A range-based volatility approach to measuring volatility contagion in securitized real estate markets

We use a newly-developed time-varying range-based volatility model to capture the dynamics of securitized real estate volatility. The novelty of the model is the use of a smooth transition copula function to capture the nonlinear comovements between major REIT markets in the presence of structural changes. We then investigate the impact of extreme events on the volatility dependence in a broad set of 13 developed countries over the period from 1990 to 2012. We find that information transmission through the volatility channel can exhibit either bi- or uni-directional causality. In addition, financial contagion following the subprime crisis is found between the U.S. and Australia.     

Regime dependent volatilities and correlation in international securitized real estate markets

This paper studies the role of regime shifts and time-varying volatilities in market integration in a Markov-switching volatility regime environment among the US, European and Asian developed securitized real estate markets. With a two-state volatility model, the study finds the co-dependence, co-movement and synchronization of volatility regime at the high volatility state are stronger between the US and European securitized real estate markets. Although correlations among the markets are higher in a high volatility regime than in a low volatility regime, there is limited evidence of contagious effects during the high volatility periods between some markets. Moreover, the unsecuritized real estate markets are different from their securitized equivalent in the volatility regime characteristics, correlation pattern and level, as well as the extent of correlation change and contagion effect in high volatility state. Thus, the regime-switching results from stock markets may not be automatically extended to the corresponding public real estate markets, and requires rigorous empirical scrutiny.     

Intraday return and volatility relationships between the Ibex 35 spot and futures markets

This paper analyses the intraday lead-lag relationships between returns and volatilities in the Ibex 35 spot and futures markets. Using hourly data, we jointly analyze the interactions between markets, estimating a bivariate error correction model with GARCH perturbations which captures stochastically the presence of an intraday U-shaped curve for both spot and futures market volatility. Our findings show a bidirectional causal relationship between market volatilities, with a positive feedback. This two-way transmission of volatility is consistent with market prices evolving according to a long-run equilibrium relationship, and shocks affecting both markets in the same direction. Our empirical results also support a unidirectional cross interaction from futures to spot market returns. This pattern suggests that the futures market leads the spot market in order to incorporate the arrival of new information.     

Price discovery and volatility spillover in spot and futures markets: evidences from steel-related commodities in China

The price discovery and spillover effect are significant indicators in futures markets. This study examines the price discovery and spillover effects using vector error correction model and generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic for seven types of steel products in Chinese spot and futures markets. The results show that the price discovery exists in all of steel futures market. It is also confirmed that futures prices in all items are mainly leading spot prices via permanent-transitory and information share. In the results of spillover effects, it is found that wire rod, coking coal, coke and silico-manganese have the effects between spot and futures market. In rebar market, there is the spillover effect from spot to futures. This information about futures prices can help the market participants to make decisions when they predict the spot prices.     

Strategic interaction between futures and spot markets

We study an oligopolistic industry where firms are able to sell in a futures market at infinitely many moments prior to the spot market. A kind of Folk-theorem is established: any outcome between perfect competition and Cournot can be sustained in equilibrium. We then find that the Cournot outcome can be sustained by a renegotiation-proof equilibrium. However, this is not true for the competitive outcome. Furthermore, only the monopolistic outcome is renegotiation-proof if firms can buy and sell in the futures market. These results suggest, contrary to existing literature, that the introduction of futures markets may have an anti-competitive effect.     

国内外铜期货市场的价格联系

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the time varying relationships between the Chinese copper futures market and its London counterparts. Rolling correlation and rolling Granger causality test show that with the development of the Shanghai copper futures markets, it has stronger connections with its London counterpart and it plays more and more important role in the price discovery process. There is a long run relationship between the Shanghai futures exchanges (SHFE) and London Metals exchanges (LME) copper futures prices. The influence of LME on SHFE is greater than that of SHFE on LME. The research will shed light on the openness of the Chinese copper commodity markets and on the nature of cross-market information transmission.      

Backtesting expected shortfall: evidence from European securitized real estate

Events such as the European sovereign debt crisis, terrorism and Brexit cause more uncertainty and volatility in capital markets. This encourages us to use both conditional and unconditional forecasts (backtests) for expected shortfall (ES) in 8 indices of listed European real estate securities and Real estate investment trusts (REITs). Using the method proposed by Du and Escanciano, we find that ES is generally superior to Value-at-Risk in describing and capturing risk during extreme events such as the financial crisis. Our results are important to regulators, risk managers and investors.     

Nonlinearities between oil spot and futures markets： Evidence from intraday data

This paper builds on the literature of the relationship between oil spot and futures prices from the NYNEX market, both in their means and in their conditional volatilities, to investigate whether the association is linear or not. The novelty of this work is based on intraday data from both markets. The empirical findings indicate the presence of nonlinearities both in means and conditional volatilities. Moreover, non-linear causality estimations both in means and in volatilities reveal the presence of bi-directional causality, a fact that provides additional support to the hypothesis that both markets are driven by the same information sets.     

Index arbitrage and dynamics between REIT index futures and spot prices

This article contributes to the real estate literature by investigating the pricing relationship between REIT index futures and spot. Based on the cost-of-carry model, we first show that there exist three arbitrage regimes in Australia’s REIT spot-futures price dynamics. Further analysis indicates that the two thresholds, which separate the regimes, are largely consistent with the level dictated by transaction costs. We then estimate a threshold vector error correction model (TVECM). The results show that mean reversion of the mispricing error only takes place in the two outer regimes. Furthermore, we find evidence that REIT spot market is more informationally efficient than the futures market. Given its short history, it will take time for REIT index futures market to mature. Finally, we find that we can enhance hedging performance by accommodating the feature of threshold cointegration displayed by the data. As the futures-spot relationship differs across regimes, we can develop a hedging strategy by adjusting the hedge ratio based on arbitrage regimes. It leads to a greater variance reduction for the hedged portfolio than some conventional methods examined in the existing real estate literature.     

International asset markets and real exchange rate volatility

The real exchange rate is very volatile relative to major macroeconomic aggregates and its correlation with the ratio of domestic over foreign consumption is negative (Backus–Smith puzzle). These two observations constitute a puzzle to standard international macroeconomic theory. This paper develops a two country model with complete asset markets and limited enforcement for international financial contracts that provides a possible explanation of these two puzzles. The model performs better than a standard incomplete markets model with a single non-contingent bond unless very tight borrowing constraints are imposed in the latter. With limited enforcement for both domestic and international financial contracts, the model's asset pricing implications are brought into line with the empirical evidence, albeit at the expense of raising real exchange rate volatility.     

A frequency domain causality investigation between futures and spot prices of Indian commodity markets

This paper examines the direction, strength and extent of causal relationship between futures and spot prices of Indian commodity markets using frequency domain approach of Breitung and Candelon (2006). Frequency domain analysis offers an effective alternative tool by examining the causality in frequency domain, whereas in traditional econometric causality analysis tools focus only on the time domain. Daily futures and spot price series on eight commodities from the Indian commodity exchanges (MCX and NCDEX) were examined for the period 3rd January, 2008 to 31st December, 2012. The results of frequency domain analysis suggest that there is a strong uni-directional relationship from futures to spot in almost all the selected commodities. This indicates that futures market has a powerful price discovery function in all the selected commodities; which in turn indicates the efficiency of Indian commodity futures market.     

Dynamics of volatility transmission between the U.S. and the Chinese agricultural futures markets

The U.S. and China are two of the biggest players in the world agricultural market. The literature documents that volatility in the U.S. agricultural futures market spills over significantly to that of China. This article provides further insights into the spillovers from China to the U.S. as well as the time horizon and dynamics of the bidirectional spillovers through the application of a multivariate extension of the heterogeneous autoregressive model, in relation to four commodities – soybean, wheat, corn and sugar. The results confirm the existence of significant spillovers from the U.S. to China for four commodities, which are primarily generated by the shorter-term volatility components in the U.S., and provide evidence for the increasing pricing power of the Chinese market. The findings are robust against various specifications and have important investment and policy implications.     

Dynamic modelling of real estate investment trusts and stock markets

Taiwan launched the first case of real estate securitization in 2005. The interrelationship between Taiwan Real Estate Investment Trusts (T-REITs) and the aggregate equity markets and segmented industries has drawn the interests of both investors and academia. This paper employs Toda and Yamamoto's (1995) procedure and the generalized impulse response approach to uncover the extent and the magnitude of the relationship between T-REITs and aggregate and segmented stock prices. We collected daily data of the first two issued T-REITs, Fubon No.1 and Cathay No. 1, from March 2005 to March 2010 and October 2005 to March 2010, respectively, to examine their causal relationships with aggregate stock markets, the financial sector, and the construction sector. The empirical results indicate that all variables have break points, reflecting shocks from the Subprime Mortgage Crisis or deregulation of the Qualified Domestic Institutional Investors (QDII) for Mainland Chinese to invest in Taiwan. We also discover that an individual T-REIT may lead or lag behind stock price indices due to its capitalization scale or business type. The transitory initial impacts of innovations in T-REITs on stock price indices are observed herein.     

Positive feedback trading and long-term volatility links: evidence from real estate markets of USA,Be/Lux and Switzerland

This article investigates the positive feedback trading strategies in the real estate markets of USA, Belgium/Luxembourg (Be/Lux) and Switzerland, linking these strategies with long-term volatility. The results are in favour of a positive feedback trading strategy which negatively influences investors' risk-return position on real estate markets.     

Impacts of derivative markets on spot market volatility and their persistence

In this article, we investigate the impacts of futures and options markets on the volatility of the underlying market. Unlike earlier studies, the focus is on their persistence over time. Tests on the Hang Seng index yield several interesting results that often contrast with previous findings. Empirical results suggest that the quality of new information generated by derivative trading determines the impacts on the spot market volatility. The futures market provides new, material information reducing spot market volatility. The Options market, on the other hand, generates noisy information and distorts price, which is followed by an increase in volatility and a decrease in its sensitivity to price change. While the impact of futures persists, that of options mostly disappears as the market matures. Our conjecture is that the futures market is mainly driven by informed, experienced participants, while the options market attracts new, inexperienced investors.     

The integration of direct real estate and stock markets in Asia

Currently, there exists relatively little research investigating the long-term association between stock and direct real estate markets. Using appropriate transaction-based property indices, this study focuses on the relationship between stock and direct real estate markets in nine Asian countries from the period 1980 to 2012 through both linear and nonlinear cointegration techniques. We find empirical evidence of linear cointegration of stock and property markets in Taiwan, fractional cointegration in Singapore and Hong Kong and no evidence of cointegration in China, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and South Korea. It is concluded that segmentation of property markets from stock markets does not appear to be linked to the differences in the maturity of national financial markets and that the differing degrees of integration across Asia may instead be reflective of a range of factors impacting upon the underlying economic structures in each country.     

Jumps and volatility dynamics in agricultural commodity spot prices

The spot commodities market exhibits both extreme volatility and price spikes, which lead to heavy-tailed distributions of price change and autocorrelation. This article uses various Lévy jump models to capture these features in a panel of agricultural commodities observed between January 1990 and February 2014. The results show that Levy jump models outperform the continuous Gaussian model. Our results prove that assuming a constant volatility or even a deterministic volatility and drift structure of agricultural commodity spot prices is not realistic and is less efficient than the stochastic assumption. The findings demonstrate an interesting correlation between volatility and jumps for a given commodity i, but no relationship between the volatility of commodity i and the probability of jumps of commodity j.     

Non-linear causality between the stock and real estate markets of Western European countries: Evidence from rank tests

Using the non-parametric rank tests proposed by Breitung (2001), we set out in this study to determine whether any non-linear long-run equilibrium relationship exists between the stock and real estate markets of Western European countries. We go on to adopt the threshold error-correction model (TECM) to determine whether a similar relationship is discernible possibly non-linear functions of the log-price of these two markets. The findings clearly point to the existence of long-run unidirectional and bidirectional causality between the real estate market and the stock market in regions both above and below the threshold level. Finally, we find the existence of both wealth and credit price effects in the real estate markets and stock markets of Western European countries, which thereby offer financial institutions and individual investors in their construction of long-term investment portfolios within these two asset markets.     

Trading platform,market volatility and pricing efficiency in the floor-traded and E-mini index futures markets

This study examines the pricing efficiency of E-mini and floor-traded index futures under electronic versus open-outcry trading platforms. By using OLS and quantile regressions to control for changes in market characteristics, we find that pricing errors are smaller in the E-mini markets than the floor-traded markets, thereby confirming that electronic trading has special attractions for arbitrageurs and informed traders. However, during periods of higher volatility, the advantages of speedier execution, anonymity and information efficiency may be offset by arbitrage risks; as a result, larger pricing errors are observed in the E-mini markets. We provide new evidence confirming the important roles in pricing efficiency played by both traditional open-outcry systems and electronic trading systems.