The impact of foreign macroeconomic news on financial markets in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland

In this paper, we investigate the effects of euro area and US macroeconomic news on financial markets in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (CEEC-3) from 1999 to 2006. Using a GARCH model, we examine the impact of news on daily returns of 3-month interest rates, stock market indices, exchange rates versus the euro, and the US dollar. First, both US and European macroeconomic news has a significant impact on CEEC-3 financial markets. Second, the process of European integration is accompanied by an increasing importance of euro area news relative to US news. Third, there are country-specific differences: for example, the Czech stock market is relatively more affected by foreign news since the Copenhagen Summit in December 2002. In general, our results support the hypothesis of a deepening euro area influence on the CEEC-3 over time and a corresponding reduction in the relative importance of US shocks.     

News and correlations of CEEC-3 financial markets

We employ DCC-MGARCH models to investigate conditional correlations between six CEEC-3 financial markets. In general, the highest correlations exist between Hungary and Poland in foreign exchange and stock markets. Short-term money markets are somewhat isolated from each other. We find that the associations of CEEC-3 exchange rates versus euro are weaker than those versus the US dollar. The persistence of the effect of shocks on the time-varying correlations is strongest for foreign exchange and stock markets, indicating a tendency toward contagion. In searching for the origins of financial market volatility in the CEEC-3, we uncover some evidence of Granger-causality on the foreign exchange markets. Finally, using a pool model, we investigate the impact of euro area, US, and CEEC-3 news on the correlations. Apart from ECB monetary policy news, we observe no broad effects of international news on correlations; instead, local news exerts an influence, which suggests a dominance of country- or market-specific circumstances.     

Municipal Finance in Poland,the Slovak Republic,the Czech Republic and Hungary: Institutional Framework and Recent Development

The recent process of political and economic transition in eastern European countries has not only contributed to the decentralisation of political structure but also significantly enhanced the fiscal autonomy of municipalities in these countries. In this context many similar types of public activities have recently been assigned to local governments, and some taxes were also declared to be local taxes. To be sure, this type of fiscal decentralisation has caused some additional problems, particularly for safeguarding the quality of publicly provided goods and services and for co-ordinating intergovernmental fiscal transfers between the central and local governments. For instance, some criticise that many small-sized municipalities in the transition economies have suffered from financial bottlenecks and have not been able to receive sufficient financial support from the central government. However, such a fiscal devolution trend appears to continue. This study primarily deals with issues surrounding the impact of national fiscal policy and the regulatory framework on local governments' expenditure behaviour and their ability to mobilise necessary revenues under the particular consideration of the institutional and administrative co-operation with the central government and of the less well-developed financial market in Poland, the Slovak Republic, the Czech Republic and Hungary.     

Impacts of China's crash on Asia-Pacific financial integration: Volatility interdependence,information transmission and market co-movement

This paper examines the price and volatility dynamics between China and major stock markets in the Asia-Pacific, investigating the effects of the Chinese stock market crash (2015–2016) for the first time. Employing the Bayesian VAR and BEKK GARCH, we observe that price and volatility spillover behaviours are different during the stable and stress periods. Particularly, price spillovers from China to other regional markets are more significant during a bullish period, showing that ‘good news’ emanating from China has strong impacts on its neighbours during better market condition. In the turbulent period, we observe strong shock spillover effects and enhanced volatility spillovers from China to most Asia-Pacific stock markets. This is because China, as an important trading partner and strategic financial centre shows to exert significant influence on the Asia-Pacific region through various economic channels. We also find that the Asia-Pacific stock markets spill over their shocks to China during the crisis, indicating that China is becoming more integrated with the regional financial markets.     

Foreign News and Spillovers in Emerging European Stock Markets

We analyze foreign news and spillovers in the emerging EU stock markets (the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland). We employ high‐frequency five‐minute intraday data on stock market index returns and four classes of EU and US macroeconomic announcements during 2004–07. We account for the difference of each announcement from its market expectation and we jointly model the volatility of the returns accounting for intraday movements and day‐of‐the‐week effects. Our findings show that intraday interactions on the new EU markets are strongly determined by mature stock markets as well as the macroeconomic news originating thereby. We show that strong contemporaneous links across markets are present even after controlling for macroeconomic announcements. Finally, in terms of specific announcements, we are able to show the exact sources of macro news spillovers from the developed foreign markets to the three new EU markets under research.     

Time-varying synchronization of European stock markets

We study intraday comovements among three developed (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) and three emerging (the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland) European stock markets. When applying a Dynamic Conditional Correlation GARCH model to 5- min tick intraday stock price data (2003–2006), we find a strong correlation between the German and French markets and also between these two markets and the UK stock market. However, very little systematic positive correlation during a trading day can be detected between the developed and emerging stock markets, or within the emerging group itself. Hungary exhibits higher correlation with the developing markets and the emerging markets and its dynamics show an increasing trend; Poland and the Czech Republic produce less clear-cut results.     

How do great shocks influence the correlation between oil and international stock markets?

We investigate the impacts of great shocks (2003 Iraq War and 2008 Financial Crisis) on the correlations between oil and US/China stock markets, utilizing a novel MADCC (mixed asymmetry dynamic conditional correlation) model. This model successfully captures the coexistence of opposite signed asymmetries. We find that great shocks indeed increased the correlations. Further, results from the news impact surfaces indicate that correlations between oil and stock markets are higher to joint negative shocks; however, correlation between stock markets has stronger response to joint positive shocks.     

Macroeconomic adjustment and private manufacturing investment in Turkey: a time-series analysis

Despite the drastic switch to market-based policies and outward orientation in Turkey during the 1980s, private investment in manufacturing industry has still not revived after seventeen years of structural adjustment. This paper examines the main determinants of private investment in the manufacturing sector and the impacts of structural adjustment (particularly financial liberalisation as an integral part of the reform) on it. The results show that liberalisation policies in financial markets appear to have positive effects by reducing the stringency of quantity constraints on investment while the high interest rates resulting from financial liberalisation had no significant impact on investment. Macroeconomic instability, proxied by the variability of the inflation rate, seems to have discouraged investment in manufacturing.     

Daily market news sentiment and stock prices

In recent years there has been a tremendous growth in readily available news related to traded assets in international financial markets. This financial news is now available through real-time online sources such as Internet news and social media sources. The increase in the availability of financial news and investor’s ease of access to it has a potentially significant impact on market stock price movement as these news items are swiftly transformed into investors sentiment which in turn drives prices. In this study, we use the Thomson Reuters News Analytics (TRNA) data set to construct a series of daily sentiment scores for Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) stock index constituents. We use these daily DJIA market sentiment scores to study the influence of financial news sentiment scores on the stock returns of these constituents using a multi-factor model. We augment the Fama–French three-factor model with the day’s sentiment score along with lagged scores to evaluate the additional effects of financial news sentiment on stock prices in the context of this model using Ordinary Least Square (OLS) and Quantile Regression (QR) to analyse the effect around the tail of the return distribution. We also conduct the analysis using the seven-day simple moving average (SMA) of the scores to account for news released on non-trading days. Our results suggest that even when market factors are taken into account, sentiment scores have a significant effect on Dow Jones constituent returns and that lagged daily sentiment scores are often significant, suggesting that information compounded in these scores is not immediately reflected in security prices and related return series. The results also indicate that the SMA measure does not have a significant effect on the returns. The analysis using Quantile Regression provides evidence that the news has more impact on left tail compared to the right tail of the returns.     

THE EFFECTS OF NEWS WHEN LIQUIDITY MATTERS

We analyze the impact of news (information shocks) in economies where liquidity matters, including those with endogenous credit limits, and those with assets serving as collateral or media of exchange. Although we also consider news about productivity and credit conditions, a leading case concerns monetary policy announcements. Real or monetary news has big effects on markets, potentially causing cyclic or boom–bust responses, even though we focus on the unique transition consistent with stationarity after shocks. In particular, policy announcements may induce instead of reduce volatility. We also discuss the implications for the inflation puzzle, forward-guidance puzzle, and other apparent anomalies.     

The effectiveness of fiscal institutions: International financial flogging or domestic constraint?

Many have argued that financial markets are crucial in ensuring that governments maintain sustainable fiscal balances - the so called ‘market discipline hypothesis’. A recent version of this theory holds that both fiscal rules and fiscal transparency are necessary to enable markets to discipline overspending governments. I argue, however, that while these fiscal institutions are effective at improving governments fiscal balances, financial markets are likely not the causal mechanism which discipline governments’ fiscal policies. Instead, I propose that fiscal rules and transparency promote better budget balances because domestic political actors use fiscal institutions to constrain executive policymaking. I test these competing hypotheses of why these fiscal institutions are effective – financial markets vs political competition – and find that country budget balances are increased not as a consequence of financial markets, but when the level of political competition and civil society engagement is sufficiently high. These results are robust to accounting for the possible selection bias of who adopts fiscal institutions.     

The linkages,persistence, asymmetry in the volatility,the price discovery and efficiency,and the effect of the US subprime mortgage financial crisis on the spot and the futures market’s returns: the case of India

This article examines the effects of persistence, asymmetry and the US subprime mortgage crisis on the volatility of the returns and also the price discovery, efficiency and the linkages and causality between the spot and futures volatility by using various classes of the ARCH and GARCH models, and through the Granger’s causality. We have used two indices: one for spot and the other for futures, for the daily data from 12 June 2000 to 30 September 2013 from Nifty stock indices. We have then tested for ARCH effects, and subsequently employed various models of the ARCH and GARCH conditional volatility. The GARCH(1,1) model is found to be significant, and it implies that the returns are not autocorrelated and have ‘short memory’. It supports the hypothesis of the efficiency of the markets. The negative ‘news’ has more significant effect on volatility, corroborating the ‘leverage impact’ in finance on market volatility. We have also tested the volatility spillover effects. The two methods we employed support the spillover effects and the causality is bidirectional. We also have used the dummy variable for the US subprime mortgage financial crisis and found that they are statistically significant. Indian stock market is thus integrated to the world stock markets.     

The effect of political volatility on capital markets in EU accession and neighborhood countries

Political instability has the potential to disrupt financial markets. But how do political institutions affect financial movements in an environment where all institutions are in flux? This paper looks at the effects of formal and informal political volatility in the new EU countries of central and eastern Europe, in the Eastern Neighborhood, and farther afield in Central Asia to answer this question. Using asymmetric GARCH modeling on monthly data, I find that informal political volatility has a significant negative effect on stock returns, while formal political institutions generate much higher financial volatility than changes in monetary policy.     

Effects of US interest rates and news on the daily interest rates of a highly indebted emerging economy: evidence from Turkey

It has been widely demonstrated that asset prices react sensitively to macroeconomic news releases both in the industrialized countries and emerging markets. However, there are contradicting results on the effects of changes in interest rates of industrialized countries on asset prices of emerging markets. In heavily indebted economies, in addition to these factors, political news and announcements from international institutions that may increase or decrease concerns about debt sustainability can affect asset prices as well. This potential notwithstanding, there has been relatively limited empirical work on the effects of such variables. The objective of this study is to quantify the impact of all of these factors on interest rates of a highly indebted emerging economy. Using daily post-crisis data of the Turkish economy we show that both good and bad political news, International Monetary Fund announcements, and European Union related news significantly affected secondary market government securities yields, whereas volatility of yields was affected mainly by bad news releases. Changes in US Treasury bond rates and ‘appetite’ for risk of foreign investors did not affect government securities yields in the period analysed.     

The impact of news,oil prices,and global market developments on Russian financial markets1

This paper analyses the impact of news, oil prices, and international financial market developments on daily returns on Russian bond and stock markets. First, regarding returns, energy news affects returns, while news from the war in Chechnya is not significant. Market volatility does not appear to be sensitive to either type of news. Second, a significant effect of the growth in oil prices on Russian stock returns is detected. Third, the international influence on Russian financial markets depends upon the degree of financial liberalization. The higher the degree of financial liberalization, the stronger is the impact of US stock returns on Russian financial markets. In addition, banking reform and interest rate liberalization efforts seem to dictate the globalization of Russian stock markets, while it is the progress in liberalizing securities markets and non‐bank financial institutions that matters more for the globalization of Russian bond markets.     

Does the currency board matter? US news and Argentine financial market reaction

Using a Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model, we study the effects of the US monetary policy and macroeconomic announcements on Argentine money, stock and foreign exchange markets over the period January 1998 to July 2007. We show, first, that both types of news have a significant impact on all markets. Second, there are noticeable differences in reaction for different subsamples: Argentine money markets were more dependent on US news under the currency board than after it was abandoned as the floating exchange rate partly absorbs spillover effects from the US. Finally, we find that the US-dollar-denominated assets react less to US news than peso-denominated assets, which suggests that the currency board was not completely credible during its final years.     

The effects of economic policy uncertainty on China’s economy: evidence from time-varying parameter FAVAR

ABSTRACT

This article explores the effects of China’s economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on its fiscal policy, monetary policy and a wide range of macro-economic variables using a time-varying parameter FAVAR model. Based on monthly data from 07/2003 to 08/2017, the time-varying structure of the model allows us to capture the time-varying characteristics of the macro-economic variables and which channel is relevant. Empirical results reveal that the reaction of monetary and fiscal policies to EPU is highly asymmetric across macro-economic circumstances. Loose monetary and fiscal policies are adopted in response to EPU shocks during the financial crisis, while policies are moderately tightened after the crisis. The China Interbank Offered Rate (Chibor) responds more sensitively and severely than M2 to EPU shocks. Additionally, EPU shocks have a significant and negative impact on economic growth, consumption, exchange rates, bonds and the stock market, but showing a positive impact on credit, real estate and fixed asset investment (which might be due to China’s special economic market environment and the high investment return). The results indicate that EPU shocks significantly affect macroeconomic fundamentals through precautionary savings and financial market channels but lose their effectiveness through a ‘real options’ effect.     

Fiscal policy rules,budget deficits,and forecasting biases

In this paper, we analyze the impact fiscal policy rules have on budget deficits and forecasting biases in official budget outlooks. Persistent budget deficits and over-optimistic budget forecasts have been observed in many countries in the past, especially in the euro area. To prevent such developments from happening in the future, fiscal rules have been revised or implemented with the aim to strengthen both preventive (ex-ante) and corrective (ex-post) elements of fiscal rules frameworks. Do such ex-ante and ex-post rules differ in their effects? In an attempt to answer this question, we build a two-period model and distinguish between ex-ante rules that apply to budget forecasts and ex-post rules that apply to realized budget deficits. Our model indicates that effectively enforced ex-post rules are more effective than ex-ante rules at reducing budget deficits. Interestingly, ex-ante rules differ from ex-post rules in their effects on forecasting biases. Only ex-post sanctions reduce forecasting biases, while ex-ante rules have no impact on such biases. In addition, we show that political stability and the size of government increase the effectiveness of fiscal rules. If, however, financial markets have a disciplining effect on governments, the effectiveness of fiscal rules is reduced. Our results imply that if fiscal policy rules cannot be effectively enforced, reforming other areas such as electoral rules or financial market regulations might be a more promising approach to ensuring sound public finances than fiscal policy rules.     

Stock Market Integration between Three CEECs,Russia, and the UK

This paper estimates a trivariate VAR‐GARCH(1,1)‐in‐mean model to examine linkages between the stock markets of three Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs), specifically the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, and both the UK and Russia. The adopted framework allows to analyze interdependence by estimating volatility spillovers, and also contagion by testing for possible shifts in the transmission of volatility following the introduction of the euro and EU accession. Further evidence on possible changes in the transmission mechanism (namely, on whether there is contagion) can be obtained by examining the conditional correlations implied by the estimated model over different time periods. The empirical findings suggest that there is significant co‐movement (interdependence) of these CEEC markets with both the Russian and the UK ones. Furthermore, whilst the introduction of the euro has had mixed effects, EU accession has resulted in an increase in volatility spillovers between the three CEECs considered and the UK (contagion).     

Fiscal deficits,banking crises and policy reversal in a semi-open economy

We study the effect of domestic policies and external shocks in a semi-open economy characterized by incomplete liberalization of the financial sector. We argue that in such transition economies stabilization programs can have a negative impact on the fiscal imbalances, offsetting to some extent the very achievement of the stabilization program. We develop a simple general equilibrium model which allows propagation of shocks in the presence of government guarantees and imperfect capital mobility. We also empirically test the impact of positive foreign interest shock on the Indian economy using a reduced form VAR approach. The econometric evidence, though broadly consistent with the main predictions of the model, suggests no significant impact of foreign interest rate shock on output and credit. We conclude that incomplete liberalization of the financial sector in transition economies has two effects. It reduces i) exposure to external financial shocks (like the current credit crisis) and ii) ability to deal with real sector shocks (which may arise from global recession in the medium term) due to endogenous policy reversals and presence of government guarantees.