Volatility transmission in global financial markets

This paper considers the transmission of volatility in global foreign exchange, equity and bond markets. Using a multivariate GARCH framework which includes measures of realised volatility as explanatory variables, significant volatility and news spillovers are found to occur on the same trading day between Japan, Europe, and the United States. All markets exhibit significant degrees of asymmetry in terms of the transmission of volatility associated with good and bad news. There are also strong links between diffusive volatilities in all three markets, whereas jump activity is only important within the equity markets. The results of this paper deepen our understanding of how news and volatility are propagated through global financial markets.     

Linkages between Indian and US financial markets: impact of global financial crisis and Eurozone debt crisis

This paper examines inter-linkages between Indian and US equity, foreign exchange and money markets using the vector autoregressive-multivariate GARCH-BEKK framework. We investigate the impact of global financial crisis (GFC) and Eurozone debt crisis (EZDC) on the conditional volatility and conditional correlation estimates derived from the multivariate GARCH model for Indian and US financial markets. Our results indicate that there is significant bidirectional causality-in-mean between the Indian stock market returns and the Rs./USD market returns, and significant unidirectional causality-in-mean from the US stock market returns to the Indian stock market returns. As regards volatility spillovers, we find that volatility in the Indian stock market rises in response to domestic as well as US financial market shocks but Indian financial market shocks do not impact the US markets. Further, impact of the recent crisis episodes on the covariance matrix is found to be significant. We find that volatility in the Indian and US financial markets significantly amplified during GFC. The conditional correlations across asset markets were significantly accentuated in the wake of the two crisis episodes. The impact of GFC on cross-market conditional correlations is higher for majority of the asset market pairs in comparison to the EZDC.     

El efecto de la volatilidad del peso mexicano en los rendimientos y riesgo de la Bolsa Mexicana de Valores

The effect of heavy tails due to rare events and different levels of asymmetry associated with high volatility clustering in the emerging financial markets requires sophisticated models for statistical modelling of such stylized facts. This article applies extreme value theory (EVT) to quantify tail risk on the daily returns of Mexican stock market under aggregation of foreign exchange rate risk from January 1971 to December 2010. This study focuses on the maximum-block method and generalized extreme value distribution (GEVD) to model the asymptotic behavior of extreme returns in US dollars. The empirical results show that EVT-Based VaR measured at high confidence levels performs better than simulation historical and delta-normal VaR models on capturing fat-tails in the returns of highly volatile stock markets. Additionally, international investors holding long positions in Mexican stock market are more prone to experience larger potential losses than investors with short positions during local currency depreciation and financial crisis periods.     

金融危机对证券市场波动溢出的影响研究

不同证券市场之间的波动存在时变、非对称、非线性相关的特性,尤其是在极端事件影响下,证券市场之间往往会表现出尾部相关的特性。以次贷危机为背景,利用时变Copula模型研究了证券市场间的波动溢出。结果发现无论是金融安全时期还是金融危机时期,均存在美国证券市场对中国证券市场的波动溢出,并且在金融危机期间这种波动溢出效应有增强的趋势。     

MENA stock market volatility persistence: Evidence before and after the financial crisis of 2008

The global financial crisis began with a financial meltdown in the United States in early 2008 and then it had spread to the rest of the world. In this paper we test whether the MENA equity market volatility presents a different behavior before and after the financial crisis of 2008. Using long range dependence techniques we test for long memory in the returns, absolute and squared returns of the MENA equity markets. We subject the series to unit root tests that allow for structural breaks and use the Bai and Perron (1998, Econometrica, 66, 47; 2003a, J. Appl. Econometrics, 6, 72; 2003b, Econometrics J., 18, 1) to test for multiple breaks in the mean returns. The results indicate that the volatility measures represented by absolute and squared returns show evidence of long memory for the full and subsample periods, while the returns show a weak evidence of long memory. Considering the shift dates and corresponding to the 2008 financial crisis, the returns and volatility measures display less evidence of long memory in the after crisis period as opposed to the before crisis period. The change in the returns and volatility dynamics of these markets was due to financial and economic conditions that took place in the MENA region after the crisis.     

Multivariate dependence of implied volatilities from equity options as measure of systemic risk

This paper presents a methodology to examine the multivariate tail dependence of the implied volatility of equity options as an early warning indicator of systemic risk within the financial sector. Using non-parametric methods of estimating changes in the dependence structure in response to common shocks affecting individual risk profiles, possible linkages during periods of stress are quantifiable while recognizing that large shocks are transmitted across financial markets differently than small shocks. Before and during the initial phase of the financial crisis, we find that systemic risk increased globally as early as February 2007 — months before the unraveling of the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis and long before the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The average (multivariate) dependence among a global sample of banks and insurance companies increased by almost 30% while joint tail risk declined by about the same order of magnitude, indicating that co-movements of large changes in equity volatility were more likely to occur and responses to extreme shocks became more differentiated as distress escalated. The key policy consideration flowing from our analysis is that complementary measures of joint tail risk at high data frequency are essential to the robust measurement of systemic risk, which could enhance market-based early warning mechanisms as part of macroprudential surveillance.     

Common trends in global volatility

This paper investigates the long-term patterns in global foreign exchange, equity and bond markets in three different trading zones, namely, Japan, Europe and the United States. Recent advances in the measurement of volatility from high-frequency data are used together with the concepts of fractional integration and cointegration. The specific objective is to consider whether there are common trends that drive volatility in the global marketplace. This so-called commonality in volatility hypothesis is formulated using a cofractional model. The results confirm that volatility in all three financial asset markets, across all three trading zones share a single common trend which lends itself to interpretation as a global news stream.     

Liquidity creation and funding ability during the interbank lending crunch

This study examines the portfolio response of US banks to the interbank lending collapse during the global financial crisis. The paper documents that a bank's response to the collapse of interbank markets is related to whether or not the bank was a net borrower or lender of funds. In particular, we find that typical borrowers had lower loan growth than typical lenders, but that the crisis did not differentially affect borrowers and lenders with respect to loan growth. However, borrowing and lending banks were differentially affected by the crisis in terms of their liquid asset growth. The typical borrowers reduced their liquid asset growth relative to lending banks during the crisis. We interpret this finding as saying that borrowing banks had to reduce their risky asset holdings because access to interbank funds had been reduced. The paper presents analogous analyses of the possible differential response of borrowers and lenders to changes in counterparty risk and lending through the Fed's TAF facility.     

The interrelatedness of global equity markets, money markets, and foreign exchange markets

This article investigates different aspects of global financial markets, specifically relationships among equity markets, money markets, and foreign exchange markets across countries. To represent the three major financial markets of the world, Japan is the proxy for Asia, Germany is the proxy for Europe, and the United States is the proxy for North America. Strong evidence exists that international money markets and international equity markets are becoming increasingly integrated over time. This article incorporates foreign exchange values as partial determinants of equity returns and money market returns and investigates the interactions among these three asset markets from a global perspective.     

Volatility spillover in the foreign exchange market: the Indian experience

We find evidence of significant volatility co-movements and/or spillover from different financial markets to the forex market in India. Among a large number of variables examined, volatility spillovers from domestic stock, government securities, overnight index swap, Ted spread and international crude oil markets to the foreign exchange market are found to be significant. There is evidence of asymmetric reactions in the forex market volatility. Comparisons between pre-crisis and post-crisis volatility indicate that the reform measures and changes in financial markets microstructure during the crisis period had significant impact on volatility spillover. During the post-crisis period, the lagged volatility component that represents persistent or fundamental changes had significant spillover effect on forex volatility, rather than the temporary shocks component. There is evidence of a decline in the asymmetric response in the forex volatility during the post-crisis period in India.     

Dynamic correlations and volatility linkages between stocks and sukuk: Evidence from international markets

An understanding of volatility and co-movements in financial markets is important for portfolio allocation and risk management practices. The current financial crisis caused a shrinkage in values of most assets, an increased volatility and a threat to the survival of several institutional investors. Managing risks and returns within the classic portfolio theory, when correlations across securities soar, is increasingly challenging. In this paper, we investigate the volatility behavior and the co-movements between sukuk and international stock indexes. Symmetric multivariate GARCH models with dynamic conditional correlations (DCC) were estimated under Student-t distribution. We provide evidence of high correlations between sukuk and US and EU stock markets, without finding the well-known flight to quality behavior affecting Islamic bonds. We also show that volatility linkages between sukuk and regional market indexes are higher during financial crisis. We argue that investors could obtain diversification benefits including sukuk in a well-diversified equity portfolio, given their lower volatility compared to equity. But higher volatility linkages and dynamic correlations during financial crises show that they are hybrid instruments between bonds and equity. Our findings are relevant for institutional investors and asset managers that include Islamic bonds in a diversified portfolio.     

Volatility and correlation in international stock markets and the role of exchange rate fluctuations

This paper develops a direct, explicit model for the role of exchange rate fluctuations in international stock markets and examines how and to what extent volatility and correlations in equity markets are influenced by exchange rate fluctuations. Evidence presented in this paper indicates that a higher foreign exchange rate variability mostly increases local stock market volatility but decreases volatility for the US stock market. The extent to which stock market volatility is influenced by foreign exchange variability is greater for local markets than for the US market, due to the fact that exchange rate changes are more strongly correlated with local equity market returns than the US market returns. We find that a higher exchange rate fluctuation marginally decreases the US/local equity market correlation. While exchange rate fluctuations held a relatively large fraction of the variation in local stock market returns, there was no significant influence on the US/local equity market correlation.     

THE ASIAN CRISIS: LESSONS FOR CRISIS MANAGEMENT AND PREVENTION

The succession of financial crises that swept through Asia, Russia, and Latin America in 1997 and 1998 has led to considerable debate about both the role of the IMF and possible actions to limit further crises. Some have argued that international financial markets do not function well and are subject to periodic contagious panics that can be stemmed by an international lender of last resort. This paper argues that the IMF has neither the resources nor the superior information to play such a role. However, there may be a need for an international financial institution that can use its leverage to secure policy changes in the affected countries.
The paper also takes issue with the view that the IMF is simply bailing out imprudent international banks and that measures are needed to "bail them back in" again. The source of the Asian crisis lay in the real economy, but the effect of the crisis was greatly exacerbated by the financial structure of the affected countries. In particular, much of the risk was borne by domestic banks that borrowed dollars in the short-term interbank market and made longerterm loans in the local currency. Public policy needs to be directed to ensuring that the risks in emerging markets are distributed efficiently across both foreign and domestic investors. That involves greater use of equity finance and structured debt, as well as possibly a more direct role for foreign banks in funding local activities.     

Illiquidity and volatility spillover effects in equity markets during and after the global financial crisis: An MEM approach

Even though the volatility spillover effects in global equity markets have been documented extensively, the transmission of illiquidity across national borders has not. In this paper, we propose a multiplicative error model (MEM) for the dynamics of illiquidity. We empirically study the illiquidity and volatility spillover effects in eight developed equity markets during and after the recent financial crisis. We find that equity markets are interdependent, both in terms of volatility and illiquidity. Most markets show an increase in volatility and illiquidity spillover effects during the crisis. Furthermore, we find volatility and illiquidity transmission are highly relevant. Illiquidity is a more important channel than volatility in propagating the shocks in equity markets. Our results show an overall crucial role for illiquidity in US markets in influencing other equity markets' illiquidity and volatility. These findings are of importance for policy makers as well as institutional and private investors.     

The impact of a new term auction facility on Libor–OIS spreads and volatility transmission between money and mortgage markets during the subprime crisis

During the subprime crisis, the U.S. Federal Reserve was concerned about widening spreads between overnight interbank lending rates such as the overnight index swap (OIS) and term London Interbank Offer Rate (Libor). Among the tools it used to counter the impact of the crisis, the innovative term auction facility (TAF) attracted much attention. We investigate the impact of the TAF on the Libor–OIS spread. We find that the TAF has clear initial and sustained expectation effects on the three-month Libor–OIS spread, but no real initial or short-term funding effects, which casts doubt on the usefulness of the TAF in reducing risk spreads. Since the subprime crisis also spilled across the interbank, commercial paper, and jumbo mortgage markets, we further examine the lead–lag relation between Libor–OIS, commercial paper, and jumbo spreads and the volatility transmission effects between them. For the period before the crisis, we find that the three markets behave largely independently. For the subprime crisis period, however, we find multidirectional lead–lag relations and one-way volatility transmission between these markets.     

Mapping the UK interbank system

We present new evidence on the structure of interbank connections across key markets: derivatives, marketable securities, repo, unsecured lending and secured lending. Taken together, these markets comprise two networks: a network of interbank exposures and a network of interbank funding. Network structure varies across and within these two networks, for reasons related to markets’ different economic functions. Credit risk and liquidity risk therefore propagate in the interbank system through different network structures. We discuss the implications for financial stability.     

Taming polysemous signals: The role of marketing intensity on the relationship between financial leverage and firm performance

This study traces the degree of integration and volatility spillover effect between the Pakistani and leading foreign stock markets by analyzing the Meteor shower hypothesis. Daily data are used from nine worldly equity markets (KSE 100, NIKKEI 225, HIS, S&P 500, NASDAQ 100, DOW JONES, GADXI, FTSE 350 and DFMGI) for the period of 2005 to 2014. First, we used the whole data set and after that we split data set into two subsets, First subset of data contains the era of global financial crisis of 2008 from 2005 to 2009 and Second subset is after global financial crisis time period from 2010 to 2014 (The global crisis prevailed till end of 2009). By following the Hamao et al. (1990) technique the univariate GARCH type models are employed to explore the dynamic linkages between Pakistani and leading foreign stock markets. The results from whole data set illustrate that there is mixed co‐movements between leading foreign stock markets and Pakistani stock market. The results from both subsets provide an evidence that there is a unidirectional mean and volatility spillover effect from S&P 500, NASDAQ 100, DJI and DFMGI to KSE 100. Also we found bidirectional spillover effect between DFMGI and KSE 100 from both subsets of data. We concluded that there is only one indirect linkage through which may the information transmitted to KSE 100. This linkage is developed due to the co‐movement among KSE 100, DFMGI and NASDAQ 100 in crisis period. This integration between these markets may provide a sign of indirect linkage. It also exhibits the volatility in Pakistan stock market returns is instigated through direct effects as well as indirect effects. Our study brings important conclusions for financial institutions, portfolio managers, market players and academician to diagnose the nature and level of linkages between the financial markets.     

Local and spillover shocks in implied market volatility: evidence for the U.S. and Germany

The occurrence and the transmission of large shocks in international equity markets is of essential interest to the study of market integration and financial crises. To this aim, implied market volatility allows to monitor ex ante risk expectations in different markets. We investigate the behavior of implied market volatility indices for the U.S. and Germany under a straightforward mean reversion model that allows for Poisson jumps. Our empirical findings for daily data in the period 1992 to 2002 provide evidence of significant positive jumps, i.e. situations of market stress with positive unexpected changes in ex ante risk assessments. Jump events are mostly country-specific with some evidence of volatility spillover. Analysis of public information around jump dates indicates two basic categories of events. First, crisis events occurring under spillover shocks. Second, information release events which include three subcategories, namely—worries about as well as actual—unexpected releases concerning U.S. monetary policy, macroeconomic data and corporate profits. Additionally, foreign exchange market movements may cause volatility shocks.     

Cross-border interbank networks,banking risk and contagion

Recent events have highlighted the role of cross-border linkages between banking systems in transmitting local developments across national borders. This paper analyzes whether international linkages in interbank markets affect the stability of interconnected banking systems and channel financial distress within a network consisting of banking systems of the main advanced countries for the period 1994–2012. Methodologically, I use a spatial modeling approach to test for spillovers in cross-border interbank markets. The results suggest that foreign exposures in banking play a significant role in channeling banking risk: I find that countries that are linked through foreign borrowing or lending positions to more stable banking systems abroad are significantly affected by positive spillover effects. From a policy point of view, this implies that in stable times, linkages in the banking system can be beneficial, while they have to be taken with caution in times of financial turmoil affecting the whole system.     

Did crisis alter trading of two major oil futures markets?

The paper analyzes how traders in two major oil futures markets: New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and Intercontinental Exchange, reacted to the 2008 financial crisis, particularly whether they shifted their trading pattern and whether the relative information role of the two markets changed. Using trade-by-trade data, the paper analyzes several trading characteristics including trading volume, trade size, volatility, bid–ask spread, and relative information share. On average, NYMEX is characterized by greater volume, trade size and slightly greater spread. Before the crisis, NYMEX leads the process of price discovery, and volatility and trade size are significant factors explaining this leadership. However, following the financial crisis of 2008, the leadership role of NYMEX declines and trade size and volatility are no longer significant factors. Contrary to results of most equity market research, bid–ask spread is not a significant factor in information share and causality tests indicate that causality runs from spread to information share before the crisis but the opposite holds during the crisis period.