Forecasting stock volatility with economic policy uncertainty: A smooth transition GARCH-MIDAS model

Given that policy uncertainty shocks in the economic environment can exacerbate financial market volatility and pose financial risks, this paper utilizes a smooth transition version of the GARCH-MIDAS model to investigate the impact of different structural state changes in economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on stock market volatility. The extended model explains the nonlinear effects of the macro variables and the structural break changes in regime transitions. The empirical results confirm that the EPU indicators provide effective prediction information for stock volatility from the in-sample and out-of-sample analyses, which reveals that the smooth transition model provides an effective method for detecting the possible regime changes between stock volatility and macroeconomic uncertainty. Additionally, we further confirm that some category-specific EPU indicators also have strong smooth transition behaviour with respect to stock volatility. More important, our new model provides significant economic value to investors from a utility gain perspective. Overall, the institutional changes present in EPU play a nonnegligible and important role in stock market volatility. Accurate identification of the structural features of financial data helps investors deepen their understanding of the sources of stock market volatility.     

Macroeconomic attention,economic policy uncertainty,and stock volatility predictability

This study adopts the newly constructed macroeconomic attention indices (MAI) and category-specific economic policy uncertainty (EPU) indices to predict stock volatility. Principal component analysis (PCA), scaled PCA (sPCA), and partial least squares (PLS) are used to extract the principal components from indicators. The results show that the combination of MAI and EPU indices can obtain additional information for predicting stock market volatility. In addition, the comprehensive index containing all indicator information (F_t^All) has the strongest short-term forecasting ability, whereas the MAI show the most substantial forecasting ability in long-term forecasting.     

A comprehensive investigation on the predictive power of economic policy uncertainty from non-U.S. countries for U.S. stock market returns

This study uses economic policy uncertainty (EPU) indices for ten developed countries, three diffusion models, and five combination methods to forecast excess returns in the U.S. stock market. It shows empirically that, over the period January 1997 to January 2022, non-U.S. EPU indices have better predictive power for U.S. equity market excess returns than the U.S. EPU index itself. This illustrates how economic information from international markets can affect the U.S. stock market. This finding challenges the extensively recognized view that the U.S. is where important market signals are initially transmitted to other markets, suggesting that this belief is incomplete. Our outcomes are robust to a battery of tests covering model selection, model specification, forecast horizons, and the pandemic period, and their economic values are assessed. The findings are essential for the financial field to confront future fierce situations and crises.     

Cointegration and causality between macroeconomic variables and stock market returns

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether current economic activities in Korea can explain stock market returns by using a cointegration test and a Granger causality test from a vector error correction model. This study finds that the Korean stock market reflects macroeconomic variables on stock price indices. The cointegration test and the vector error correction model illustrate that stock price indices are cointegrated with a set of macroeconomic variables—that is, the production index, exchange rate, trade balance, and money supply—which provides a direct long-run equilibrium relation with each stock price index. However, the stock price indices are not a leading indicator for economic variables, which is inconsistent with the previous findings that the stock market rationally signals changes in real activities.     

Stock market return predictability: A combination forecast perspective

Based on traditional macroeconomic variables, this paper mainly investigates the predictability of these variables for stock market return. The empirical results show the mean combination forecast model can achieve superior out-of-sample performance than the other forecasting models for forecasting the stock market returns. In addition, the performances of the mean combination forecast model are also robust during different forecasting windows, different market conditions, and multi-step-ahead forecasts. Importantly, the mean combination forecast consistently generates higher CER gains than other models considering different investors' risk aversion coefficients and trading costs. This paper tries to provide more evidence of combination forecast model to predict stock market returns.     

Economic policy uncertainty,investor attention and post-earnings announcement drift

How the market incorporates information into stock price is a core issue in finance. This study focuses on the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the stock prices information efficiency of China's A-share market and underlying role of investors' attention allocation mechanism. This study analyzes the information efficiency of stock prices using the sensitivity of stock cumulative abnormal return to earnings information across different windows following earnings announcement. Based on the earnings announcement events of listed companies in China's A-share market, this study presents an empirical study of the aforementioned issues using event study and regression analysis methods. The following results are seen: (1) EPU aggravates the underreaction of stock price earnings information and the post-earnings announcement drift in the A-share market. (2) Under highly uncertain economic policies, investors show a limited attention allocation pattern of devoting increasing attention to macroeconomic policies and decreasing attention to earnings information, which leads to a decrease in the information efficiency of stock price. This study also analyzes the heterogeneity of the influence of EPU on stock price information efficiency using the institutional shareholding ratio. The results show that increasing institutional shareholding does not reduce the adverse effects of EPU on the information efficiency of stock prices. This study not only provides empirical evidence for Brunnermeier, Sockin, and Xiong (2022) and rational inattention theory, but also reveals that institutional investors show similar behavioral characteristics to retail investors in China's stock market. The results of this study have policy significance for improving the information efficiency of stock market.     

Economic policy uncertainty and momentum

We show that a news‐based measure of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) negatively forecasts momentum. A 1‐standard‐deviation increase in EPU is associated with a 1.11% decrease in risk‐adjusted momentum returns. The predictive power of EPU is robust after controlling for previously documented economic state variables and macroeconomic uncertainty. We provide an explanation for these results from the perspective of a fund flow‐induced trading mechanism and offer direct empirical support. The literature documents that momentum can be partially attributed to performance‐chasing mutual fund flows. We find that this flow‐induced mechanism functions more effectively in low EPU states, thereby generating stronger stock momentum.     

Is U.S. economic policy uncertainty priced in China's A-shares market? Evidence from market,industry, and individual stocks

This paper is motivated by Bali, Brown, and Tang (2017) who find U.S. economic policy uncertainty (EPU) is priced in the cross-section of U.S. stock returns, and uses weekly data from March 2006 to April 2016 to study whether shocks in U.S. EPU also influence prices of China's A-shares from a market, industry, and individual stock perspective. Our methodology relies on an ARMA (1,1) model to extract shocks in the U.S. EPU series and a GARCH (1,1) model to examine how returns of China's A-shares respond to these shocks after controlling for business conditions proxied by term and credit spread in China. Generally, we find that shocks in U.S. EPU significantly and negatively explain returns of Chinese A-shares with a lag of one week. In addition, the market index containing small and growth stocks is more sensitive to shocks in U.S. EPU than the index containing big and value stocks. Furthermore, we find that firms in manufacturing, information technology, and media industries in China are more sensitive to shocks in U.S. EPU, while firms in agriculture and real estate industries respond less to shocks in U.S. EPU. Finally, China's A-shares which decline more in response to shocks in U.S. EPU have higher returns, smaller market capitalization, weaker operating profitability, higher asset growth, and better past year's cumulative returns. Overall, our findings show that investors in the Chinese A-shares market require a premium to hold stocks that are sensitive to shocks in U.S. economic policy uncertainty.     

Momentum, Business Cycle, and Time-varying Expected Returns

A growing number of researchers argue that time-series patterns in returns are due to investor irrationality and thus can be translated into abnormal profits. Continuation of short-term returns or momentum is one such pattern that has defied any rational explanation and is at odds with market efficiency. This paper shows that profits to momentum strategies can be explained by a set of lagged macroeconomic variables and payoffs to momentum strategies disappear once stock returns are adjusted for their predictability based on these macroeconomic variables. Our results provide a possible role for time-varying expected returns as an explanation for momentum payoffs.     

Stock Market Returns and Economic Fundamentals in an Emerging Market: The Case of Korea

This paper investigates the feedback relationship between stock market returnsand economic fundamentals in an emerging market. Starting from an intertemporalconsumption-based CAPM (CCAPM), we obtain a restricted VAR model for stockreturns and macroeconomic variables. We then apply this model to Korea and findstatistically significant departures from the restrictions implied by CCAPM.Consequently, an unrestricted VAR model is used to analyze the variations of expectedand unexpected returns in the Korean stock market. It is shown that the expectedmarket returns vary with a set of macroeconomic variables, and that thepredictable component is substantial. Reflecting richer dynamics in the data,relative to the usual single equation modeling in the literature, the estimatedVAR model shows considerable predictive ability for both real economic activityand real returns. Using the model for a variance decomposition of unexpectedreturns, we find that, although we cannot directly observe the market's revisionof expected future dividend growth, we can estimate a large part of therevision with the news in the expected industry output growth from our VAR model.Finally, we also find that economic fundamentals can explain only a smallportion of the variation in unexpected returns in the Korean stock market.     

Intraday Seasonalities and Macroeconomic News Announcements

Using a data set consisting of more than five years of 5‐minute intraday stock index returns for major European stock indices and US macroeconomic surprises, conditional means and volatility behaviour in European markets were investigated. The findings suggest that the opening of the US stock market significantly raises the level of volatility in Europe, all markets responding in an identical fashion. Furthermore, US macroeconomic surprises exert an immediate and major impact on both the European stock markets’ intraday returns and volatilities. Thus, high frequency data appear to be critical for the identification of news impacting the markets.     

Simultaneous monetary policy announcements and international stock markets response: An intraday analysis

This paper investigates the return and volatility response of major European and US equity indices to monetary policy surprises by utilizing extensive intraday data on 5-min price quotes along with a comprehensive dataset on monetary policy decisions and macroeconomic news announcements. The results indicate that the monetary policy decisions generally exert immediate and significant influence on stock index returns and volatilities in both European and the US markets. The findings also show that press conferences held by the European Central Bank (ECB) that follow monetary policy decisions on the same day have a clear impact on European index return volatilities. This implies that they convey additional important information to market participants. Overall, our analysis suggests that the use of high frequency data is critical to separate the effect of monetary policy actions from those of macroeconomic news announcements on stock index returns and volatilities.     

Empirical relationship between macroeconomic volatility and stock returns: Evidence from Latin American markets

Emerging market stock returns have been characterized as having higher volatility than returns in the more developed markets. But previous studies give little attention to the fundamentals driving the reported levels of volatility. This paper investigates whether dynamics in key macroeconomic indicators like exchange rates, interest rates, industrial production and money supply in four Latin American countries significantly explain market returns. The MSCI world index and the U.S. 3-month T-bill yield are also included to proxy the effects of global variables. Using a six-variable vector autoregressive (VAR) model, the study finds that the global factors are consistently significant in explaining returns in all the markets. The country variables are found to impact the markets at varying significance and magnitudes. These findings may have important implications for decision-making by investors and national policymakers.     

Real‐Time Risk Pricing Over the Business Cycle: Some Evidence for the UK

Abstract:   The fully‐revised data typically utilized in empirical research do not reflect the true information available to financial market participants at the time of their decision‐making. This paper uses a new real‐time macroeconomic dataset to appraise the relative importance of different vintages of data on economic variables as determinants of UK stock returns using the framework of Arbitrage Pricing Theory. We find that two factors influence expected stock returns, namely unanticipated inflation and economic uncertainty, but only when measured in real‐time. Moreover, their pricing influence is only present during phases of the business cycle when their associated risks are at their most prevalent.     

The monetary origins of asymmetric information in international equity markets

Existing studies using low-frequency data have found that macroeconomic shocks contribute little to international stock market covariation. However, these papers have not accounted for the presence of asymmetric information where sophisticated investors generate private information about the fundamentals that drive returns in many countries. In this paper, we use a new microstructure data set to better identify the effects of private and public information shocks about U.S. interest rates and equity returns. High-frequency private and public information shocks help forecast domestic money and equity returns over daily and weekly intervals. In addition, these shocks are components of factors that are priced in a model of the cross-section of international returns. Linking private information to U.S. macroeconomic factors is useful for many domestic and international asset-pricing tests.     

Economic and financial crises and the predictability of U.S. stock returns

We argue that the use of publicly available and easily accessible information on economic and financial crises to detect structural breaks in the link between stock returns and macroeconomic predictor variables improves the performance of simple trading rules in real time. In particular, our results suggest that accounting for structural breaks and regime shifts in forecasting regressions caused by economic and financial crises has the potential to increase the out-of-sample predictability of stock returns, the performance of simple trading rules, and the market-timing ability of an investor trading in the U.S. stock market.     

Dynamic and frequency-domain spillover among economic policy uncertainty,stock and housing markets in China

This study examines the dynamic characteristics of information spillover effect among economic policy uncertainty (EPU), stock and housing markets in China's first-, second- and third-tier cities. To measure return and volatility spillovers over time and across frequencies simultaneously, the researchers utilize the time-frequency connectedness network approach developed by Baruník and Křehlík (2018). The empirical findings suggest that return and volatility spillovers are stronger in the longer period (more than 3 months) than in the shorter period (1 to 3 months). In the short term, second and third-tier cities are net transmitters of information spillovers, while in the long term, first-tier cities, EPU, and stock markets are the net information transmitters. Furthermore, the long-term information from the EPU and stock market affect most of the real estate markets for different tier cities. Additionally, market segmentation reveals the city-specific characteristics of China's real estate market, especially the close connections between first-tier cities and the stock market. These results have important empirical implications for real estate policymakers and investors when they make related short or long-term decisions.     

The joint response of stock and foreign exchange markets to macroeconomic surprises: Using US and Japanese data

This paper investigates the joint response of stock and foreign exchange (FX) market returns to macroeconomic surprises, employing a system method of estimation that allows for the cross-country and cross-market interaction for asset returns and risk premia. Using US and Japanese data, we find that US stock markets are asymmetrically responsive to domestic developments in output growth and interest rates but are not influenced by macroeconomic surprises from Japan. The surprise in the FX market seems to affect stock markets in the US and Japan, respectively. In particular, we find that the interest rate surprise in the US and inflation surprise in Japan tend to overstate the impact that these surprises would have on the respective stock market. The impact of the surprises would appear smaller if macroeconomic developments induced by the FX market were incorporated into the model.     

Macroeconomic News, Business Cycles and Australian Financial Markets

This paper examines the effects of news surprises of macroeconomic announcements on Australian financial markets across different business cycles. We find that overall, the news arrivals are influential in both stock and debt markets but in an interesting array of responses across asset classes. Debt markets are more responsive to macroeconomic news surprises compared to the stock market, hence supporting the notion that information revealed from the macroeconomic news is related to interest rates. Specifically, news about CPI is important over the full sample period and especially during expansions for both stock and bond returns while the unemployment rate news is influential to the money market rates. Furthermore, these effects are seemingly asymmetric in nature, with their directions and magnitudes conditional on the state of economy.     

The Lead‐Lag Relationship Between Cash and Stock Index Futures in a New Market

This paper investigates the lead‐lag relationship in daily returns and volatilities between price movements of the FTSE/ATHEX‐20 and FTSE/ATHEX Mid‐40 stock index futures and the underlying cash indices in the relatively new futures market of Greece. Empirical results show that there is a bi‐directional relationship between cash and futures prices. However, futures lead the cash index returns, by responding more rapidly to economic events than stock prices. This speed is much higher in the more liquid FTSE/ATHEX‐20 market. Moreover, results indicate that futures volatilities spill information over to the corresponding cash market volatilities in both investigated futures markets, but volatilities in the cash markets have no effect on the volatilities of futures markets. Overall, it seems that new market information is disseminated faster in the futures market compared to the stock market. This implies that the futures markets can be used as price discovery vehicles, providing further evidence that derivatives markets contribute to completing and stabilising capital markets in Greece. A further finding of this study is that futures volume and disequilibrium effects between cash and futures prices are important variables in the explanation of volatilities in cash and futures markets.