Do German renewable energy resources affect prices and mitigate market power in the French electricity market ?

Several empirical studies show that renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, typically supplied at low marginal cost, can cause electricity market prices to fall. Recent theoretical research and simulations also highlight the link between the integration of renewable energy and market performance in an oligopolistic energy market. This article looks at these dynamics in the context of cross-border effects between two highly interconnected electricity markets, France and Germany. Using a rich panel dataset for hourly data from November 2009 to July 2015, I estimate the impact of German wind and solar power production on both prices and market power in the French wholesale market. The findings highlight the importance of coordinating energy policies via joint renewable energy support schemes among interconnected European electricity markets.     

Does past performance affect mutual fund tracking error in Taiwan?

This study examines the relationship between fund past performance and manager choice of portfolio risk in Taiwan. Employing the exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity and linear regression models, the results demonstrate that historically poor average performance does not increase mutual fund tracking error (TE) or portfolio risk. Additionally, yearly tournament behaviour, namely mid-year losers increasing their last-half year TEs, only appears in funds with higher management fees. This implies that managers of high management fee funds actively increase TE in response to poor historical performance, to enable them to beat the market during future months or the second half of the year.     

Does performance explain mutual fund flows in small markets? The case of Portugal

We study the performance reaction of investors in a specific small market context. Our sample includes all Portuguese open-end equity funds that invested in stocks issued by Portuguese companies in the period December 1993–June 2009. Instead of the convex flow–performance relationship usually documented for the US, we find an absence of reaction to past performance. We find no evidence to support the “smart money effect”, given that capital flows do not favour next period performance winners. We also document persistence of fund flows. Our results are consistent with the idea that large financial intermediaries have the capacity “to drive” their customers to funds with larger fees.     

Do different time horizons in the volatility of the US stock market significantly affect the China ETF market?

This article investigates the linear, nonlinear and time-varying Granger causality between different time horizons in the volatility of US stock market and the China Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) market. We find evidence of linear causality from the US stock market to the China ETF market, with a bilateral nonlinear causal relationship in the longer term. Bootstrap rolling causality analysis indicates high rejection rates of a noncausal relationship running from the US stock market to the China EFT market. The causality linkage from the China ETF market to the US stock market was determined to be time-horizon-dependent, and the null hypothesis rejection rate of non-Granger causality increased in the longer term.     

Do central bank foreign exchange interventions affect market expectations?

The aim of this article is to study the impact of the Brazilian central bank swap interventions on the FX market from 2006 to 2013. In this period, these nontraditional interventions were the main FX instrument of the Brazilian Government. Since the central bank operates through a sequence of daily interventions in most of the period, we employ the event study method, which is appropriate to investigate cumulative impact of intervention episodes. We analyse the effects on the risk neutral distribution of BRL-USD exchange rate, which incorporates economic valuation besides the likelihoods. We investigate both changes in level and in the dynamics of the moments. Our tests indicate that interventions have little effects on the exchange rate distribution. We only find evidences of some impact on the dynamics of the mean, volatility and skewness over long horizons when the central bank takes short positions on the exchange rate.     

Do corporate governance mechanisms affect cash dividends? An empirical investigation of UK firms

The study examines whether corporate governance mechanisms and the compliance with good governance practice are related to cash dividends. In particular, the study assesses the effect of institutional ownership and board structure on the decision to pay cash dividends. A study on UK firms is interesting because firms are expected to voluntarily structure governance mechanisms based on their own needs. We find that institutional owners positively affect cash dividend payments, suggesting that UK institutions are effective in forcing firms to disgorge cash. There is limited evidence that independent directors affect the cash dividends. The results also show that firm specifics affect the cash dividends, namely, business risk, firm size, and leverage ratio. The results are consistent across several robustness checks.     

Does stock market performance affect the government satisfaction rating in the UK?

In this study, we attempt to answer the question of whether stock market performance affects the government satisfaction rating in the long run in a sample period spanning 1984:Q1 to 2013:Q2 in the UK. We examine both the equilibrium relationship and the causality relationship between stock market performance and government satisfaction rating. The results indicate that the voters are sensitive to the economic shocks and hold responsible for the government. The empirical results confirm the responsibility hypothesis.     

Do speculative bubbles migrate in the Chinese stock market?

In this paper, a duration dependence test for speculative bubbles in the Chinese stock market is developed. It is found that bubbles in the aggregate stock price existed before the split share reform. After the reform, we observe the phenomenon of bubble migration across industries. In particular, bubbles migrate from the telecommunications industry to the health care industry. Moreover, we find that monetary policy used to have a significant impact on the bubble size before the reform but the impact diminished after the reform.

     

How international financial flows affect stock markets?

Relying on the IMF Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey, which reports countries’ bilateral investments in financial assets at end-2001 to end-2015, this article shows that a country’s stock market growth is not only spatially correlated with those of nearby countries, but also positively associated with the magnitude of connectedness of the country’s international investments in debt within a dynamic financial investment flow network. The positive relation arises because debts have become an increasingly important source of capital for developing countries.     

Does black market exchange rate volatility deter the trade flows? Iranian experience

Previous studies that investigated the impact of exchange rate volatility on the trade flows, employed official exchange rate data to construct a measure of exchange rate uncertainty. In this paper we show that in countries that there is a black market for foreign exchange, the black market exchange rate volatility could have adverse effect on the trade flows. We show this by using data from Iran and cointegration analysis.     

Do short sellers outperformthe market?

During the current financial crisis, short sellers have been blamed for causing or at least accelerating the crash of the financial market. They have been accused of manipulating stock prices so that they would fall and getting rich at the ‘naive’ investors' expense. This study investigates the validity of these accusations by following the TA100 Index and four designed portfolios during the period 2006 to 2008. The designed portfolios were constructed in accordance with the weekly report on short selling activity issued by the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. The results show that short sellers did not succeed in outperforming the market during that 3-year period. Moreover, the portfolios that did not include the stocks picked by the short sellers performed more poorly (they should have been sold short) than the portfolios that included stocks chosen by the short sellers. These results contradict the hypothesis that short selling disrupts market efficiency.     

Wealth effects on the housing markets: Do market liquidity and market states matter?

This paper analyzes the effect of household wealth (including housing and financial wealth) on housing sales and probes their long-run and short-run dynamic relationships. We further examine the short-run effect of financial wealth on housing sales by employing quantile regressions, restricted upon different liquidity (quantile) levels and up-down housing markets, from which the differences between the early and late stages of an uptrend/downtrend can be respectively exhibited. We find that housing wealth, income, and mortgage rates have long-run influences on housing sales. Looking at the short run, we find that housing sales only respond to housing wealth and mortgage rates. When we distinguish the effects of financial wealth on housing sales in up-down housing markets, we note a positive influence of financial wealth on housing sales in down markets, but not in up markets. Particularly, our results show an impact of housing liquidity on the short-run relationships.     

Do food standards affect the quality of EU imports?

This paper investigates the relationship between the diffusion of EU standards and product quality upgrading using highly disaggregated import data to the EU in the food industry. Results show that, on average, the diffusion of EU voluntary standards boosts the rate of quality upgrading. However, the results are heterogeneous when moving from primary to processed foods, and from ISO to non-ISO standards.     

Do national soccer results really impact on the stock market?

This study is a response to Klein et al. (2008), which was highly critical of earlier work by Ashton et al. (2003). This work considering the link between international soccer results and stock market returns was challenged by Klein et al. (2008), who reject the presence and importance of this link. In response, this work provides a reassessment of the link between international soccer results and stock market returns within Ashton et al. (2003). This new analysis extends the original work by using a larger dataset, employing an extended range of tests and allowing for outliers. It is reported that, contrary to the findings of Klein et al. (2008), the link between international soccer results and stock market prices does indeed exist particularly within the sample period 1984–2002 used by Ashton et al. (2003). After extending the dataset to include observations from 2002 until 2009, it is reported that the effect on stock market returns has declined in importance over this period, particularly the impact of wins.     

Does corporate governance still affect firm performance after controlling the distress factor?

We explore the impact of corporate governance on firm performance. We first identify whether corporate governance can still be an influential factor or has been largely captured by the traditional Fama-French three-factor model. More importantly, our study adds a financial distress factor to the Fama-French three-factor model to form a four-factor pricing model (labelled as the ‘financial distress four-factor model’). We find that for the US Russell 1000 firms, the financial distress four-factor model is the better model of the two models considered. We further find that the financial distress four-factor model has a higher explanatory power in capturing the return variation. We find that the differences between the return of firms with good (weak) corporate governance and the expected return are insignificantly different from zero for most portfolios in all the two models. The financial distress four-factor model, however, has the fewer portfolios with return difference being significantly different from zero, implying that corporate governance has been better priced in the financial distress factor.     

Do macroeconomic fundamentals affect exchange market pressure? Evidence from bounds testing approach for Turkey

This article investigates the relationship between Exchange Market Pressure (EMP) and macroeconomic fundamentals in Turkey using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing procedure and Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) within the framework of the canonical currency crisis models. The results of the bounds tests suggest the existence of a level relationship between EMP and the selected macroeconomic fundamentals. The results of the VECM also suggest that there exists a unidirectional causation that runs from those macroeconomic fundamentals to EMP in the case of the Turkish Economy.     

Do sovereign rating announcements affect emerging market exchange rate correlations? A multivariate DCC-GARCH approach

This article investigates the effects of sovereign credit rating announcements on time-varying exchange rate return correlations for a sample of 11 emerging market countries over the period 2002–2015. The data set covers daily exchange rates and long-term foreign currency sovereign ratings, outlooks and watch list. The pairwise time-varying correlations are derived by corrected Dynamic Conditional Correlation (cDCC) modelling which is a member of multivariate Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models family. Furthermore, to capture the global factor effect, a dynamic-weighted index is created by using dynamic principal component (DPC) analysis. Findings suggest that some of the emerging market exchange rate co-movements are affected by rating announcements. Upgrades of Moody’s and downgrades of Fitch lead to spillovers. Main source of these spillovers are sovereign credit rating changes of European countries, especially Czech Republic and Turkey. Countries with high amount of external debt, large current account deficit and speculative grade are more prone to be influenced by announcements on a foreign country’s long-term sovereign rating.     

Do income tax breaks for the elderly affect economic growth?

Income tax breaks for elderly taxpayers are sizable, widespread, and potentially affect growth through migration and other behaviors. We provide the first investigation into the growth effects of differential tax policy by age, taking a multi-pronged empirical approach to US state-level data since 1977. Some analyses include panel error-correction models combined with variation in state-level policies over time. Alternative analyses use how changes in federal tax law manifest at the state-level. Results suggest that taxes on lower income taxpayers, of any age, decrease growth the most, while taxing the high income elderly—those targeted recently—has little effect.     

Do corporate executives have accurate predictions for the economy? A directional analysis

Although many studies on the directional accuracy of forecasts by international organizations and professional forecasters have been scrutinized, little attention has been paid to forecasts by business leaders. In order to address this gap, we use directional tests to investigate whether forecasts of Gross Domestic Product by corporate executives are valuable to their users. Our findings indicate that all the forecasts with forecast horizons from 1 to 14 months are valuable, whereas established literature indicates that longer-term forecasts tend not to be valuable. This suggests that corporate executives are concerned with and focus on longer-term economic environments and can therefore serve as an important resource for policymakers. However, some of the useful forecasts with real-time data, in particular those in the Tankan survey, are not useful with historical data.     

Do currency undervaluations affect the impact of inflation on growth?

In this paper, we investigate how the level of currency undervaluations affects the effect of inflation on growth in a sample of 62 countries over the 1980–2015 period. While previous studies find a positive effect of an undervalued currency, we show that higher currency undervaluations reinforce the contractionary effect of inflation on growth. As an undervalued currency is associated with supplementary inflation pressures arising from a cost-push inflation phenomenon and economy overheating, growth is thus penalized. This result is shown to be robust to the exclusion of currency crises episodes from our sample, and dependent of the development level of countries. Specifically, it holds in the case of emerging countries, but not for developing economies. Consequently, policies based on undervaluations should not be encouraged for emerging economies as they tend to reinforce the contractionary effect of inflation on growth.