Extreme returns and the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle: African evidence

We examine the cross-sectional relationship between the expected stock return and both the maximum daily return (MAX) and the idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL) in the five largest emerging African stock markets over the period from 2001 to 2015. First, we find that there is a robust and significantly negative MAX effect in the pooled African stock markets. Second, though we initially document a negative IVOL effect, it disappears after controlling for MAX. Finally, the negative MAX effect is only significant in the small-SIZE, high-illiquidity and high-skewness portfolios. Our results suggest risk-seeking behaviour among African investors similar to that in other parts of the world.     

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.     

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.     

Oil shocks,policy uncertainty and stock returns in China

This paper examines the interdependence of China's policy uncertainty, the global oil market and stock market returns in China. A structural VAR model is estimated that shows that a positive shock to economic policy uncertainty in China has a delayed negative effect on global oil production, real oil prices and real stock market returns. Shocks to oil market‐specific demand significantly raise China's economic policy uncertainty and reduce the real stock market returns. As measured by a spillover index, the interdependence between these variables has been rising since 2003 as China's influence in the oil market has increased. An equivalent spillover index calculated for the US is smaller and has been largely flat over time.     

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.     

Note Short-term predictability of German stock returns

The paper investigates short-horizon individual stock returns; it exhibits statistically and economically significant autocorrelations, which for stock returns have so far been established mainly over long horizons, also for certain daily data, in particular between monday returns and various linear combinations of the previous week's returns.Research supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG); I am grateful to Ralf Runde for preparing the data and to Gerd Ronning and an anonymous referee for helpful criticism and comments.     

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.     

Pitfalls in estimates of the relationship between stock returns and inflation

Empirical tests of the Fisher hypothesis give conflicting results, regardless of whether income growth is accommodated in the estimates. This paper shows theoretically and empirically that standard methods of testing the Fisher hypothesis give biased results and that the bias depends on the specification of the Fisher equation, the process governing inflation, measurement of inflation expectations, and the time aggregation of the data. Alternative tests show that share markets take several years to adjust to innovations in inflation and therefore that the Fisher hypothesis cannot be maintained. Helpful comments and suggestions from Hans Christian Kongsted, Darrel Turkington and seminar participants at the University of Western Australia, and University of Konstanz and, particularly, two referees, are gratefully acknowledged.     

主营业务贡献对利润质量影响实证分析

本文从分析我国上市公司主营业务贡献与净资产收益率的关系入手,探讨主营业务利润对利润质量的影响．结果发现主营业务贡献与净资产收益率变异系数呈负相关关系,主营业务贡献率变异系数与净资产收益率的变异系数呈正相关关系。说明主营业务利润比重在很大程度上决定了公司盈利的稳定性与持久性。因此上市公司应该重视主营业务利润,提高主营业务利润在利润总额中的比重。     

An information theoretic analysis of stock returns,volatility and trading volumes

Information theory is used to examine the dynamic relationships between stock returns, volatility and trading volumes for S&P500 stocks. This provides an alternative approach to traditional Granger causality tests when dealing with nonlinear relationships. The article highlights the dominant role played by trading volumes in all of these relationships – even in the return–volatility relation – and finds evidence of a market level feedback effect from index returns to the return–volatility relation at the stock level. The article also produces a number of stylized facts from an information theoretic perspective.     

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.     

Idiosyncratic volatility and the cross-section of anomaly returns: is risk your Ally?

Due to arbitrage risk asymmetries, the relationship between idiosyncratic risk and expected returns is positive (negative) among overpriced (underpriced) stocks. We offer a new active anomaly-selection strategy that capitalizes on this effect. To this end, we consider 11 equity anomalies in the U.S. market for years 1963–2016. Buying (selling) long (short) legs of the anomaly portfolios with the highest idiosyncratic volatility produces monthly abnormal returns ranging from 0.97% to 1.14% per month, outperforming a naive benchmark that equally weights all the anomalies by 45–70%. The effect cannot be subsumed by any other established anomaly-return predictor, such as momentum or seasonality. The results are robust to many considerations, including different numbers of anomalies in the portfolios, subperiod analysis, as well as estimation of idiosyncratic risk from the alternative models and throughout different periods.     

Long memory in the volatility of China stock returns

In this paper, we empirically examine the volatility process of China's stock market returns using daily and weekly Shanghai and Shenzhen stock indices during January 1990 to August 2008. To investigate the property of the process, we used the FIGARCH (fractionally integrated GARCH) model including GARCH and IGARCH processes as special cases. Since the FIGARCH model allows fractional integration order, it can detect hyperbolically decaying volatility processes which cannot be explained by previous models with integer integration order. Our results show that the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock indices exhibit long-term dependencies. The long memory properties of the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets do not seem to be spuriously induced without exception.     

Time-varying relationship of news sentiment,implied volatility and stock returns

I examine the relationship between aggregate news sentiment, S&P 500 index (SPX) returns, and changes in the implied volatility index (VIX). I find a significant negative contemporaneous relationship between changes in VIX and both news sentiment and stock returns. This relationship is asymmetric whereby changes in VIX are larger following negative news and/or stock market declines. Vector autoregression (VAR) analysis of the dynamics and cross-dependencies between variables reveals a strong positive relationship between previous and current period changes in implied volatility and stock returns, while current period and lagged news sentiment has a significant positive (negative) relationship with stock returns (changes in VIX). I develop a simple trading strategy whereby high (low) levels of implied volatility signal attractive opportunities to take short (long) positions in the underlying index, while extremely negative (positive) news sentiment signals opportunities to enter short (long) index positions. The investor fear gauge (VIX) appears to perform better than news sentiment measures in forecasting future returns.     

Moments of cross-sectional stock market returns and the German business cycle

Based on monthly data covering the period from 1987 to 2021, we analyse whether cross-sectional moments of stock market returns may provide information about the future position of the German business cycle. We apply in-sample forecasting regressions with and without leading indicators as control variables, pseudo-out-of-sample exercises, autoregressive distributed lag models, and impulse-response functions estimated by local projections. We find in-sample predictive power of the first and third cross-section moments for the future growth of industrial production, even if one controls for well-established leading indicators for the German business cycle. Out-of-sample tests show that these variables reduce the relative mean squared error compared with benchmark models. We do not find a long-run relation between the moment series and industrial production. The dynamic response of industrial production to a shock on the cross-section moments is in line with the other results.     

The relationship between South Asian stock returns and macroeconomic variables

This article investigates whether economic variables have explanatory power for share returns in South Asian stock markets. In particular, using data for four South Asian emerging stock markets over the period 1998–2012, the article examines the influence of a selection of local, regional and global economic variables in explaining equity returns; most previous studies that have examined this issue have tended to focus on only local and/or global factors. Important factors are identified by distilling the macroeconomic variables into principal components. Economic activities, real interest rates, real exchange rates and the trade balance represent local factors. Regional factors are represented by interregional trade and regional economic activity while global factors are represented by world financial asset returns and world economic activity. The vector autoregression results suggest that the South Asian markets examined are not efficient. Both local and regional factors can directly and indirectly explain Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Sri Lankan stock returns while the lagged returns of the Pakistani stock market and world economic activity can explain Indian stock returns.     

Predicting long-run risk factors of stock returns: Evidence from Australia

This study utilises the stock market data provided by the Australian Equity Database to analyse the long-run relationship between Australian stock returns and key macroeconomic variables over the period 1926–2017. To measure the diverse risk factors in the stock market, we examine the possible determinants in four main categories: real, financial, domestic and international. Our results reveal that historical stock returns are strongly connected to financial and international factors as compared to real and domestic factors. Both the 1973–1974 OPEC Oil Price Crisis and 2007–2008 Global Financial Crisis had dampening effects on stock returns. There is a positive association between the US and Australian stock markets in the long-run. These findings on stock market dynamics and their linkages with domestic and international macroeconomic policy changes in the long-run have important implications for traders and practitioners.     

Macroeconomic shocks and stock market returns: the case of Korea

This study examines the effects of macroeconomic shocks on key macro variables, including stock market returns in Korea, using the structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model. We suggest a three-variable SVAR model incorporating inflation, output growth and stock returns. We adopt a nonzero z-ratio restriction for the long-run identifying assumption to allow for economically meaningful relationships among variables. While our results support the negative (positive) relation of demand (supply) shocks to stock returns, we also find that demand shocks influence stock market variance more significantly than supply shocks do. The sub-period analysis finds that global market fluctuations during the global financial crisis have relatively little effect on Korean stock market performance. We also examine a generalized five-variable model that includes the foreign exchange rate and interest rate, confirming the results from the three-variable case.     

Nonlinear causality relationship between stock and real-estate returns in PIGS countries: wealth effect or credit-price effect

It is the first research to investigate for nonlinear interdependence of these two markets in the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) countries based on the quantile causality test. The results reveal the existence of the nonlinear causality relationship between the stock returns and real-estate returns in the PIGS countries.

The empirical results of the quantile causality test suggest a significant causal relationship between these two markets in the PIGS countries, especially in the tail quantile. The existence of a significant tail interdependence implies that investors are unable to hedge the risk across the real-estate and stock markets when they are extremely volatile. Therefore, when there exist extreme returns between the two markets in the PIGS countries, both continuous negative impacts imply that instability in the real-estate market drives instability in the stock market and vice versa. It could be one of the major reasons why it deepened the systemic risk of the European sovereign debt crisis.