Volatility Spillover from the Fear Index to Developed and Emerging Markets

This article examines cross-market volatility linkages among the fear index (VIX), the developed-market index (VXEFA), and the emerging-market index (VXEEM). Analysis on the first moments of volatilities reveals that the fear index has a leading role and has information content for VXEFA and VXEEM. A shock to the fear index spillovers to VXEFA and VXEEM and contributes 57.07% and 63.77% to their shocks, respectively. Further analysis on the second moments of volatilities confirms that the volatility indices are highly dynamically correlated while the fear index drives the correlation dynamics with the VXEEM. Correlations increase in turbulent periods and decrease in tranquil periods.     

Volatility Spillover in Regional Emerging Stock Markets: A Structural Time-Series Approach

Volatility spillovers among the stock markets of Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia are investigated using the concept of stochastic volatility and structural time-series modeling. The results reveal volatility spillovers, in which the Kuwait market plays the major role. It is also found that volatility in one market cannot be explained fully in terms of volatility in the other two markets, but that, out of the three markets, the Kuwait market seems to be the most influential. Some explanations are put forward for why this is the case.     

Returns,Volatilities, and Correlations Across Mature,Regional, and Frontier Markets: Evidence from South Asia

We investigate returns, volatilities, and correlations across mature, dominant regional, and frontier equity markets. Standard & Poor's 500 is chosen as a mature equity market; India is chosen as a dominant regional market; and Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka are chosen as frontier markets. Our empirical tests show that the frontier markets remain fundamentally decoupled from the mature markets during normal market periods. During turbulent times, the contagion effects from the mature to the frontier markets become more pronounced. The results suggest that the dominant regional market plays a key role in disseminating shocks across the frontier markets during normal periods; during the turbulent recent financial crisis period, a similar contagion is not observed.     

Public Information Arrival and the Fisher Effect in Emerging Markets: Evidence from Stock and Bond Markets in Turkey

We examine the impact of inflation on nominal stock returns and interest rates in Turkey's emerging economy, which has a moderately high, persistent, and volatile inflation rate. Empirical evidence indicates that Turkey's inflation increased more than nominal stock returns and interest rates, implying that real returns to investors declined during our sample period. Among the different sector indexes we study, the financials sector serves as the best hedge against expected inflation, and the Fisher effect appears to hold only for this sector. We also find that public information arrival plays an important role, especially in the stock market.     

Stock Market Volatility in an Emerging Market: Further Evidence from the Athens Stock Exchange

We investigate the time series properties of the daily and weekly returns from the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE) index for the years 1987 to 1997. We investigate whether important time-series characteristics have changed significantly over time. The Greek market has recently undergone major changes including complete capital flow liberalization, the implementation of computerized trading, as well as significant increases in market volume and capitalization; we thus contrast the 1987–90 and 1991–97 periods. Our findings suggest the dynamics of the ASE composite index returns have changed as the market has developed.     

Volatility Linkages Among Gold Futures in Emerging Markets

We aim to detect the cross-border volatility linkages among gold futures in emerging markets, which still remain an untapped area. China, India, Japan, Taiwan, Turkey, and U.S. futures markets are included in the sample. The volatility linkage analyses confirm the existence of volatility transmission among the majority of the sample countries’ gold futures. This article carries vital inferences and implications for policy makers and investors. The policy making is particularly important for China, which is a relatively isolated market. From investors’ perspective, the results indicate that the risk diversification and cross-market hedging opportunities in the emerging gold futures markets are quite limited.     

Empirical Analysis of Stock Returns and Volatility: Evidence from Seven Asian Stock Markets Based on TAR-GARCH Model

This paper investigates the time-series behavior of stock returns for seven Asian stock markets. In most cases, higher average returns appear to be associated with a higher level of volatility. Testing the relationship between stock returns and unexpected volatility, the evidence shows that four out of seven Asian stock markets have significant results. Further analyzing the relationship between stock returns and time-varying volatility by using Threshold Autoregressive GARCH(1,1)-in-mean specification indicates that the null hypothesis of no asymmetric effect on the conditional volatility is rejected for the daily data. However, the null cannot be rejected for the monthly data.     

Contemporaneous Spillover Effects between the U.S. and the U.K. Equity Markets

We use high frequency data and the “identification through heteroskedasticity” approach of Rigobon (2003) to capture the contemporaneous volatility spillover effects between the U.S. and U.K. equity markets. We demonstrate the relevance of taking into account the information present during simultaneous trading hours by comparing the results generated by our structural vector autoregression with those of a traditional reduced-form vector autoregression. Our findings clearly demonstrate that contemporaneous relations matter and that ignoring them leads to inappropriate conclusions regarding the magnitude and direction of volatility spillover.     

Random Walks and Market Efficiency Tests: Evidence from Emerging Equity Markets

We use the multiple variance-ratio test of Chow and Denning (1993) to examine the stochastic properties of local currency- and US dollar-based equity returns in 15 emerging capital markets. The technique is based on the Studentized Maximum Modulus distribution and provides a multiple statistical comparison of variance-ratios, with control of the joint-test's size. We find that the random walk model is consistent with the dynamics of returns in most of the emerging markets analyzed, which contrasts many random walk test results documented with the use of single variance-ratio techniques. Further, a runs test suggests that most of the emerging markets are weak-form efficient. Overall, our results suggest that investors are unlikely to make systematic nonzero profit by using past information in many of the examined markets, thus, investors should predicate their investment strategies on the assumption of random walks. Additionally, our results suggest exchange rate matters in returns' dynamics determination for some of the emerging equity markets we analyzed.     

Trading Volume and Market Volatility: Developed versus Emerging Stock Markets

We investigate the relation between volatility and volume in 22 developed markets and 27 emerging markets. Compared to developed markets, emerging markets show a greater response to large information shocks and exhibit greater sensitivity to unexpected volume. We find a negative relation between expected volume and volatility in several emerging markets, which can be attributed to the relative inefficiency in those markets. Previous research reports that the persistence in volatility is not eliminated when lagged or contemporaneous trading volume is considered. Our findings show that, when volume is decomposed into expected and unexpected components, volatility persistence decreases.     

Shock and Volatility Transmission in the Futures and Spot Markets: Evidence from Turkish Markets

This paper examines the volatility transmission mechanism between the futures and corresponding underlying asset spot markets, focusing on Turkish currency and stock index futures traded on the lately established Turkish Derivatives Exchange (TURKDEX). Employing multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity modeling, which allows for potential spillovers and asymmetries in the variance-covariance structure for the market returns, the paper investigates the volatility interactions among each of the three futures-spot market systems. For all market systems under study, the volatility spillovers are found to be important and bidirectional. For the stock index market system, in line with the previous literature, volatility shows asymmetric behavior and strong asymmetric shock transmission. The main implication is that investors need to account for volatility spillovers and asymmetries among the futures and the spot markets to correctly build hedging strategies.     

期货市场的交易量与价格波动

本文检验了美国期货市场WTI原油、S＆P500指数和10年期国债品种的日内、日间价格波动与日内交易量、隔日交易量之间的关系,发现预期的日内和隔日交易量都有平抑期货市场价格波动的作用,非预期的隔日交易量与期货价格波动之间有正相关关系,非预期的目内交易量对价格波动的影响不显著。从信息对称性的角度分析,预期的交易量中含有更多信息,能抑制期货价格的偏离;非预期的交易量主要由信息反馈者提供,他们往往对期货价格的变动做出过度反应,从而加剧价格波动。     

Modeling Time-Varying Volatility and Expected Returns: Evidence from the GCC and MENA Regions

The aim of this study is to investigate empirically the underlying nexus of stock market returns and volatility in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region by using the GARCH-M model. We find that volatility is time-varying in all countries, which indicates substantial variation in the degree of risk across time. However, we do not find empirical support that this time-varying volatility significantly explains expected returns, except in the case of Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, and the MENA region portfolio. Our findings show that stock return volatility is negatively correlated with stock returns in these three markets under the assumption of investor risk aversion. This lends some support to the hypothesis of a volatility-driven negative relationship in the literature. The policy implications of our results are discussed.     

Jump Spillover in International Equity Markets

In this article we study jump spillover effects between a numberof country equity indexes. In order to identify the latent historicaljumps of each index, we use a Bayesian approach to estimatea jump-diffusion model on each index. We look at the simultaneousjump intensities of pairs of countries and the probabilitiesthat jumps in large countries cause jumps or unusually largereturns in other countries. In all cases, we find significantevidence of jump spillover. In addition, we find that jump spilloverseems to be particularly large between countries that belongto the same regions and have similar industry structures, whereas,interestingly, the sample correlations between the countrieshave difficulties in capturing the jump spillover effects.     

Credit Spread Changes and Equity Volatility: Evidence from Daily Data

We investigate the determinants of daily changes in credit spreads in the U.S. corporate bond market. Using a sample of liquid investment grade and high‐yield bonds, we show that both systematic bond and stock market factors as well as idiosyncratic equity market factors affect changes in the yield spread at the daily frequency. In particular, we find that increase in stock market volatility has a positive effect on changes in the spread of corporate bonds over the corresponding Treasuries beyond that captured by standard term structure variables. Our results show that there is an almost contemporaneous inverse relationship between changes in the bond yield spread and the stock return of the issuing firm.     

Regulation Change and Volatility Spillovers: Evidence from China's Stock Markets

This paper investigates the structural changes of volatility spillovers between Chinese A-share and B-share markets induced by a regulation change on February 19, 2001, that allowed Chinese domestic investors to trade in the B-share market. The empirical results of the study, using high-frequency intraday data collected from a sample of seventy-eight firms issuing both A-shares and B-shares and employing a bivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model, show that after the regulation change, the volatility in A-shares increases the volatility in B-shares, thus increasing the risk of the whole market, whereas the latter reduces the former, thus reducing the risk of the whole market. A further investigation of the determinants influencing these structural changes shows that the following factors can encourage structural changes that reduce overall market risk: government ownership, institutional ownership, firm size, B-share proportion, and market-to-book ratio. Conversely, the following factors can encourage structural changes that increase overall market risk: dual roles of chief executive officer and chairman and the joint effect of firm size and B-share proportion.     

Volatility‐Spillover Effects in European Bond Markets

Volatility spillover from the US and aggregate European bond markets into individual European bond markets using a GARCH volatility‐spillover model is analysed. Strong statistical evidence of volatility spillover from the US and aggregate European bond markets is found. For EMU countries, the US volatility‐spillover effects are rather weak (in economic terms) whereas the European volatility‐spillover effects are strong. The bond markets of EMU countries have become much more integrated after the introduction of the euro, and in recent years they have become close to being perfectly integrated. The main driver of the integration appears to be convergence in interest rates.     

Asymmetric Price and Volatility Adjustments in Emerging Asian Stock Markets

This paper tests the hypothesis that stock returns in emerging stock markets adjust asymmetrically to past information. The evidence suggests that both the conditional mean and the conditional variance respond asymmetrically to past information. In agreement with studies dealing with developed stock markets, the conditional variance is an asymmetrical function of past innovations, rising proportionately more during market declines. More importantly, the conditional mean is also an asymmetrical function of past returns. Specifically, positive past returns are more persistent than negative past returns of an equal magnitude. This behaviour is consistent with an asymmetric partial adjustment price model where news suggesting overpricing (negative returns) are incorporated faster into current prices than news suggesting underpricing (positive returns). Furthermore, the asymmetric adjustment of prices to past information could be partially responsible for the asymmetries in the conditional variance if the degree of adjustment and the level of volatility are positively related.     

Interdependence and Volatility Spillovers Under Market Liberalization: The Case of Istanbul Stock Exchange

This paper analyzes stock returns and volatility relations between the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) and the global market as represented by stock markets in the US, the UK, Japan and Germany. Results from monthly data and multivariate cointegration tests suggest that the ISE became significantly integrated in the global market only in the period following market liberalization in late 1989. We also find evidence based on GARCH estimations that capital liberalization actually mitigated, rather than intensified, volatility in the ISE. Our results further suggest that the Asian crisis in mid‐1997 and the consequent Russian economic meltdown in mid‐1998 are partly responsible for the recent excessive volatility in the Turkish market. The results also identify the US and the UK markets as dominate sources of volatility spillovers for the ISE, even in the period following the Asian‐Russian crises. Consequently, it appears that the two matured markets of the US and the UK shoulder significant responsibility for the stability and financial health of smaller emerging markets like the ISE.     

The Importance of Industry and Country Effects in the EMU Equity Markets

Most empirical studies find that country effects are larger than industry effects in stock returns, although industry effects have gained in importance recently. Our results support the dominance of country effects relative to industry and common effects in the EMU equity markets in the 1975–2001 period. However, there is an increasing importance of industry effect relative to country effect in the 1990s. In fact, industry effects is similar in magnitude to country effect in the post‐euro period. The evolution of the ratio of country to industry effect is explained by the decrease in the cross‐sectional variance of interest rate movements across EMU countries. Thus, there is evidence that nominal convergence has reduced the differences between national equity markets.