Evidence on inflation–output trade-off in developing and industrial countries

This paper subjects Lucas's output–inflation trade-off study to further empirical investigation. The cross-country study divides the 111 countries covered into 90 developing countries and 21 advanced countries. Lucas's proposition is that volatility of aggregate demand growth should reduce the impact of aggregate demand growth on the cyclical output and the implication of this is that there is no output–inflation trade-off in line with the natural rate theory. We employ annual data over periods that fall between 1958 and 1985 in order to conduct the test. Our findings suggest that Lucas's proposition is valid for developed economies but not for developing economies.     

The Volatility of Foreign Portfolio Investment and the Access to Finance of Small Listed Firms

This paper examines the impact of foreign portfolio investment (FPI) volatility on the access to capital of small listed firms. The volatility of FPI is significantly associated with decreased access to finance for small listed firms only in years when nations are considered less “creditworthy.” Even in these times, however, the benefits of FPI are not completely depleted. These results underscore the significance of both a good financial system that minimizes capital flow volatility and national creditworthiness in inspiring confidence in foreign investors.     

Exchange rate volatility and United Kingdom trade: evidence from Canada,Japan and New Zealand

This paper investigates the influence of exchange rate volatility on the real imports of the United Kingdom from Canada, Japan and New Zealand during the period 1980–2003. The Johansen multivariate cointegration method and the constrained error correction (general-to-specific) method are applied to study the relationship between real imports and its determinants (including exchange rate volatility). Conditional variance from the GARCH(1,1) model is applied as exchange rate volatility. Both nominal and real exchange rates are employed in the empirical study. Results indicate a significant effect of the exchange rate volatility on real imports. These exchange rate volatility effects are mostly positive. The author thanks an anonymous referee, the editor and Myles Wallace for several useful comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors and omissions are the author’s responsibility alone.     

An empirical analysis of currency volatilities during the recent global financial crisis

This paper investigates the impact of the 2008–2009 global financial crisis on the co-movement of 16 currencies in the sample. It employs a two-step atheoretic empirical methodology; it i) applies change point estimation based on geometric Brownian motion to detect change points in volatilities and ii) applies Engle's (2002) dynamic conditional correlation (DCCR) approach to estimate time varying correlations and then, observes the behavior of volatility co-movements during the periods found in (i). The results show that volatilities increase at least twofold with the outbreak of the crisis and there is an inverse relationship between volatility and the duration of the crisis. The DCCRs usually increase with the onset of the crisis and they fluctuate smoothly afterwards while keeping that increased level.     

Sources of employment fluctuations in Taiwan's industries and regions

This empirical study explores the sources of employment fluctuations in Taiwan's industries and regions over the period 1978 to 2004. The quarterly growth rates of employment in nine industries and four regions are modelled with a structural vector autoregression (VAR), and the employment shocks are measured by VAR residuals. The covariance matrix of the VAR residuals is decomposed using system estimation method that selects the parameters to make the error model close to the covariance matrix and, in turn, to estimate the relative importance of national as well as industry-specific and region-specific shocks. The empirical results show that industry-specific shocks account for the major fluctuations in industries and regions. On average, about 83.95% of an industry's cyclical variations and 56.28% of the volatility in a region may be attributed to industry-specific shocks. National shocks account for little employment volatility in industries. Only the finance and personal service industries are highly sensitive to national shocks.     

Foreign Portfolio Equity Investments, Financial Liberalization, and Economic Development

Reform of local capital markets and relaxation of capital controls to attract foreign portfolio investments (FPIs) has become an integral part of development strategy. The proximity of market openings and large, sudden shifts in international capital flows gave credence to the notion that the liberalization was the primary culprit in precipitating the recent Asian crisis. Hence, this paper reassesses the benefits and costs of FPIs from the perspective of the recipients. Specifically, it discusses the various FPI contributions and presents empirical evidence regarding the relationship between FPIs and market development, degree of capital market integration, cost of capital, cross-market correlation and market volatility. It is clear that the evidence on benefits of FPIs is strong, whereas the policy concerns regarding resource mobilization, market comovements, contagion, and volatility are largely unwarranted. The authors make some policy suggestions regarding preconditions for capital market openings, market regulation, and liberalization sequencing.     

What's so great about the Great Moderation?

This paper examines how volatilities of output growth and inflation have changed over a long period for eight countries. We obtain a number of robust empirical results based on a variety of different econometric methods. The lowest volatility occurs during or shortly after the Great Moderation period. Volatility is reduced during that time for most of the countries; however, these reductions in volatility pale in comparison with stability gains achieved during two other periods. One of those periods is the Postwar Moderation, which began near the end of World War II for each country. Not only is the decline in volatility impressive, but also the volatility is typically at the lowest level up to that point in a sample or at least has fallen to a low not seen for decades. And those reductions in volatility are statistically significant, in contrast to the Great Moderation. A second fall in volatility that in nearly all cases exceeds that of the Great Moderation is for inflation during the 1920s. And this moderation in inflation during the 1920s is statistically significant in almost every case. Overall, these and a number of other notable changes in volatility are remarkably robust across countries, different data sources, and alternative econometric methodologies. For example, implementation of a broad-based fixed exchange rate system is typically associated with a substantial reduction in macroeconomic volatility. Another finding, obtained from structural vector autoregression models, is that the changes in volatility for each variable are primarily driven by a fundamentally different type of disturbance.     

The effectiveness of the sunshine effect in Taiwan's stock market before and after the 1997 financial crisis

This study constructs a variety of GARCH models with the consideration of the generalized error distribution to analyze the relationship between the cloud cover and stock returns in Taiwan in the whole sample period (1986 to 2007) and in the two sub-sample periods (1986 to 1996 and 1997 to 2007). The data include Taiwan Stock Exchange Capitalization Weighted Stock Index, the primary eight stock sector indices, and the U.S. Dow Jones Industrial Average index to proxy the impact of U.S. stock market on Taiwan's stock market performance. The empirical finding of this study could be used to reconfirm the existence of the so-called sunshine effect. In addition, by comparing the long-run impulse multiplier effects of the cloud cover on the stock return in the two sub-sample periods; this study could examine the transition of the sunshine effect in Taiwan's stock market. The empirical results suggest that cloud cover has a significant negative impact on Taiwan's stock market, especially in the low cloud cover periods. Moreover, the pre-determined distribution of the error term plays an important role on the significance of the sunshine effect. The empirical result shows that most long-run multipliers are negative and the multiplier is more effective in the low cloud cover periods than in the high cloud cover periods.     

The relationship between interest rate volatility and the shadow economy in OECD countries: An asymmetric analysis

Interest rate changes by central banks are a strong monetary policy tool that has a significant impact on the performance of the real economy via various channels. Despite extensive theoretical and empirical studies in this area, the current literature lacks a comprehensive assessment of the relationship between interest rate volatility and the shadow economy. This study explores the link between interest rate volatility and the shadow economy for 38 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries over the period 1991–2021 using both linear and non-linear ARDL models. The use of the non-linear ARDL specification will allow for the possibility of an asymmetric effect of interest rate volatility on the shadow economy. In addition to the examination of the potential asymmetric effects, we also discuss the ramifications for policymakers with respect to monetary and financial policies while considering each country's specific economic structure.     

Volatility and trading activity in Short Sterling futures

The objective of the present study is to examine the interplay between information, trading volume and volatility in Short Sterling futures. More specifically, the paper concentrates on the role of liquidity variables as conduits of information arrival and whether such variables could be an exclusive platform of the market's information set. The analytical framework employed to examine the interaction among those factors is based on the conditional volatility family of techniques. The approach is well suited as it naturally leads to examine the interaction among volatility and sources of information. In an attempt to identify proxies of information and their role in determining volatility, four main conclusions have emerged. First, the empirical findings suggest that both volume and open interest exhibit a positive correlation with volatility. Second, based on the current methodology, one can observe the persistence and importance of GARCH effects after accounting for liquidity. Third, the liquidity variables remain significantly exogenous compared with other studies. Finally, although both liquidity variables are found significant, their role as vehicles of transmitting information is proved to be weak with respect to the information itself.     

Equilibrium asset pricing under the Lévy process with stochastic volatility and moment risk premiums

In this paper, we extend Zhang, Zhao and Chang's (2012) production-based equilibrium asset pricing model from a jump diffusion setting to a Lévy process with stochastic volatility. This paper is a further extension of Fu and Yang (2012), which is under a Lévy process with a constant volatility. Using newly developed closed-form formulas of equity premium and pricing kernel, we are able to price Schouten's (2005) moment swaps analytically. Numerical results show that our pricing formula performs very well. Our model explains Zhao, Zhang and Chang's (2013) empirical observations on moment risk premiums.     

Taxes,institutions and foreign diversification opportunities

Investors can access foreign diversification opportunities through either foreign portfolio investment (FPI) or foreign direct investment (FDI). The worldwide tax regime employed by the US potentially distorts this choice by penalizing FDI, relative to FPI, in low-tax countries. On the other hand, weak investor protections in foreign countries may increase the value of control, creating an incentive to use FDI rather than FPI. By combining data on US outbound FPI and FDI, this paper analyzes whether the composition of US outbound capital flows reflects these incentives to bypass home and host country institutional regimes. The results suggest that the residual tax on US multinational firms' foreign earnings skews the composition of outbound capital flows — a 10% decrease in a foreign country's corporate tax rate increases US investors' equity FPI holdings by approximately 10%, controlling for effects on FDI. Investor protections also seem to shape portfolio choices, though these results are not robust when only within-country variation is employed.     

FPI、FDI与中国经济增长——基于SVAR的经验研究

利用SVAR模型,研究了外国直接投资和外国证券投资对中国经济增长的影响。结果显示FPI、FDI与中国经济增长呈现正相关关系,FDI的作用显著,FPI的作用不显著。同时,FDI和FPI之间存在一定的交替关系,FDI拉低了FPI,而FPI则在短期内对FDI有促进作用。     

A discussion on the innovation distribution of the Markov regime-switching GARCH model

The Markov Regime-Switching Generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic (MRS-GARCH) model is a widely used approach to model the financial volatility with potential structural breaks. The original innovation of the MRS-GARCH model is assumed to follow the Normal distribution, which cannot accommodate fat-tailed properties commonly existing in financial time series. Many existing studies point out that this problem can lead to inconsistent estimates. To overcome it, the Student's t-distribution and General Error Distribution (GED) are the two most popular alternatives. However, a recent study points out that the Student's t-distribution lacks stability. Also, it incorporates the α-stable distribution in the GARCH-type model. The issue of the α-stable distribution is that its second moment does not exist. To solve this problem, the tempered stable distribution, which retains most characteristics of the α-stable distribution and has defined moments, is a natural candidate. In this paper, we conduct a series of simulation studies to demonstrate that MRS-GARCH model with tempered stable distribution consistently outperform that with Student's t-distribution and GED. Our empirical study on the S&P 500 daily return volatility also generates robust results. Therefore, we argue that the tempered stable distribution could be a widely useful tool for modeling the financial volatility in general contexts with a MRS-GARCH-type specification.     

Seasonality in foreign exchange volatility

The paper reports further empirical evidence on seasonality in foreign exchange volatility using high-frequency data. Using a basis of the signal plus noise framework, the approach decomposes tick-by-tick Reuters FXFX quotes into a random walk and a stationary component, termed the efficient price and the pricing error, respectively. The efficient price is not directly observable and is an approximation of the ‘true’ value. The pricing error captures the deviation between the observed indicative quote and the efficient price. Under the proposed model, daily and intraday volatilities of the efficient price are estimated. A pronounced pattern of volatility is uncovered and appears related to the daily activity cycle of major organized stock exchanges. It is argued that seasonality in volatility is a symptom of foreign exchange markets. Results confirm Andersen and Bollerslev's findings that significant seasonal effects are one important determinant of overall volatility at high frequencies.     

How is China's coke price related with the world oil price? The role of extreme movements

This paper focuses on the relationship between the world oil price and China's coke price, particularly with respect to extreme movements in the world oil price. Based on a daily sample from 2009 to 2015 and the ARJI-GARCH models and copulas, our empirical results show that China's coke price and the world oil price are characterized by GARCH volatility and jump behaviors. Specifically, negative oil price shocks lead to falls in China's coke returns on the following day while positive oil prices have no significant effects. In addition, current coke returns positively respond to the very recent oil price jump intensity, and a time-varying and volatile lower tail dependence is found between the world oil price and China's coke price. Our results are expected to have implications for coke producers and users and policy makers.     

Regime dependent volatilities and correlation in international securitized real estate markets

This paper studies the role of regime shifts and time-varying volatilities in market integration in a Markov-switching volatility regime environment among the US, European and Asian developed securitized real estate markets. With a two-state volatility model, the study finds the co-dependence, co-movement and synchronization of volatility regime at the high volatility state are stronger between the US and European securitized real estate markets. Although correlations among the markets are higher in a high volatility regime than in a low volatility regime, there is limited evidence of contagious effects during the high volatility periods between some markets. Moreover, the unsecuritized real estate markets are different from their securitized equivalent in the volatility regime characteristics, correlation pattern and level, as well as the extent of correlation change and contagion effect in high volatility state. Thus, the regime-switching results from stock markets may not be automatically extended to the corresponding public real estate markets, and requires rigorous empirical scrutiny.     

OPTIMAL WEIGHT FOR REALIZED VARIANCE BASED ON INTERMITTENT HIGH‐FREQUENCY DATA*

Japanese stock markets have two types of breaks, overnight and lunch, during which no trading occurs, causing an inevitable increased variance in estimating daily volatility via a naive realized variance (RV). In order to perform a more stabilized estimation, we modify Hansen and Lunde's weighting technique. As an empirical study, we estimate optimal weights by using a particular approach for Japanese stock data listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and then compare the forecast performance of weighted and non‐weighted RV through an autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average model. The empirical result indicates that the appropriate use of the optimally weighted RV can lead to remarkably smaller estimation variance compared with the naive RV, in many series. Therefore a more accurate forecasting of daily volatility data is obtained. Finally, we perform a Monte Carlo simulation to support the empirical result.     

Exchange rate volatility and capital inflows: role of financial development

There is vast literature examining the impact of exchange rate volatility on various macroeconomic aggregates such as economic growth, trade flows, domestic investment, and more recently capital flows. However, these studies have ignored the role of financial development while examining the impact of exchange rate volatility on capital flows. This study aims to analyze the impact of exchange rate volatility on capital inflows towards developing countries by incorporating the role of financial development over the time period 1980–2013. In this regard, the behavior of two types of capital flows is examined: physical capital inflows measured as foreign direct investment, and financial inflows quantified through remittance inflows. The empirical investigation comprises the direct as well as indirect effect of exchange rate volatility on capital inflows. The study employs dynamic system GMM estimation technique to empirically estimate the effect of exchange rate volatility on capital inflows. The empirical results of the study identify that exchange rate volatility dampens both physical and financial inflows towards developing countries. The indirect impact of exchange rate volatility through financial development, however, turns out positive and statistically significant. This finding reflects that financial development helps in reducing the harmful impact of exchange rate volatility on capital inflows. Hence, the study concludes that a developed financial system is an important channel through which developing countries may improve capital inflows in the long run.     

Return and volatility spillovers between china and world oil markets

We examine return and volatility spillovers between China and world oil markets. This topic is of great importance because China is the world's second-largest oil importer and has exhibited substantial growth in oil consumption. Extending Diebold and Yilmaz's (2012) method of catching spillover dynamics, it is found that return and volatility spillovers between China and world oil markets are bi-directional and asymmetric. The Chinese oil market is highly affected by world oil markets and exerts an influence on world oil markets, although to a lesser extent. Moreover, the volatility spillover index has increased significantly since the peak of the last financial crisis in September 2008. Although the US oil market impacts China's market most in terms of spillover, the influence of China's oil market on the world oil market has intensified in recent years.