-correlations and regressions with daily returns. To cope with this and other problems, an empirical model is proposed and estimated. This model allows the separation of the ability to influence and the sensitivity of the different markets, and New York is found to be the most influential market, with Tokyo the most sensitive.     

Market integration and currency risk in Asian emerging markets

Most of the Asian emerging stock markets started to liberalize their markets in 1990s. In this paper, I examine whether those markets have become integrated with world stock market since the 1990s by estimating and testing a dynamic version of international CAPM (ICAPM) in the absence of purchasing power parity (PPP) using a parsimonious multivariate GARCH-in-Mean (MGARCH-M) approach. I also investigate to what extent the liberalization process has affected the cost of capital and price volatility for each market. The empirical results show that Philippines was segmented from the world stock market before its liberalization date, but no evidence of market segmentation is found for the other five markets (India, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Thailand) before their liberalization dates. However, all six markets have become integrated after opening up their markets to foreign investors. In addition, the estimated risk premia are lower after the liberalization, indicating that the liberalization process has reduced the cost of capital for their domestic firms. Moreover, there is no evidence of extra market volatility introduced by capital market liberalization, and on the contrary, the markets have become more stabilized through the liberalization process.