Idiosyncratic volatility and cross‐sectional stock returns in Southeast Asian stock markets

We examine the role of idiosyncratic risk in five ASEAN markets of Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Our research was motivated by the findings of Ang et al. (2006, 2009) of a ‘puzzling’ negative relation between idiosyncratic volatility and 1‐month ahead stock returns in developed markets and the suggestion of the ubiquity of these results in other markets. In contrast, we find no evidence of an idiosyncratic volatility puzzle in these Asian stock markets; instead, we document a positive relationship between idiosyncratic volatility and returns in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia and no relationship in the Philippines. The idiosyncratic volatility trading strategy could result in significant trading profits in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and to some extent in Indonesia. Our study underscores the fact that generalizing empirical results obtained in developed stock markets to new and emerging markets could potentially be misleading.     

Price Linkages in Asian Equity Markets: Evidence Bordering the Asian Economic, Currency and Financial Crises

This paper examines price linkages among Asian equity markets in the period surrounding the recent Asian economic, financial and currency crises. Three developed markets (Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore) and six emerging markets (Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand) are included in the analysis. Multivariate cointegration and level VAR procedures are conducted to examine causal relationships among these markets. The results indicate that there is a stationary relationship and significant causal linkages between the Asian equity markets. Nevertheless, lower causal relationships that exist between the developed and emerging equity markets suggest that opportunities for international portfolio diversification in Asian equity markets still exist.     

Asset Fire Sales and Purchases and the International Transmission of Funding Shocks

We identify a new channel for the transmission of shocks across international markets. Investor flows to funds domiciled in developed markets force significant changes in these funds' emerging market portfolio allocations. These forced trades or “fire sales” affect emerging market equity prices, correlations, and betas, and are related to but distinct from effects arising purely from fund holdings or from overlapping ownership of emerging markets in fund portfolios. A simple model and calibration exercise highlight the importance to these findings of “push” effects from funds' domicile countries and “co‐ownership spillover” between markets with overlapping fund ownership.     

Global market inefficiencies

Using point-in-time accounting data, we estimate monthly fair values of 25,000+ stocks from 36 countries. A trading strategy based on deviations from fair value earns significant risk-adjusted returns (“alpha”) in most regions, especially Asia-Pacific, that are unrelated to known anomalies. The strategy's 40–70 basis point per month alpha difference between emerging and developed markets contrast with prior research findings. A country's pre-transaction cost alpha is positively related to its trading costs, but exceeds country-specific institutional trading costs. Thus, global equity markets are inefficient, particularly in countries with quantifiable market frictions, like trading costs, that deter arbitrageurs.     

The Week-End Effect in Common Stock Returns: The International Evidence

This paper examines the daily stock market returns for four foreign countries. We find a so-called “week-end effect” in each country. In addition, the lowest mean returns for the Japanese and Australian stock markets occur on Tuesday. The remainder of the paper answers four questions. Are seasonal patterns in foreign stock markets independent of those previously reported in the U.S.? Do Japan and Australia exhibit a seasonal one day out of phase due to different time zones? Do settlement procedures across countries bias week-end effects? Does the seasonal pattern in foreign exchange offset the week-end effect in stocks for Americans investing overseas?     

The “reverse” weekend effect: the U.S. market versus international markets

In this paper we find that the “reverse” weekend effect—where average Monday returns tend to be positive—is a unique feature of the U.S. market. During the time the U.S. market exhibits the reverse weekend effect, foreign markets still show the “traditional” weekend effect or no effect at all. The results persist even after we sort the data by week of the month and month of the year. We also find that in foreign markets negative Monday returns tend to follow negative Friday returns. However, in the U.S. market, positive Monday returns tend to follow positive Friday returns.     

The Risk Exposure of Emerging Equity Markets

The low correlation between returns in emerging equity marketsand industrial equity markets implies that the global investorwould benefit from diversification in emerging markets. Thisarticle explores the sensitivity of the emerging-market returnsto measures of global economic risk. When these traditionalmeasures of risk are used, the emerging markets have littleor no sensitivity. This finding is consistent with these markets'being segmented from world capital markets. However, the correlationbetween the emerging-market returns and the risk factors appearsto be changing over time.     

An empirical analysis of the equity markets in China

This paper subjects the newly established stock markets in Shanghai and Shenzhen to tests of market efficiency, utilizing daily stock price data. Using a battery of tests, the study concludes that there are significant inefficiencies present on both exchanges. These can be traced to the unique structural and institutional problems that plague both exchanges. The study also tests for the presence of seasonal anomalies on both exchanges. The results show that there are significant negative weekend and positive holiday effects, but there is no evidence of a January effect or early January effect.     

INTERNATIONAL EVIDENCE ON WEEKEND ANOMALIES

Recent studies on the U.S. market find that the Monday effect is observed mainly when the return on the previous Friday is negative or when the Monday falls within the last two weeks of the month. I look for international evidence and examine whether such properties of the Monday effect are related to another anomalous phenomenon—high weekend correlation. By examining twenty‐three equity market indexes, I find that the negative Friday is, in general, important to the Monday effect. Furthermore, Monday returns tend to be lowest on the fourth week of the month. Although high weekend correlation is also common to these markets, it seems not related to the bad‐Friday factor and shows no seasonality across weeks of the month. JEL classification: G15, G10.     

Extreme return–volume dependence in East-Asian stock markets: A copula approach

A copula approach is used to examine the extreme return–volume relationship in six emerging East-Asian equity markets. The empirical results indicate that there is significant and asymmetric return–volume dependence at extremes for these markets. In particular, extremely high returns (large gains) tend to be associated with extremely large trading volumes, but extremely low returns (big losses) tend not to be related to either large or small volumes.     

International Equity Index and Currency Futures: Commodity Currencies or Emerging Versus Developed Markets?

Equity index futures in both emerging and developing markets that are net commodity exporters are strongly linked to their respective currency futures markets. Unconditional correlations among equity and currency futures are the highest for these net basic materials producers in both emerging and developed markets. Granger causality tests also indicate that stock market returns are more strongly related to currency futures returns for commodity-exporting countries. Additionally, conditional correlations among currency and equity futures returns are the strongest for commodity-producing countries in both emerging and developed economies. Volatility spillover analysis provides consistent results. The overall results indicate that the status of a country as a net importer or exporter of raw materials is more important to the relationship between equity and currency futures than whether it is an emerging or developed economy.     

Predictable risk and returns in emerging markets

The emergence of new equity markets in Europe, Latin America,Asia, the Mideast and Africa provides a new menu of opportunitiesfor investors. These markets exhibit high expected returns aswell as high volatility. Importantly, the low correlations withdeveloped countries' equity markets significantly reduces theunconditional portfolio risk of a world investor. However, standardglobal asset pricing models, which assume complete integrationof capital markets, fail to explain the cross section of averagereturns in emerging countries. An analysis of the predictabilityof the returns reveals that emerging market returns are morelikely than developed countries to be influenced by local information.     

THE OVERNIGHT AND DAILY TRANSMISSION OF STOCK INDEX FUTURES PRICES BETWEEN MAJOR INTERNATIONAL MARKETS

Stock index futures prices for the world's major equity markets, Japan, the UK and the US, are used to examine the interaction of international equity markets. By using stock index futures prices, we avoid the nonsynchronous data problem inherent with opening and closing market averages. We find that the US is the dominant world market; overnight returns in Japan and the UK are greatly influenced by the US daily returns. In contrast, the Japanese market has no impact on the overnight or daily returns in the UK, while the UK daily performance has a small influence on Japanese overnight returns. Slight evidence of over-reaction at the opening of Japanese futures exists as the daily Nikkei returns are negatively related to the US returns.     

The risk adjusted uncovered equity parity

This paper explores the risk adjusted uncovered equity parity model to investigate a degree of market integration for four Asian emerging markets relative to the U.S., Japan and the U.K. from January 1994 to July 2008. The uncovered equity parity is revised to take into account of market risk in a framework of a portfolio rebalancing model. Evidence was found to strongly support our hypotheses; Market risk is significant in international capital flows between the Asian emerging markets and the developed economies, and it can help explain the failure of a traditional uncovered equity (or interest) parity model. The relationship between returns and an appreciation of the exchange rate are divided between the Asian emerging markets and the developed economies, depending on the direction of capital flows.     

Global economic activity as an explicator of emerging market equity returns

This paper evaluates whether global economic activity, measured by the maritime index and commodity index, is a distinct common factor in explaining equity returns in emerging markets. We document two important features of global equity markets that show that emerging market equities are a segregated part of the global stock market. First, our results show that increases in global economic activity are associated with higher emerging market equity returns. Second, companies in developed markets that have a significant exposure in emerging markets have incremental exposure to commodity returns. By allocating more capital to emerging market equities, an investor increases portfolio exposure to changes in global economic activity.     

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.     

Capital Market Regimes and Bank Structure in Europe

We hypothesize that fundamental features that distinguish European capital markets have predictably influenced emerging national differences in bank capitalization and loan growth. Using bank‐level data from 13 European countries, 1998 to 2004, we find evidence of positive effects of “equity‐friendly” market features on bank capitalization and positive effects of both “equity‐friendly” and “credit‐friendly” market features on loan growth. The findings are strongest in small banks and in banks with cooperative charters. Our results suggest that ongoing and prospective integration of European banking markets is mitigated by relatively static features of the equity and credit markets on which banks rely.     

Random Walks and Market Efficiency Tests of Latin American Emerging Equity Markets: A Revisit

The few existing studies on equity price dynamics and market efficiency for Latin American emerging equity markets show conflicting results. This study uses multiple varianceratio and auto-regressive fractionally integrated moving-average tests and new data (U.S. dollar-based national equity indices for the 1987–1997 period) to clarify these results. Documented evidence shows that equity prices in major Latin American emerging equity markets — Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico—follow a random walk, and that they are, generally, weak-form efficient. In sum, therefore, the evidence suggests that international investors in these markets cannot use historical information to design systematically profitable trading schemes because future long-term returns are not dependent on past returns.     

Debt/Equity Ratio and Expected Common Stock Returns: Empirical Evidence

The expected common stock returns are positively related to the ratio of debt (noncommon equity liabilities) to equity, controlling for the beta and firm size and including as well as excluding January, though the relation is much larger in January. This relationship is not sensitive to variations in the market proxy, estimation technique, etc. The evidence suggests that the “premium” associated with the debt/equity ratio is not likely to be just some kind of “risk premium”.     

Are credit default swaps still a sideshow? How information flow between equity and CDS markets has changed since the financial crisis

We examine the information flow between equity and credit default swap (CDS) markets using firm-level returns data before and after the global financial crisis. Before the crisis, the information flow was unidirectional, with equity returns leading CDS returns. While equity returns continue to lead CDS returns after the crisis, we find that the speed of adjustment of the CDS market to equity markets has increased during this period. We also find evidence of a bidirectional flow of information between these markets, with equity returns responding to credit protection returns in the postcrisis period. The quicker response of CDS spreads to equity returns during the postcrisis period primarily occurs among entities with lower credit ratings. In contrast, the response of equity returns to lagged CDS returns during the postcrisis period is observed among firms across different credit rating categories; however, the magnitude of the response is higher among those with lower credit ratings.