Comparing linear and nonlinear forecasts for stock returns

We compare the out-of-sample performance of monthly returns forecasts for two indices, namely the Dow Jones (DJ) and the Financial Times (FT) indices. A linear and a nonlinear artificial neural network (ANN) model are used to generate the out-of-sample competing forecasts for monthly returns. Stationary transformations of dividends and trading volume are considered as fundamental explanatory variables in the linear model and the input variables in the ANN model. The comparison of out-of-sample forecasts is done on the basis of forecast accuracy, using the Diebold and Mariano test [J. Bus. Econ. Stat. 13 (1995) 253.], and forecast encompassing, using the Clements and Hendry approach [J. Forecast. 5 (1998) 559.]. The results suggest that the out-of-sample ANN forecasts are significantly more accurate than linear forecasts of both indices. Furthermore, the ANN forecasts can explain the forecast errors of the linear model for both indices, while the linear model cannot explain the forecast errors of the ANN in either of the two indices. Overall, the results indicate that the inclusion of nonlinear terms in the relation between stock returns and fundamentals is important in out-of-sample forecasting. This conclusion is consistent with the view that the relation between stock returns and fundamentals is nonlinear.     

Modeling different kinds of spatial dependence in stock returns

The paper modifies previously suggested GMM approaches to spatial autoregression in stock returns. Our model incorporates global dependencies, dependencies inside industrial branches and local dependencies. As can be seen from Euro Stoxx 50 returns, this combination of spatial modeling and finance allows for superior risk forecasts in portfolio management.     

Conditional volatility and correlations of weekly returns and the VaR analysis of 2008 stock market crash

Modelling of conditional volatilities and correlations across asset returns is an integral part of portfolio decision making and risk management. Over the past three decades there has been a trend towards increased asset return correlations across markets, a trend which has been accentuated during the recent financial crisis. We shall examine the nature of asset return correlations using weekly returns on futures markets and investigate the extent to which multivariate volatility models proposed in the literature can be used to formally characterize and quantify market risk. In particular, we ask how adequate these models are for modelling market risk at times of financial crisis. In doing so we consider a multivariate t version of the Gaussian dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) model proposed by Engle (2002), and show that the t-DCC model passes the usual diagnostic tests based on probability integral transforms, but fails the value at risk (VaR) based diagnostics when applied to the post 2007 period that includes the recent financial crisis.     

交叉上市对本地股票收益的影响：俄罗斯ADRs的案例

导言 处于过渡时期的新兴资本市场经常受到低流动性，管制不足，机构脆弱，对小股东权益保护不够等问题的损害。这些问题都是发生在俄罗斯股票市场上的有关问题。本文的目的在于检验这样一个假设：交叉上市对来自先前是封闭的市场的公司有着有益的影响。理论表明交叉上市的公司（这些公司来自有投资壁垒的被分割的市场）的股票价格可望上升，但因这些壁垒的消失而出现的另外的内在风险溢价会使这些股票预期收益下降。（Harcs and Ramanlal，1998）。操纵收益的因素还包括投资者认同感的流动性。Doidge，Karolyi and Stulz（2003）认为一种备择的解释与所有权集中有关。与未在美国上市的公司的控投股东相比，在美国上市的公司的控股股东不能从对公司的控制中获取同样多的个人利益，而且交叉上市公司还可能利用增长机会。因此，交叉上市公司会成为其利益同小股东的利益更为一致的公司。进人海外市场或许是对交叉上市公司小股东进行更好的保护。     

Foreign determinants of local institutions: Spatial dependence and openness

There are both empirical and theoretical arguments for the thesis that foreign factors have an impact on domestic institutional quality. Yet the literature is divided over whether exposure (openness to the world economy) or the kind of institutions in surrounding countries (relative location) determines the quality of local institutions. This paper confronts these hypotheses empirically, addressing the issues of strong cross-sectional dependence and the endogeneity of openness. In a 107-country cross-section, both trade openness and relative location have a positive impact on local institutions. The institutional quality of neighbouring countries is not found to be statistically significant when considering openness to foreign direct investments instead of trade, but the statistical performance of that model is poorer.     

Profit persistence and stock returns

This article attempts to assemble further empirical evidence on the relationship between the product and the financial market. Drawing back on work in industrial organization, we analyse the relationship between profit persistence and factor-adjusted stock returns looking at about 2000 listed US firms over the last 34 years. While the relationship between (current, lagged and unexpected) profits/earnings and returns has been extensively analysed before, to our knowledge this is the first study to look at the relationship between stock returns and profit persistence. We interpret profit persistence as a result of market competition and innovation of the firm. It is shown that firm-specific long-run profit persistence after correction for other additional economic fundamentals of the firm has a positive impact on four-factor adjusted returns and a negative impact on their volatility.     

Grexit news and stock returns

During the first 8 months of 2015, there was an ongoing debate about whether or not Greece should remain in the euro area. Using an event study approach, we quantify the effects of Grexit-related statements made by six important euro area politicians (Merkel, Schaeuble, Tsipras, Varoufakis, Juncker, and Schulz) on intraday stock returns in Germany, Greece, and the euro area during the period of 1 January 2015–19 August 2015. We show that positive statements indicating that a Grexit is less likely lead to higher returns, and negative statements to lower returns. The overall impact of negative statements is more pronounced. The cumulative absolute effects on stock returns are sizeable as the statements contribute to a variation of up to 58 percentage points in the ATHEX. These large effects are of particular relevance as our study only captures an 8-month snapshot of the Greek Government debt crisis.     

Impact of state-dependent oil price on US stock returns using local projections

In this paper, we investigate the impact of oil prices on both aggregate and industry US real stock returns over the period 1973–2017. The empirical analysis contributes to the related literature introducing a state-dependent oil price (high and low) and the local projections approach. Our main finding is that, depending on the nature of the shock and industry, the negative effects of oil price shocks become exacerbated -and the positive effects get moderated- if oil prices are already high.     

Sentiment dynamics and stock returns: the case of the German stock market

We use weekly survey data on short-term and medium-term sentiment of German investors in order to study the causal relationship between investors’ mood and subsequent stock price changes. In contrast to extant literature for other countries, a trivariate vector autoregression for short-run sentiment, medium-run sentiment, and stock index returns allows to reject exogeneity of returns. Depending on the chosen VAR specification, returns are found to either follow a feedback process caused by medium-run sentiment, or returns form a simultaneous systems together with the two sentiment measures. An out-of-sample forecasting experiment on the base of estimated subset VAR models shows significant exploitable linear structure. However, trading experiments do not yield convincing evidence of significant economic gains from the VAR forecasts, and it appears that predictability of returns from sentiment decreases during the recent market gyrations.     

Bond rating changes and stock returns: evidence from the Spanish stock market

This study analyzes the effect of corporate bond rating changes by international agencies on stock prices. This topic has not yet been analyzed for the Spanish stock market, despite the growing importance of ratings in Spanish financial markets. On an efficient market, rating changes will only have an effect if they contain some new information. The results from an event study indicate that rating actions cause significant negative abnormal returns in issuing firms around the date of the announcement. This evidence indicates an informational effect related to downgrades, which supports the hypothesis that credit rating agencies provide information that may reduce the asymmetric information problem between firms and investors. In the case of upgrades, our results are compatible with a redistribution of wealth between bondholders and owners or with the reputation hypothesis.      

Increasing returns: historiographic issues and path dependence

Writing a history of the analysis of increasing returns in economics is qualitatively different from the usual cumulative history of knowledge, as exemplified by the history of perfectly competitive analysis. The history of increasing returns is much less continuous. The reason for this irregular history lies, in my view, in the analytic nature of the subject. I concentrate on the recent history of the implications of increasing returns for path dependence in economic development. Foreshadowed by Veblen (1915) the topic was made explicit by Paul David in some theoretical analyses of topics in economic history (1971, 1975) and then by subsequent papers by David and by Brian Arthur in the 1980s. Contemporaneously, Farrell, Katz, Saloner, and Shapiro came to parallel conclusions in a very specific industrial organization context marked by network externalities.     

Productivity growth and stock returns: firm- and aggregate-level analyses

A firm’s stock return is affected not only by its own productivity growth rate, but also by other firms’ productivity growth rates. We show that this spillover effect is significant and time-varying, and underlies a fallacy of composition observed in late 20th century U.S. data: stock returns and productivity growth are correlated positively in firm-level data but negatively in aggregate data. This seeming fallacy of composition reflects Schumpeterian creative destruction: a few technology winners’ stocks rise with their rising productivity while many technology losers’ stocks fall with their declining productivity. Thus, most individual firms’ stock returns correlate negatively with aggregate productivity growth. This implies that technological innovation need not be a blessing for all firms and as a result, for investors holding the market. Our findings also provide a firm-level technology innovation-based explanation of prior findings that the market return correlates negatively with aggregate earnings.     

Oil prices and UK industry-level stock returns

In this article, we study whether the behaviour of oil prices can be used as a reliable predictor for the disaggregated industry-level stock market indices. We find strong evidence for the relevance of changes in oil price as a predictor for the returns of UK industry portfolios, while this relevance is heterogeneous across industries. In an out-of-sample framework, we find that both the contemporaneous and lagged oil price changes do predict UK industry stock market returns. The predictive power is more transient for the latter case, and mostly appearing after allowing for time variation in the relative performance. In addition, we find some evidence of asymmetry in the oil–stock price relationships.     

Oil prices and stock returns: nonlinear links across sectors

We present evidence of an asymmetric relationship between oil prices and stock returns. The two regime multivariate Markov switching vector autoregressive (MSVAR) model allow us to capture the state shifts in the relationship between regional stock markets and sectors. Results suggest that oil price risk is significantly priced in the sample used. The impact is asymmetric with respect to market phases, and regimes have been associated with world economic, social and political events. Our study also suggests asymmetric responses of sector stock returns to oil price changes and different transmission impacts depending on the sector analyzed. There is a high causality from oil to sectors like Industrials and Oil & Gas. Companies inside the Utilities sector were more able to hedge against oil price increases between 2007 and 2012. Historical crisis events between 1992–1998 and 2003–2007 do not seem to have affected the relationship between oil and sector stock returns, given the higher probability of remaining smoother. For all sectors there seems to be a turn back to stability from 2012 onwards. Finally, investors gain more through portfolio diversification benefits built across, rather than within sectors.     

Inflation news and stock returns: market direction and flow-through ability

Previous studies of the short-run response of daily stock prices to announcements of macroeconomic news could be biased when responses in different scenarios cancel each other out. In our analysis of inflation news in the Spanish stock market, we consider market direction arguments and implement our study based on the sector of activity to control for the ‘flow-through’ ability of the firms in each industry. In general, our results are quite consistent with the ‘market direction’ and the ‘flow-through’ hypotheses. Unanticipated inflation news implies abnormal returns depending on the direction of the news, the state of the economy and the flow-through ability of the sector. The impact of positive surprises affects the abnormal returns of many more sectors than does the impact of negative surprises, especially in the low states of economy. These significant effects are mainly observed in industries that are characterised by low flow-through ability.     

Conditional heteroscedasticity with leverage effect in stock returns: Evidence from the Chinese stock market

In recent years the Chinese stock market has experienced an astonishing growth and unprecedented development, but is also viewed as one of the most volatile markets, which has been called by many observers a “casino”. This study intends to examine the presence of heteroskedasticity and the leverage effect in the Chinese stock markets, and to capture the dynamics of conditional correlation between returns of China's stock markets and those of the U.S. in a bivariate VC-MGARCH framework. The results show that the leverage effect is significant in these markets during the sample period in 2000–2013, and the conditional correlation between mainland China's and the U.S. stock markets is quite low and highly volatile. The Chinese stock markets are found to be highly regimes persistent. These findings have important implication for investors seeking opportunity of portfolio diversification.     

Testing for nonlinearities in German bank stock returns

In this paper nonlinear structures in German bank stock returns are investigated in a stochastic modelling framework. In the first step we show the existence of a nonlinear return structure by means of the McLeod-Li and the BDS test. In the second step we focus our analysis on the kinds of nonlinearity actually present in bank stock data. On the basis of the Hsieh test it is possible to discriminate with high power additive from multiplicative dependencies to provide guidance for the choice of an adequate class of stochastic models. It is shown that the multiplicative dependencies predominating the bank stock returns can be captured by low order GARCH models.     

Investor sentiment,trading behavior and stock returns

This article examines how investor sentiment and trading behaviour affect asset returns. By analysing the unique stock trading dataset of the Korean market, we find that high investor sentiment induces higher stock market returns. We also find that institutional (individual) trades are positively (negatively) associated with stock returns, suggesting the information superiority (inferiority) of institutional (individual) investors. Investor sentiment generally plays a more important role in explaining stock market returns than investor trading behaviour.     

Variability of realized stock returns and trading volume

Using monthly data for 2005–2014 time period, this article documents the relationship between lagged stock returns and trading volume. We show that the dispersion of stock returns in a market portfolio positively affects future trading volume. We also show that extreme negative returns lead to high future trading volume while extreme positive returns have little effect on future trading. Dividing our sample into several sub-samples based on the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) divisions leads to similar results for most of the SIC divisions.     

The importance of fear: investor sentiment and stock market returns

The presence of investor sentiment pushes asset prices away from the equilibrium level justified by underlying fundamentals. While sentiment is not directly observable, identifying appropriate proxies and, quantifying the impact of sentiment on asset prices is an important topic. Asset prices that do not appropriately reflect fundamental values may result in inefficient allocation of capital – impacting portfolio allocation decisions and the cost of capital. Utilizing a number of sentiment proxies, over the period 1990–2015, we demonstrate a strong relationship between investor sentiment and stock returns that is consistent with theoretical explanations of sentiment. We determine that implied volatility index (VIX) is the preferred measure of sentiment in terms of improving model fit and adding explanatory power. Causality tests suggest that investor fear (VIX) drives returns across firm-size and value, and also across industry. We also illustrate that firms that are more subjective to value, or face limits to arbitrage, such as small-cap stocks, or those in the business equipment (technology) or telecoms industry, are most responsive to changes investor sentiment. Finally, we demonstrate that sentiment has a greater influence on market returns during recession, when sentiment is at its lowest ebb, and this is particularly true for those stocks most susceptible to speculative demand.