Foreign debt supply in an imperfect international capital market: Theory and evidence

We investigate the determinants of foreign borrowing costs in a stochastically growing economy. We find that these increase with the debt-wealth ratio, depending also upon the volatilities of domestic and foreign origin, and the length of debt contract. In addition, the sensitivity of the short-term debt supply to the debt-wealth ratio exceeds that of long-term debt, and the effects of volatility on the borrowing premium, growth of wealth, and its volatility, depend on the relative size of a direct effect and a secondary portfolio-adjustment effect of the initial shock, as well as the length of the debt contract. Panel regressions suggest that the empirical evidence generally support the theoretical predictions.     

Short-Term External Debt and Foreign Exchange Rate Volatility in Emerging Economies: Evidence from the Korea Market

Abstract:

We empirically analyze the main determinants of foreign exchange rate (FX) volatility in emerging market economies using the data of Korea corporations and financial institutions. We find that short-term external debt is more important than trading volume of foreign investors in explaining FX volatility. Our results suggest that short-term debt-controlling measures, such as a tax levy on short-term borrowing, can be more effective in moderating FX volatility than can the measures affecting the trading volume, such as a Tobin tax.     

Does the law of one price hold in international financial markets? Evidence from tick data

This paper investigates the validity of the law of one price (LOP) in international financial markets by examining the frequency, size and duration of inter-market price differentials for borrowing and lending services (‘one-way arbitrage’). Using a unique data set for three major capital and foreign exchange markets that covers a period of more than seven months at tick frequency, we find that the LOP holds on average, but numerous economically significant violations of the LOP arise. The duration of these violations is high enough to make it worthwhile searching for one-way arbitrage opportunities in order to minimize borrowing costs and/or maximize earnings on given funds. We also document that such opportunities decline with the pace of the market and increase with market volatility.     

Domestic or global imbalances? Rising income risk and the fall in the US current account

When default leads to exclusion from financial markets, the implied loss of consumption smoothing opportunities is more costly when income volatility is high. A rise in income risk thus makes default less attractive, allowing creditors to relax borrowing limits. I show how, in an open economy, this endogenous financial deepening may reduce aggregate foreign assets in response to a rise in individual income risk, against the precautionary savings intuition. Conditions for this depend on whether default constrains complete or uncontingent contracts. The post-1980 rise in US household income risk strongly reduces foreign assets when domestic markets are complete or world interest rates low.     

Spot and forward volatility in foreign exchange

This paper investigates the empirical relation between spot and forward implied volatility in foreign exchange. We formulate and test the forward volatility unbiasedness hypothesis, which may be viewed as the volatility analogue to the extensively researched hypothesis of unbiasedness in forward exchange rates. Using a new dataset of spot implied volatility quoted on over-the-counter currency options, we compute the forward implied volatility that corresponds to the delivery price of a forward contract on future spot implied volatility. This contract is known as a forward volatility agreement. We find strong evidence that forward implied volatility is a systematically biased predictor that overestimates movements in future spot implied volatility. This bias in forward volatility generates high economic value to an investor exploiting predictability in the returns to volatility speculation and indicates the presence of predictable volatility term premiums in foreign exchange.     

Public information releases, private information arrival and volatility in the foreign exchange market

This paper estimates the impact of market activity and news on the volatility of returns in the exchange market for Japanese Yen and US dollars. We examine the effects of news on volatility before, during and after news arrival, using three categories of news. Market activity is proxied by quote arrival, separated into a predictable seasonal component and an unexpected component. Results indicate that both components of market activity, as well as news releases, affect volatility levels. We conclude that both private information and news effects are important determinants of exchange rate volatility. Our finding that unexpected quote arrival positively impacts foreign exchange rate volatility is consistent with the interpretation that unexpected quote arrival serves as a measure of informed trading. Corroborating this interpretation is regression analysis, which indicates that spreads increase in the surprise component of the quote arrival rate, but not in the expected component. The estimated impact of a unit increase in unexpected quote arrival and the range of values observed for this variable imply an important volatility conditioning role for informed trading.     

Revenue Volatility and Fiscal Risks: An Application of Value-at-Risk Techniques to Hong Kong's Fiscal Policy

Revenue volatility poses challenges for fiscal policy makers. It can create risks to service provision, require borrowing, or entail sudden tax changes. This paper investigates the use of value-at-risk techniques to measure the fiscal risks caused by volatility as well as the sensitivity of measured risks to policies that may limit volatility. The revenue of Hong Kong's Special Administrative Region (SAR) is among the most volatile in Asia, and thus is a natural case for applying these techniques. Reflecting its revenue volatility, Hong Kong's SAR has traditionally held high fiscal savings (reserves), and the value of the self-insurance these savings provide is also discussed.     

Worldwide reach of short selling regulations

We characterize legality and incidence of short selling in a worldwide, multimarket framework. Home country short selling restrictions curtail home market stock borrowing by 45% and reduce short selling of the country's American Depository Receipts (ADRs) by 68% due to regulatory reach. Also, the 2008 US ban on short selling of financial firms reduced borrowing in foreign locations. These findings are robust to controls for option availability, enforcement, returns, firm size, trading volume, dividends, ADR level, volatility, days-to-cover, and industry sector. Further, we show that investor conduct resulting from adherence to professional standards is a more powerful mechanism of regulatory reach than intergovernment cooperation.     

Do Banks Affect the Level and Composition of Industrial Volatility?

In theory, better access to bank credit can reduce or increase output volatility depending on whether firms are more financially constrained during contractions or expansions. This paper finds that the volatility of industrial output is lower in countries with more bank credit. Most of the reduction in volatility is idiosyncratic, which follows from the ability of banks to pool and diversify shocks. Systematic volatility is reduced less strongly. Volatility dampening is achieved via countercyclical borrowing: At the firm level, short‐term borrowing is less (or more negatively) correlated with sales and inventories in countries with high levels of bank credit.     

A portfolio based theory of excessive foreign borrowing and capital control in a small open economy

We develop a simple model of portfolio choice in a mean variance framework to address the issue of international borrowing and financial crisis. Instead of adverse selection or moral hazard of lending and borrowing activities we emphasise the role of exchange rate movement. Syndicated borrowing by way of internalising the aggregate effect tends to restrict excessive borrowing from external source. However, this may undermine the welfare consequences by further aggravating the extent of risk undertaken in the process. There is a built-in externality in the model that leads to over exposure to foreign currency debt and readily calls for intervention by the government. Government intervention by way of a tax on foreign borrowing may help restrain the amount of external debt and implement the first best.     

The ability of banks to lend to informationally opaque small businesses

We test hypotheses about the effects of bank size, foreign ownership, and distress on lending to informationally opaque small firms using a rich new data set on Argentinean banks, firms, and loans. We also test hypotheses about borrowing from a single bank versus multiple banks. Our results suggest that large and foreign-owned institutions may have difficulty extending relationship loans to opaque small firms. Bank distress appears to have no greater effect on small borrowers than on large borrowers, although even small firms may react to bank distress by borrowing from multiple banks, raising borrowing costs and destroying some relationship benefits.     

Exploring the relationship between investor sentiment and price volatility

By performing Grey relation analysis, this study elucidates the relationship between investor sentiment and price volatility in the Taiwanese stock market. A sequential relationship is identified between investor sentiment and price volatility, and ranked according to order of importance. Analytical results show that short sales volumes may be an individual leading indicator useful in observing the effects of sentiment on price volatility, followed by open interest put/call ratios and trading volumes, and buy/sell orders. Institutional investors are related, to a lesser extent, to price volatility and sentiment. Qualified foreign institutional investors, or more rational investors, are the least influenced by price volatility, followed by securities investment trust companies and dealers. TAIEX options exert the strongest influence on sentiment during the study period, making them a valuable reference for gauging price volatility.     

What expenditure does Anglosphere foreign borrowing fund?

This paper examines the extent to which foreign borrowing funds private investment, consumption and government expenditure in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand (the Anglosphere), advanced economies which have been the world's largest international borrowers since 1990. Using a bivariate predictive regression model, we estimate the relative importance of these expenditure aggregates as predictors of their external deficits, and hence foreign borrowing. Overall, based on quarterly macroeconomic data for the period 1990–2011, the evidence suggests that foreign borrowing has not financed higher household consumption in these economies over recent decades, with the possible exception of the United States. While results concerning government spending are mixed due to policy reaction, business cycle and public-private saving offset effects, strong results for private investment augur well for the sustainability of this grouping's foreign borrowing.     

Foreign currency borrowing surrounding the global financial crisis: Evidence from Korea

We present a complete profile of firms’ foreign currency borrowing surrounding the 2007 global financial crisis. Employing extensive data from Korean firms during 2002–2012, we find that foreign currency borrowing is significantly related to firm attributes of export revenues, firm size, tangible assets and asset growth, as well as to macro-level factors. These results offer two important implications. First, macroeconomic factors alone cannot fully explain firms’ foreign currency borrowing. Second and more importantly, these firm attributes are indicative of a lower default probability and larger collateral value, which would not only facilitate borrowers’ access to foreign currency debt markets but also offer lenders a better protective cushion from possible loan defaults in the face of exchange rate changes and information asymmetry on borrowers’ credits. Period wise, asset-related firm attributes have more pronounced effects in the post- than pre-crisis period. We further show that banking regulations following the crisis effectively limit the access to foreign currency borrowing by Korean firms, most significantly by those belonging to large business groups.     

Efficiency tests with overlapping data: an application to the currency options market

This paper presents the results of an empirical study into the efficiency of the currency options market. The methodology derives from a simple model often applied to the spot and forward markets for foreign exchange. It relates the historic volatility of the underlying asset to the implied volatility of an option on the underlying at a specified prior time and then proceeds to test obvious hypotheses about the values of the coefficients. The study uses panel regression to address the problem of overlapping data which leads to dependence between observations. It also uses volatility data directly quoted on the market in order to avoid the biases which may occur when ‘backing out’ volatility from specific option pricing models. In general, the evidence rejects the hypothesis that the currency option market is efficient. This suggests that implied volatility is not the best predictor of future exchange rate volatility and should not be used without modification: the models presented in this paper could be a way of producing revised forecasts.     

Financing decisions of firms and central bank policy

This paper aims to explain why unhedged foreign borrowing by South East Asian corporations rose sharply during the few years prior to the crisis despite little change in fundamentals. We show that decisions of firms and decisions of the central bank are complementary. Consequently, a small shock to fundamentals may have a large and permanent impact on the equilibrium composition of firms’ borrowing.     

Taming polysemous signals: The role of marketing intensity on the relationship between financial leverage and firm performance

This study traces the degree of integration and volatility spillover effect between the Pakistani and leading foreign stock markets by analyzing the Meteor shower hypothesis. Daily data are used from nine worldly equity markets (KSE 100, NIKKEI 225, HIS, S&P 500, NASDAQ 100, DOW JONES, GADXI, FTSE 350 and DFMGI) for the period of 2005 to 2014. First, we used the whole data set and after that we split data set into two subsets, First subset of data contains the era of global financial crisis of 2008 from 2005 to 2009 and Second subset is after global financial crisis time period from 2010 to 2014 (The global crisis prevailed till end of 2009). By following the Hamao et al. (1990) technique the univariate GARCH type models are employed to explore the dynamic linkages between Pakistani and leading foreign stock markets. The results from whole data set illustrate that there is mixed co‐movements between leading foreign stock markets and Pakistani stock market. The results from both subsets provide an evidence that there is a unidirectional mean and volatility spillover effect from S&P 500, NASDAQ 100, DJI and DFMGI to KSE 100. Also we found bidirectional spillover effect between DFMGI and KSE 100 from both subsets of data. We concluded that there is only one indirect linkage through which may the information transmitted to KSE 100. This linkage is developed due to the co‐movement among KSE 100, DFMGI and NASDAQ 100 in crisis period. This integration between these markets may provide a sign of indirect linkage. It also exhibits the volatility in Pakistan stock market returns is instigated through direct effects as well as indirect effects. Our study brings important conclusions for financial institutions, portfolio managers, market players and academician to diagnose the nature and level of linkages between the financial markets.     

Dual long-memory, structural breaks and the link between turnover and the range-based volatility

This paper investigates the issue of temporal ordering of the range-based volatility and turnover volume in the Korean market for the period 1995–2005. We examine the dynamics of the two variables and their respective uncertainties using a bivariate dual long-memory model. We distinguish volume trading before the Asia financial crisis from trading after the crisis. We find that the apparent long-memory in the variables is quite resistant to the presence of breaks. However, when we take into account structural breaks the order of integration of the conditional variance series decreases considerably. Moreover, the impact of foreign volume on volatility is negative in the pre-crisis period but turns to positive after the crisis. This result is consistent with the view that foreign purchases tend to lower volatility in emerging markets—especially in the first few years after market liberalization when foreigners are buying into local markets—whereas foreign sales increase volatility. Before the crisis there is no causal effect for domestic volume on volatility whereas in the post-crisis period total and domestic volumes affect volatility positively. The former result is in line with the theoretical underpinnings that predict that trading within domestic investor groups does not affect volatility. The latter result is consistent with the theoretical argument that the positive relation between the two variables is driven by the uninformed general public.     

FX spreads and dealer competition across the 24-hour trading day

This study examines the impact of competition on bid-ask spreadsin the spot foreign exchange market. We measure competitionprimarily by the number of dealers active in the market andfind that bid-ask spreads decrease with an increase in competition,even after controlling for the effects of volatility. The expectedlevel of competition is time varying, highly predictable, anddisplays a strong seasonal component that in part is inducedby geographic concentration of business activity over the 24-hourtrading day. Our estimates show that the expected addition ofone more competing dealer lowers the average quoted spread by1.7%