Is the presidential premium spurious?

A hotly debated question in finance is whether the higher stock returns under Democratic presidencies relative to Republican presidencies represent abnormal return, risk premium, or mere statistical fluke. This paper investigates whether this presidential premium is due to spurious-regression bias, data mining, or economic policy uncertainty. Decomposing the presidential premium into expected and unexpected components, we find that over two-thirds of the premium is unexpected, which is inconsistent with the spurious regression bias explanation. The presidential premium is not explained by data mining given that it persists in the post-publication period, and remains robust even if we purge returns of their covariation with economic policy uncertainty.     

Dynamic technical and allocative efficiencies in European banking

This paper examines the performance of European banks during the pre-crisis and post-crisis periods, both in terms of technical and allocative efficiencies. We use an innovative Bayesian dynamic frontier model that: (1) distinguishes between short-run and long-run performance; and (2) provides impulse response functions to examine the dynamic effect of shocks in technical and allocative inefficiencies. Based on a rich sample of European banks, we show that while there was a drop in efficiency for most countries following the crisis, the long-run results suggest improvement both in terms of technical and allocative efficiencies. The impulse response functions also show that in the case of shocks in the system, banks seem to revert back to these long-run allocative efficiency scores. We discuss the results in terms of the current financial crisis and provide interesting implications for the European banking industry. We also discuss the determinants of technical and allocative efficiencies. (We would like to thank Professor Allen N. Berger and Professor Andy Mullineux for their valuable comments on the early version of this paper.)     

Empirical investigation of changes in policy uncertainty on stock returns—Evidence from China’s market

This study finds evidence that a rise in economic policy uncertainty (EPU) leads to a decline in stock returns in Chinese market; however, a positive coefficient was observed in the lagged EPU as stock prices rebound. This phenomenon also holds true for a rise in uncertainty innovations in fiscal policy, monetary policy, trade policy and global policy. The evidence leads to conclude that policy uncertainty premiums should be priced into China’s stock prices. An escalation of U.S. policy uncertainty has a significantly harmful effect on Chinese stocks regardless of whether firms are stated own or listed on U.S. market.     

When to go abroad: economic policy uncertainty and Chinese firms’ overseas investment

We study how economic policy uncertainty (EPU) influences firms’ overseas investments for Chinese listed companies. We find a significant negative relationship between EPU and firms’ overseas investments after controlling for firm characteristics and macroeconomic variables. Chinese firms seem to reduce their overseas investments on fixed income securities when facing domestic policy uncertainty. The negative relationship is pronounced for financially constrained firms, firms relying on government subsidies and with low overseas revenues, and SOEs. Firms operating in high marketisation regions can mitigate the negative effect of EPU on firms’ overseas investments. Our results remain significant when considering endogeneity problems.     

Components of Market Risk and Return

This article proposes a flexible but parsimonious specificationof the joint dynamics of market risk and return to produce forecastsof a time-varying market equity premium. Our parsimonious volatilitymodel allows components to decay at different rates, generatesmean-reverting forecasts, and allows variance targeting. Thesefeatures contribute to realistic equity premium forecasts forthe U.S. market over the 1840–2006 period. For example,the premium forecast was low in the mid-1990s but has recentlyincreased. Although the market's total conditional variancehas a positive effect on returns, the smooth long-run componentof volatility is more important for capturing the dynamics ofthe premium. This result is robust to univariate specificationsthat condition on either levels or logs of past realized volatility(RV), as well as to a new bivariate model of returns and RV.     

Unconventional monetary policy announcements and risk aversion: evidence from the U.S. and European equity markets

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the role of unconventional monetary policy announcements on risk aversion – as proxied by the variance premium – by using panel data analysis. The objective of this empirical analysis is to investigate the risk-taking channel of monetary policy for the major European and U.S. equity markets by studying the impact that the announcements of an unconventional monetary policy has on market uncertainty and risk perception. By measuring the difference between risk-neutral and realised and conditional variance, we estimate the variance premium, which captures the impact that pricing concerns have on the prices of options. The empirical analysis indicates that easing monetary policies can significantly reduce the variance premium. In addition, we examine the risk premium structure across markets to determine the potential differences in investors’ risk aversion.     

Oil prices and economic policy uncertainty: Evidence from global,oil importers,and exporters’ perspective

Containing various information, economic policy uncertainty reflects significant rises and declines when facing shocks like financial crisis, oil-price change, and other specific economic or policy events. This paper empirically studies the interaction between oil prices and the newly formulated economic policy uncertainty indices using a time-varying parameter vector autoregression framework. Generally, the results of this study suggest that economic policy uncertainty reveals fluctuating responses to oil price shocks, while the oil price has a negative response to the uncertainty. The findings also reveal that the economic policy uncertainty indices for oil-importers and oil-exporters respond to oil price shocks differently. The oil price shock has a larger fluctuation to the economic policy uncertainty of oil-exporters than that of importers. Moreover, for the oil-exporters, the negative response to the oil price shock is greater than that of the oil-importing countries. This paper also discusses the impact of asymmetric shocks of oil price on economic policy uncertainty. In particular, after two financial crises, positive shocks decrease the uncertainty and vice versa. These findings are robustly verified.     

我国经济开放、地区分割影响技术差距的实证分析

采用我国1992～2007年的省际面板数据,以我国商品市场分割和省际贸易合作来度量地区分割,发现我国地区分割程度不断下降;进一步分析地区分割、经济开放影响地区技术差距的机制,建立技术差距的影响因素模型.实证结果表明,地区分割妨碍落后地区的技术进步,加剧了我国地区间的技术差距;扩大出口贸易,提高引资份额在一定程度上有利于落后地区的技术收敛;研发、市场化改革对技术差距的缩小也有积极作用.