European equity market integration and joint relationship of conditional volatility and correlations

We analyse the integration patterns of seven leading European stock markets from 1990 to 2013 using daily data and mismatched monthly macroeconomic data. To study the mismatch of data frequencies we use the DCC-MIDAS (Dynamic Conditional Correlation – Mixed Data Sampling) technique developed by Colacito, Engle and Ghysels (Journal of Econometrics, 2011). We benchmark European integration patterns against the German stock market. The reported integration patterns show a clear divide between large and (relatively) small equity markets' short run and long run return correlations: the small markets display higher short run European convergences than the large markets and vice versa. The across-the-board divergence from Greek risk, during the crisis period, is the most unambiguous conclusion of our study. During this period, cross-country joint relationships of conditional variances and return correlations – a ‘convergence of risks’ resulting in global/regional contagious spillovers – are typically positive. Only exceptions are the German stock market's joint relationships.     

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.     

Stochastic risk premiums,stochastic skewness in currency options,and stochastic discount factors in international economies

We develop models of stochastic discount factors in international economies that produce stochastic risk premiums and stochastic skewness in currency options. We estimate the models using time-series returns and option prices on three currency pairs that form a triangular relation. Estimation shows that the average risk premium in Japan is larger than that in the US or the UK, the global risk premium is more persistent and volatile than the country-specific risk premiums, and investors respond differently to different shocks. We also identify high-frequency jumps in each economy but find that only downside jumps are priced. Finally, our analysis shows that the risk premiums are economically compatible with movements in stock and bond market fundamentals.     

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.     

Daily pricing of emerging market sovereign CDS before and during the global financial crisis

In this paper, we study the determinants of daily spreads for emerging market sovereign credit default swaps (CDSs) over the period April 2002–December 2011. Using GARCH models, we find, first, that daily CDS spreads for emerging market sovereigns are more related to global and regional risk premia than to country-specific risk factors. This result is particularly evident during the second subsample (August 2007–December 2011), where neither macroeconomic variables nor country ratings significantly explain CDS spread changes. Second, measures of US bond, equity, and CDX High Yield returns, as well as emerging market credit returns, are the most dominant drivers of CDS spread changes. Finally, our analysis suggests that CDS spreads are more strongly influenced by international spillover effects during periods of market stress than during normal times.     

Evolution of international stock and bond market integration: Influence of the European Monetary Union

This paper examines the dynamic relationship between daily stock and government bond returns of selected countries over the past decade to infer the state and progress of inter-financial market integration. We proceed to empirically investigate the influence of the European Monetary Union (EMU) on time variations in inter-stock–bond market integration/segmentation dynamics using a two-step procedure: First, we document the downward trends in time-varying conditional correlations between stock and bond market returns in European countries, Japan and the US. Second, we investigate the causality and determinants of this interdependent relationship, in particular, whether the various macroeconomic convergence criteria associated with the EMU have played a significant role. We find that real economic integration and the reduction in currency risk have generally had the desired effect on financial integration but monetary policy integration may have created uncertain investor sentiments on the economic future of the EMU, thereby stimulating a flight to quality phenomenon.     

Time-varying stock returns and labor income risks in the US and UK

I propose and estimate conditional asset pricing models where the risk premiums of the markets are related to the conditional covariance of the markets with labor income growth within and across countries and the volatility of the markets are related to the shocks and interactions of stock returns and labor income growth. I document that the risk premiums for the US and UK stock markets are more related to the conditional covariance of returns with the labor income growth within countries than across countries. I also find significant interactions of volatilities between stock returns and labor income within countries but not across countries. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that prices of domestic stocks are determined to a greater extent by stochastic discount factors of domestic investors than foreign investors and vice versa.     

International capital asset pricing: Evidence from options

We study the risk dynamics and pricing in international economies through a joint analysis of the time-series returns and option prices on three equity indexes underlying three economies: the S&P 500 Index of the United States, the FTSE 100 Index of the United Kingdom, and the Nikkei-225 Stock Average of Japan. We develop an international capital asset pricing model, under which the return on each equity index is decomposed into two orthogonal jump-diffusion components: a global component and a country-specific component. We apply separate stochastic time changes to the two components so that stochastic volatility can come from both global and country-specific risks. For each economy, we assign separate market prices for the two return risk components and the two volatility risk components. Under this specification, we obtain tractable option pricing solutions. Model estimation reveals several interesting insights. First, global and country-specific return and volatility risks show different dynamics. Global return movements contain a larger discontinuous component, and global return volatility is more persistent than the country-specific counterparts. Second, investors charge positive prices for global return risk and negative prices for volatility risk, suggesting that investors are willing to pay positive premiums to hedge against downside global return movements and upside volatility movements. Third, the three economies contain different risk profiles and also price risks differently. Japan contains the largest idiosyncratic risk component and smallest global risk component. Investors in the Japanese market also price more heavily against future volatility increases than against future market downfalls.     

Common and country-specific components in national stock prices

Previous studies on cointegration among national stock markets show conflicting results. This paper designs a general state space model to investigate the importance of a common world-wide component and the existence of country-specific components in national stock market indices. For G7 countries, there exist country-specific permanent and transitory components. Based on a variance decomposition analysis, Germany, Italy, and Japan's country-specific permanent shocks account for about half of their total permanent shocks. Most of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom's transitory shocks are country-specific. G7 countries do not seem to cointegrate around one common stochastic trend, and potential long-run international diversification benefits still exist.     

Regional integration of the East Asian stock markets: An empirical assessment

The aim of this paper is to study the dynamics of regional financial integration in East Asia over the 1990:01–2012:08 period. To this end, we use the international capital asset pricing model (ICAPM) to assess the evolution of financial market integration through time and evaluate their risk premia. We also construct an Asian currency basket in order to obtain a reference currency in this area. Our empirical analysis is based on the multivariate GARCH-DCC approach with time-varying correlations. Our results show that the East Asian stock markets were partially segmented (except for Japan) within their region until approximately 2008. However, the last years are characterized by an upward trend in the regional integration of stock markets. Our findings also show that the risk premium related to regional stock markets is significant for all countries.     

Time-varying risk The case of the American computer industry

A bivariate GARCH-in-mean model for individual stock returns and the market portfolio is designed to model volatility and to test the conditional Capital Asset Pricing Model versus the conditional Residual Risk Model. We find that a univariate model of volatility for individual stock returns is misspecified. A joint modelling of the market return and the individual stock return shows that a major force driving the conditional variances of individual stocks is the history contained in the market return variance. We find that a conditional residual risk model, where the variance of the individual stock return is used to explain expected returns, is preferred to a conditional CAPM. We propose a partial ordering of securities according to their market risk using first and second order dominance criteria.     

Spillover of fear: Evidence from the stock markets of five developed countries

This study investigates the spillover effect in five leading stock markets (i.e., the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and France). It estimates the spillover indices of these countries and finds that information transmission between these stock markets increases considerably after 1998. Germany and the United States are the main stock markets conveying information to other international markets. Germany primarily influences the French stock market, and the United States significantly influences many other stock markets. Results show that the US stock market shows three periods during which its net spillover effect exceeds zero: the period prior to 1997, the dot-com bubble from 2000 to 2002, and the subprime mortgage crisis and Lehman Brothers bankruptcy from 2007 to 2008. The fear index correlates significantly with the spillover of the US stock market into other markets. The spillover effect of the US stock market demonstrates asymmetry and the likelihood to spread positive fundamental information and non-fundamental information (e.g., fear).     

Exchange risk and universal returns: A test of international arbitrage pricing theory

According to the international arbitrage pricing theory (IAPT) posited by Solnik (1983), currency movements affect assets' factor loadings and associated risk premiums. Based on a novel universal return decomposition, we propose an empirical model to test this proposition and perform tests using U.S. stock returns in the period 1975–2008. Our results confirm that currency movements significantly affect the market betas of a large proportion of stocks. Further cross-sectional tests indicate that currency movements affecting the market factor are significantly priced in stock returns. Based on these and other findings, we conclude that Solnik's IAPT is supported. An important implication of our findings is that exchange rate risk can broadly affect stock returns through both factor loading and residual factor channels.     

European financial market dependence: An industry analysis

This paper uses a copula model to investigate the degree and determinants of European market dependence across 10 industries in 12 Euro zone and 8 non-Euro zone stock markets during the period 1992–2011. Most of the industries in Euro countries show a dependence increase with the Euro-area after the introduction of the Euro. The effects are strongest in countries with larger market capitalization and in the Financials, Industrials, Consumer Goods, Utilities, Technology and Telecommunications industries. Overall, the export intensity, interest rate sensitivity and competitiveness of an industry and the financial development and economic openness of a country are the most important determinants of changes in equity market dependence. The period around the Lehman collapse also shows higher equity market dependence between European countries, while the lower dependence increase during the period of the recent European sovereign debt crisis suggests that country-specific factors may matter more than before.     

Comoment risk and stock returns

We estimate investable comoment equity risk premiums for the US markets. The stock's contribution to the asymmetry and the fat tails of the market portfolio's payoff are priced into a coskewness premium and a cokurtosis premium. We construct zero-investment strategies that are long and short in coskewness and cokurtosis equity risks; we infer from the spread the returns attached to a unit exposure to US equity coskewness and cokurtosis. The coskewness and cokurtosis premiums present positive monthly average returns of 0.27% and 0.14% from January 1959 to December 2011. Comoment risks appear to be significantly priced within the US stock market and display significant explanatory power regarding the US size and book-to-market effects. The premiums do not subsume, but rather complement the empirical capital asset pricing model. Our analysis relies on data collected from CRSP (Chicago Research Center for Security Prices) over December 1955 to December 2011. To our knowledge, the paper is the first to propose investable higher-moment risk factors over such an extensive time period.     

International asset pricing models and currency risk: Evidence from Finland 1970–2004

In this paper we investigate whether global, local and currency risks are priced in the Finnish stock market using conditional international asset pricing models. We take the view of a US investor. The estimation is conducted using a modified version of the multivariate GARCH framework of [De Santis, G., Gérard, B., 1998. How big is the premium for currency risk? Journal of Financial Economics 49, 375–412]. For a sample period from 1970 to 2004, we find the world risk to be time-varying. While local risk is not priced for the USA, the local component is significant and time-varying for Finland. Currency risk is priced in the Finnish market, but is not time-varying using the De Santis and Gérard specification. This suggests that the linear specification for the currency risk may not be adequate for non-free floating currencies.     

The evolution of risk premium as a measure for intra-regional equity market integration

We estimate and test the conditional version of an international capital asset pricing model using a parsimonious multivariate GARCH process and the multivariate nonlinear least squares method. Since our approaches are fully parametric, we can recover any quantity that is a function of the first two conditional moments. Our findings strongly support using a model that includes both regional market and foreign exchange risk. However, both sources of risk are detected only when their prices are allowed to change over time. Our empirical results show clear evidence of market integration to varying degrees, explained by the US term premium and the level of market openness. Though it reaches high values during turmoil periods and exhibits an upward trend toward the end of the estimation period, the Indonesian stock market remains partially integrated into the ASEAN-5 regional market. These results suggest that diversification into Indonesian market assets continues to produce substantial profits and that asset pricing rules should reflect a state of partial integration.     

The information content of issuer rating changes: Evidence for the G7 stock markets

We study the firm-specific and intra-industry stock market effects of issuer credit rating changes and negative watch list placements for the G7 countries. We show that both the information content and the information transfer effects of these rating signals differ considerably in terms of magnitude and in terms of direction across the G7 countries. In particular, conditional on the type of rating change we find significant contagion effects for the US, the UK and Italy, but not for the other G7 countries. Moreover, we show that in some countries abnormal industry portfolio returns associated with rating downgrades and negative watch list signals tend to be more negative for more concentrated and more heavily levered industries. Overall, our results shed new light on country-specific differences in the relevance of credit ratings as risk indicators from an equity investor's perspective, and they may also be of interest to both risk managers and financial market supervisors striving to develop more accurate credit risk models and to better assess the systemic relevance of credit ratings.     

Accounting and capital market measures of risk: Evidence from Asian banks during 1998–2003

This study examines the relation between accounting and capital market risk measures for a sample of 46 listed Asian banks during the period 1998–2003. By applying a panel data analysis that includes a control for country-specific factors, the results show that the standard deviation of the return-on-assets and loan-loss-reserves-to-gross-loans are significantly related to total risk. Also gross-loans-to-total-assets and loan-loss-reserves-to-gross-loans are significantly related to non-systematic risk. These results indicate that in these Asian countries, firm-specific risk is more important than systematic risk and the results are robust even though significant differences exist across Asian countries in banking activities, capital adequacy requirements, and deposit insurance protection.     

Do time-varying risk premiums explain labor market performance?

Within the standard search and matching model, time-to-build implies that high aggregate risk premiums should forecast low employment growth in the short run but high employment growth in the long run. If there is also time-to-plan, high risk premiums should forecast low net hiring rates in the short run but high net hiring rates in the long run. Our evidence indicates two-quarter time-to-build in the aggregate payroll data, no time-to-plan in the aggregate hiring data, but two-quarter time-to-plan in the job creation data for manufacturing firms. High payroll growth and high net job creation rate in manufacturing also forecast low stock market excess returns at business cycle frequencies.