Possible effects of EMU on German long-term interest rates

It is often argued that long-term German bonds suffer from an inflation premium caused by EMU. A decomposition of long rates shows that factors besides inflationary expectations and conversion risk affect the long bond yield. The following paper therefore discusses a more complete set of channels through which currency union affects interest rates and argues that they do not all point in the direction of rising rates. Data generating processes for long-term bonds are specified and tested for structural breaks. Absence of a structural break is interpreted as evidence against a premium caused by EMU. The authors would like to thank the participants of the German American Academic Council (GAAC) workshop “The Political Economy of European Integration” in Bremen, August 1996, and especially Paul Bergin for their helpful comments. Financial support from the GAAC is gratefully acknowledged.     

新冠肺炎疫情后各国主权债务风险及其前景

新冠肺炎疫情及其经济冲击促使许多国家财政赤字率和政府债务率大幅升高,其影响程度超过了2008年国际金融危机。笔者既不赞成现代货币理论(MMT)的看法,也不认同悲观派的看法。从影响各国主权债务风险的几大因素看,一些新兴市场经济体尤其需要关注利率的3种风险溢价:通胀风险溢价、货币贬值风险溢价和信誉(违约风险)溢价。展望未来,发达经济体和新兴市场经济体将花费数年时间进行财政收支和政府债务调整,以渐进方式推进政府部门的去杠杆。     

Yield curve risks in currency carry forwards

We provide empirical evidence that cross-country yield curve gaps (parallel gap, twist gap, and butterfly gap) are predictive to the expected currency carry premiums using currency forward contracts. We find that the expected currency gains are more notable as these yield curve risk factors at time t indicate short-term bond prices of investment currencies to go up (positive parallel movement, negative twist, and positive butterfly). We also find carry gains are more sensitively affected by cross-country monetary shocks than currency-country inflation pressures and business cycles. Our findings support that cross-country yield curve risk premiums still exist even after considering transaction costs.     

Something Free or Something Off? A Comparative Study of the Purchase Effects of Premiums and Price Cuts

As an alternative to promotional price cuts, retailers and manufacturers often rely on non-price promotion techniques, such as premium promotions, where consumers receive a free gift with the purchase of a product. We compare the effectiveness of premiums to that of price cuts, and study moderators of this comparative premium effectiveness. We use data from a large online shopping simulation study with more than 2,000 participants to model consumers’ purchase decisions in response to premiums and price cuts. Results indicate that the impact of premiums on purchase behavior is systematically lower than that of equivalent price cuts. However, a premium’s smaller sales impact may be offset by a cost advantage. This is especially true for private label brands where the premium’s purchase effects do not differ too much from those of a price cut. We calculate how large the cost advantage has to be for a premium to be more profitable than a price cut, and show that premiums entail risks as well as opportunities, for both manufacturers and retailers.     

The Greek Debt Crisis: Likely Causes,Mechanics and Outcomes

We use insights from the literature on currency crises to offer an analytical treatment of the crisis in the market for Greek government bonds. We argue that the crisis itself and its escalating nature are very likely to be the result of: (i) steady deterioration of Greek macroeconomic fundamentals over 2001–09 to levels inconsistent with long‐term EMU participation; and (ii) a double shift in markets’ expectations, from a regime of credible commitment to future EMU participation under an implicit EMU/German guarantee of Greek fiscal liabilities, to a regime of non‐credible EMU commitment without fiscal guarantees, respectively occurring in November 2009 and February/March 2010. We argue that the risk of contagion to other periphery EMU countries is significant; and that without extensive structural reforms, the sustainability of the EMU is in question.     

The Relation between Physical and Risk‐neutral Cumulants

Variance swaps are natural instruments for investors taking directional bets on volatility and are often used for portfolio protection. The empirical observation on skewness research suggests that derivative professionals may also desire to hedge beyond volatility risk and there exists the need to hedge higher‐moment market risks, such as skewness and kurtosis risks. We study two derivative contracts – skewness swap and kurtosis swap – which trade the forward realized third and fourth cumulants. Using S&P 500 index options data from 1996 to 2005, we document the returns of these swap contracts, i.e., skewness risk premium and kurtosis risk premium. We find that the both skewness and kurtosis risk premiums are significantly negative.     

Pricing of global and local sources of risk in Russian stock market

This paper investigates whether global, local and currency risks are priced in the Russian stock market using conditional international asset pricing models. The estimation is conducted using a modified version of the multivariate GARCH-M framework of De Santis and Gérard [De Santis, G., Gérard, B., 1998, How big is the premium for currency risk? Journal of Financial Economics 49, 375–412]. We take US investors' point of view and use a sample period from 1995 to 2006. The results show that the world market risk together with the currency and local market risks are priced on the Russian stock market.     

China's segmented stock market: An application of the conditional international capital asset pricing model

China's segmented stock market provides an opportunity to study conditional international asset pricing from multiple viewpoints—domestic and foreign. We use the multivariate GARCH-M framework of De Santis and Gérard [De Santis, G., and Gérard, B., 1998. How big is the premium for currency risk? Journal of Financial Economics 49, pp. 375–412.], but add conditional local specific risk and find global, local, and currency risk to be priced and time-varying in Chinese markets, suggesting mild segmentation for developing country markets. The time-varying price of currency risk indicates that the strict currency restrictions in China do not sufficiently reduce currency risk to stabilize the price of currency risk. We also find that the price of local risk in the Chinese A stock market is non-time-varying relative to the developed market, but time-varying relative to the emerging market. This finding implies that the Chinese A stock market is more comparable to a developed market than an emerging market. However, results on Chinese B shares show the opposite relationship: from a foreign investor's perspective, Chinese B shares are better categorized as being emerging than developed. This is further supported by an Engle–Granger cointegration test.     

Risk premiums and predictive ability of BAX futures

This study provides an in‐depth analysis of risk premiums in the Canadian Bankers' Acceptances futures (BAX) market. The predictive regressions for excess and holding‐period returns on BAX futures lend empirical support to the presence of time‐varying risk premiums especially at longer horizons. Despite the evidence of time variation in the risk premium, however, the unbiasedness of the basis as a predictor of spot returns in forecast efficiency regressions cannot be rejected. The out‐of‐sample forecasts of spot returns demonstrate the excellent predictive ability of models that exploit the restrictions implied by the unbiasedness hypothesis. Overall, our findings support the presence of a slowly moving risk premium and entail important practical implications for measuring monetary policy expectations and portfolio allocation. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark     

Jump variance risk: Evidence from option valuation and stock returns

We study jump variance risk by jointly examining both stock and option markets. We develop a GARCH option pricing model with jump variance dynamics and a nonmonotonic pricing kernel featuring jump variance risk premium. The model yields a closed-form option pricing formula and improves in fitting index options from 1996 to 2015. The model-implied jump variance risk premium has predictive power for future market returns. In the cross-section, heterogeneity in exposures to jump variance risk leads to a 6% difference in risk-adjusted returns annually.     

Speculative pressure

The paper investigates the information content of speculative pressure across futures classes. Long-short portfolios of futures contracts sorted by speculative pressure capture a significant premium in commodity, currency, and equity markets but not in fixed income markets. Exposure to commodity, currency, and equity index futures’ speculative pressure is priced in the broad cross-section after controlling for momentum, carry, global liquidity, and volatility risks. The findings are confirmed by robustness tests using alternative speculative pressure signals, portfolio construction techniques, and subperiods interalia. We argue that there is an efficient hedgers-speculators risk transfer in commodity, currency, and equity index futures markets.     

The long or short of it: Determinants of foreign currency exposure in external balance sheets

A major focus of the recent literature on the determination of optimal portfolios in open-economy macroeconomic models has been on the role of currency movements in determining portfolio returns that may hedge various macroeconomic shocks. However, there is little empirical evidence on the foreign currency exposures that are embedded in international balance sheets. Using a new database, we provide stylized facts concerning the cross-country and time-series variation in aggregate foreign currency exposure and its various subcomponents. In panel estimation, we find that richer, more open economies take longer foreign-currency positions. In addition, we find that an increase in the propensity for a currency to depreciate during bad times is associated with a longer position in foreign currencies, providing a hedge against domestic output fluctuations. We view these new stylized facts as informative in their own right and also potentially useful to the burgeoning theoretical literature on the macroeconomics of international portfolios.     

Valuation of housing index derivatives

This study analyzes the valuation of housing index derivatives traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). Specifically, to circumvent the nontradability of housing indices, we propose and implement an equilibrium valuation framework. Assuming a mean-reverting aggregate dividend process and a utility function characterized by constant relative risk aversion, we show that the value of a housing index derivative depends only on parameters characterizing the underlying housing index, the endogenized interest rate and their correlation. We also analytically and numerically examine risk premiums for the CME futures and options and obtain three important findings. First, risk premiums are significant for all contracts with maturities longer than one year. Second, the expected growth rate of the underlying index is the key determinant for risk premiums. Third, risk premiums can be positive or negative, depending on whether the expected growth rate of the underlying index is higher or lower than the risk-free yield-to-maturity. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 30:660–688, 2010     

A Jump/Diffusion Consumption-Based Capital Asset Pricing Model and the Equity Premium Puzzle

This paper derives the equilibrium excess returns on risky assets in an exchange economy where the underlying exogenous uncertainty is a combination of a pure multidimensional jump process and a diffusion model. We derive closed-form solutions for the interest rate and the risk premiums on risky assets for a traditional class of separable utility indices. Our analysis demonstrates that when the underlying jumps of the aggregate consumption process are not negligible, then the traditional form of the consumption-based capital asset princing model need not hold and the asset risk premiums may be larger than predicted by the traditional CCAPM in continuous time, based on pure Itô diffusion processes. Our analysis suggests an explanation for the large estimates of the risk premiums reported in empirical tests of the single-beta CCAPM.     

Targetsalden: Viel mehr als nur ein Haftungsrisiko

The Target2 balances of the ESCB have become a focus of scholarly discussion. Triggered by a loss of international competitiveness and subsequent current account deficits in the EMU’s periphery states, they now constitute a default risk for the core states. But there is more to it: balance of payment disequilibria in a currency union are supposed to trigger money supply flows from surplus countries to deficit countries. Since they form the basis for readjustments in relative prices and competitiveness, they must not be neutralised by monetary policy. The ECB’s Target2 balances create precisely this neutralisation and thus undermine the self-adjusting mechanism of the EMU.     

The diversifiability of exchange risk

Discussions of the determinants of the spot or forward exchange rate frequently argue that holders of foreign assets that are subject to exchange risk must be compensated by a risk premium. This paper shows that much of exchange risk is diversifiable. If there are no outside assets and the value of the currency is uncorrelated with the value of other forms of wealth, then all exchange risk is diversifiable; there is no risk premium. More generally, there is a risk premium, but it need not be related to foreign indebtedness or to the variability of the exchange rate as commonly presumed.     

Examining Determinants of Foreign Wage Premiums in China

We estimate foreign wage premiums for every 3‐digit manufacturing industry in China and discover a wide range of premiums both for ‘foreign’ ownership and for overseas Chinese ownership. Foreign ownership generates larger and more prevalent wage premiums than overseas Chinese ownership, but both produce premiums that respond similarly in estimates of determinants. Using the number of computers per worker to measure firms' technology levels, we find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that foreign firms pay higher wages to reduce the risk of worker turnover and the accompanying technology leakage in 76 to 78 per cent of industries. However, this determinant explains only 5 to 6 per cent of the foreign wage premium. We find the most intensive support for the ‘fair wage’ hypothesis that foreign firms pay higher wages because they are more profitable than domestic firms and workers in more profitable firms expect to be paid more, otherwise they will shirk. This hypothesis explains an average of 8 to 9 per cent of the foreign wage premiums, with support found in 72 to 75 per cent of the industries. When we consider the best combination of explanatory variables to include in each industry's wage regression, we find evidence consistent with our combined hypotheses in most industries, but we still find large residual foreign wage premiums.     

Estimation Uncertainty and the Equity Premium*

This paper studies a dynamic equilibrium model of asset prices in a partially observable exchange economy. It shows that the precautionary savings motive in response to estimation uncertainty can dominate the risk aversion effect, resulting in the reduction of the equity premium over short horizons. This exacerbates the equity premium puzzle. Over longer holding horizons, however, estimation uncertainty does induce higher risk premiums on equity over risk‐free coupon bonds of matching maturities, as long‐term bond yields are lowered due to the precautionary savings effect.     

Hedging costs and joint determinants of premiums and spreads in structured financial products

Evaluating more than 317,000 discount certificates in the German secondary market, we find that premiums and spreads are endogenous and negatively related but depend on different key determinants. The fundamental determinants of the premiums are mainly profit-related, that is, dividends of the underlying, issuers’ credit risk, lifecycle effect, and competition, whereas hedging costs are less important. However, initial hedging costs (IHC) are priced into the premium in the case of large inventory changes. The spread is mostly determined by hedging costs and risk components, such as IHCs, rebalancing costs, volatility, scalper risk, and overnight gap risk—but also by dividends.     

One‐day forward premiums and the impact of virtual bidding on the New York wholesale electricity market using hourly data

This study examines one‐day forward premiums at the hourly level on the New York independent systems operator wholesale electricity market for the period 2001–2005. Examining two representative zones, the authors show that premiums vary by hour of day, day of week, and month. We report differences in the level and volatility of the premium across zones. We measure the impact of opening the market to outsiders through the introduction of virtual bidding. Results indicate that virtual bidding is associated with lower premiums in off‐peak or near‐off‐peak hours; it is associated with higher premiums during peak hours. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 27: 1107–1125, 2007