Market effects of private equity placement: Evidence from Chinese equity and bond markets

Research has provided empirical evidence for the stock market reaction toward private placement; however, similar research has not been conducted in terms of the bond market. Using the event study method, we empirically examine the explanatory power of the signaling, free cash flow, and wealth transfer hypotheses based on the reaction of the stock market, bond market, and firm abnormal returns to the private placement announcement. The results show that the stock market has a negative reaction toward private placement, whereas the bond market has a positive reaction. The results also show that the scale of private placement is correlated with the severity of the market reaction. Abnormal returns indicate no significant change both before and after the private placement, and they are unaffected by the scale of private placement. These results are consistent with the wealth transfer hypothesis; however, the market reaction is not attributable to the signaling hypothesis and the free cash flow hypothesis. Extensive research shows that the abnormal returns of private placement change dramatically in non-state-owned enterprises and firms with low credit rating bonds, whereas the bond maturity has no significant impact on the abnormal returns—the wealth transfer effect of private placement is stronger in non-state-owned enterprises and firms with low credit rating bond.     

The COVID-19 pandemic uncertainty,investor sentiment,and global equity markets: Evidence from the time-frequency co-movements

We use daily data of the Google search engine volume index (GSVI) to capture the pandemic uncertainty and examine its effect on stock market activity (return, volatility, and illiquidity) of major world economies while controlling the effect of the Financial and Economic Attitudes Revealed by Search (FEARS) sentiment index. We use a time–frequency based wavelet approach comprising wavelet coherence and phase difference for our empirical assessment. During the early spread of the COVID-19, our results suggest that pandemic uncertainty, and FEARS sentiment strongly co-move, and increased pandemic uncertainty leads to pessimistic investor sentiment. Furthermore, our partial wavelet analysis results indicate a synchronization relationship between pandemic uncertainty and stock market activities across G7 countries and the world market. Our results are robust to the inclusion of alternative pandemic fear measure in the form of equity market volatility infectious disease tracker. The pandemic uncertainty and associated sentiment implications could be one plausible reason for increased volatility and illiquidity in the market, and hence, policymakers should look upon this issue for the financial market stability perspective.     

Market efficiency,asset returns,and the size of the risk premium in global equity markets

An important economic insight is that observed equity prices must equal the present value of the cash flows associated with the equity claim. An implication of this insight is that present values of cash flows must also quantitatively justify the observed volatility and cross-correlations of asset returns. In this paper, we show that parametric economic models for present values can indeed account for the observed high ex post return volatility and cross-correlation observed across five major equity markets—the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, and Japan. We present evidence that cash flow growth rates contain a small predictable long-run component; this feature, in conjunction with time-varying systematic risk, can justify key empirical characteristics of observed equity prices. Our model also has direct implications for the level of equity prices and specific versions of the model can, in many cases, capture observed price levels. Our evidence suggests that the ex ante risk premium on the global market portfolio has dropped considerably—we show that this fall in the risk premium is related to a decline in the conditional variance of global real cash flow growth rates.     

Random walks,cointegration, and the transmission of shocks across global real estate and equity markets

This article presents tests of the random walk hypothesis for the U.S. and world commercial real estate markets along with the world stock market through utilizing appropriate market indices. The augmented Dickey-Fuller and Phillips-Perron unit root tests and Cochrane variance ratio test find each of these markets to exhibit random walk behavior. In addition, Johansen-Juselius cointegration tests reveal that the three markets are not cointegrated. The vector autoregressive model shows little or no predictive power in explaining the variation in monthly returns. The generalized impulse response functions suggest that shocks stemming from one market are quickly disseminated to the other markets within two months. (JEL G14, G15)     

Spillover effects on the sectoral returns for australian and New Zealand equity markets

In this paper, we examine the return and volatility spillovers, together with the trend spillovers on the sectoral equity returns for Australian and New Zealand markets. We find that the return spillovers of industrial, local and global shocks have a limited effect on Australian and New Zealand sector returns, whereas the volatility spillovers play a significant role on explaining the volatility of sector equity indices. Furthermore, we discover that the volatility spillover effects of the global and industrial shocks are greater in magnitude for explaining the volatility of the Australian sectors than those of New Zealand, particularly basic materials, oil and gas, technology and telecom sectors. By employing the trend spillover model, we find that the volatility spillover effects of global sector indices have been increasing over the volatility of the Australian sectoral returns until now. This finding proposes that Australian sector equity market is more integrated with the world than the New Zealand counterpart.     

Black markets and pre-reform crises in former socialist economies

Boycko [Q. J. Econ. 107 (1992) 907] and others showed that wage increases in a socialist economy result in longer queues and lower output. Beyond a certain level of shortages, wage increases may lead to a “near collapse” of the economy. We show that the presence of black markets alleviates this outcome. In particular, wage elasticity of output is always smaller in the framework that includes heterogenous agents and black markets.     

Contagion between real estate and financial markets: A Bayesian quantile-on-quantile approach

We study contagion between Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and the equity market in the U.S. over four sub-samples covering January, 2003 to December, 2017, by using Bayesian nonparametric quantile-on-quantile (QQ) regressions with heteroskedasticity. We find that the spillovers from the REITs on to the equity market has varied over time and quantiles defining the states of these two markets across the four sub-samples, thus providing evidence of shift-contagion. Further, contagion from REITs upon the stock market went up during the global financial crisis particularly, and also over the period corresponding to the European sovereign debt crisis, relative to the pre-crisis period. Our main findings are robust to alternative model specifications of the benchmark Bayesian QQ model, especially when we control for omitted variable bias using the heteroskedastic error structure. Our results have important implications for various agents in the economy namely, academics, investors and policymakers.     

Co-movement in the price of risk of aggregate equity markets

This paper examines the issue of co-movement in G7 equity markets. Earlier research in this area has focussed on the first or the second moment of the return process from different markets. The approach in this paper takes the analysis to a finer level to examine the co-movement between these markets. The price of risk from the equity market is inferred in an unobserved component modelling framework to study the co-movement using a non-parametric measure of association, concordance. The findings of this paper also indicate that the price of risk is more important than volatility in explaining movements in excess return.     

Region-wide connectedness of Asian equity and currency markets

This study systemically analyzes the dynamics of interdependence between the Asian equity and currency markets. The novelty of our study is that unlike other studies that explore either co-movements among equity markets or co-movements among currency markets, we pay particular attention to the interdependence between the two in terms of both return and volatility connectedness. We find that the contribution of crossspillovers between the Asian equities and currencies is substantial for the region-wide connectedness of both the returns and volatilities. We also find that the short-term spillovers are far more important for the return spillovers, while the long-term spillovers are far more important for the volatility spillovers, presumably reflecting the long-lasting effects of volatility shocks. All the results consistently underline the pivotal role of cross-interdependence between equity and currency markets, both as channels for integrating Asian financial markets and as sources of financial contagion across these markets. Our findings will provide useful guidance for portfolio risk management to adopt better hedging strategies for foreign exchange risks involved in the international investment of Asian equities.     

Predictability dynamics of Islamic and conventional equity markets

This study undertakes the challenging task of comparing the weak form efficiency of conventional and Islamic equity markets. Using 12 different Dow Jones indexes that cover 16 years of daily data, we compare the time-varying non-linear predictability patterns of conventional market indexes and their Islamic counterparts at country and continent level by using permutation entropy. Accordingly, we find that all indexes in our analysis have different degrees of time-varying predictability and all conventional markets are found to be more efficient compared to their Islamic counterparts. However, in some of the cases, this difference in efficiency is almost indistinguishable. Our findings reveal that compared to their conventional counterparts, Islamic markets do not necessarily need to carry a more deterministic or predictable structure since efficiency in these markets depends mostly on liquidity, market quality, institutional characteristics and the country/continent specific investment behavior.     

Equilibrium in collateralized asset markets: Credit contractions and negative equity loans

We address a general equilibrium model with collateralized debt, credit contractions, and financial market segmentation. Restrictions on credit access make borrower’s optimal payment strategies–coupon payment, prepayment, and default–sensitive to idiosyncratic factors, even though the only payment enforcement is the seizure of collateral guarantees. We prove equilibrium existence, characterize optimal borrower’s payment strategies, and provide a numerical example illustrating our main results. A remarkable feature of our model is that it rationalizes the prevalence of negative equity non-recourse loans.     

Linkages between emerging and developed equity markets: Empirical evidence in the PMG framework

This paper empirically investigates the international equity market causal links between Central and South-Eastern Europe, on the one hand, and developed countries (Western Europe and the United States), on the other hand, over the monthly sample period spanning from October 2000 to September 2012. Unlike previous studies, we use the pooled mean group (PMG) approach of Pesaran et al. (1999), which is suitable to estimate dynamic heterogeneous panels to draw reliable conclusions. After cointegration is found between the stock markets of interest, the PMG estimates show evidence of each market's sensitivity to the fluctuations of the other markets over both the short- and long-run, supporting the feedback hypothesis. The impact of developed markets on emerging markets is more important than that of emerging markets on developed markets and the bidirectional impact is higher between emerging and Western European markets than between these emerging markets and the United States. These conclusions are robust to an alternative specification, which supports the view that the stock markets are closely interlinked. The findings are of great interest and have important implications for policy makers, investors, and practitioners.     

The impact of equity markets and corporate governance on labour market flexibility

Drawing from various literatures, this article explores links between equity markets and labour market flexibility. Various data sources are used to test relationships for a set of OECD countries, controlling for other likely influences on flexibility such as government and industrial relations institutions. The results are generally supportive as regards employment flexibility: equity market trading activity is associated with shorter job tenure, higher activity rates, and greater employment change over the cycle. However, the relationship between equity markets and pay flexibility is less statistically robust to the addition of controls.     

Credit-based early warning indicators of banking crises in emerging markets

This article explores the role of credit-based variables as early warning indicators (EWIs) of banking crises in the context of emerging economies. We collect data on bank and total credit to the private sector in emerging markets and evaluate the signalling performance by using the area under the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve (AUC). Our results show that nominal credit growth and the change in the credit-to-GDP ratio have the best signalling properties and significantly outperform the credit-to-GDP gap in almost all specifications for policy-relevant horizons. These findings are in stark contrast with the results on advanced economies, where the credit-to-GDP gap is the single best performing EWI. Our results emphasize the importance of caution when applying statistical methods calibrated for advanced markets to emerging economies.     

The outbreak of COVID-19 and stock market liquidity: Evidence from emerging and developed equity markets

The outbreak of the novel corona virus has heightened concerns surrounding the adverse financial effects of the outbreak on stock market liquidity and economic policies. This paper contributes to the emerging strand of studies examining the adverse effects of the virus on varied aspect of global markets. The paper examines the causality and co-movements between COVID-19 and the aggregate stock market liquidity of China, Australia and the G7 countries (Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Germany, the UK and the US), using daily three liquidity proxies (Amihud, Spread and Traded Value) over the period December 2019 to July 2020. Our empirical analysis encompasses wavelet coherence and phase-differences as well as a linear Granger causality test. Linear causality test results suggest that a causal relationship exists between the number of cases of COVID 19 infections and stock market liquidity. To quantitatively examine the degree of causality between COVID-19 outbreak and stock market liquidity, we employ the continuous wavelet coherence approach with results revealing the unprecedented impact of COVID-19 on stock market liquidity during the low frequency bands for countries that were hard hit with the COVID-19 outbreak, i.e., Italy, Germany, France, the UK and the US. Further, evidence shows that there is a heterogeneous lead-lag nexus across scales for the entire period of the study.     

Contagion effects and risk transmission channels in the housing,stock, interest rate and currency markets: An Empirical Study in China and the U.S.

This paper aims to investigate the crisis linkage and transmission channels within the housing, stock, interest rate and the currency markets in the U.S. and China in the past decade since the 2008 Subprime Mortgage Crisis. Two hybrid models, namely the SWARCH-EVT-Copula and the Bivariate SWARCH-EVT models, are proposed and applied in order to take into account (A) the high/low volatility regimes, (B) the interdependence structure inherited from the joint tail behaviours, as well as, (C) the risk spillover dynamics among financial sectors during market turmoils. We empirically show that the housing and stock markets share the strongest linkage and play central roles in the spreading of shocks. With a highly integrated system, the American financial sectors are under greater exposure to risk contagion and systemic risk during crises than the Chinese markets. Nevertheless, the exchange rate risk of Renminbi remains at an intensive level since its “crawl-like arrangement” and leads to increasing co-movements in the stock and interest rate markets since 2014.     

Asymmetry in the jump-size distribution of the S&P 500: Evidence from equity and option markets

This paper studies alternative distributions for the size of price jumps in the S&P 500 index. We introduce a range of new jump-diffusion models and extend popular double-jump specifications that have become ubiquitous in the finance literature. The dynamic properties of these models are tested on both a long time series of S&P 500 returns and a large sample of European vanilla option prices. We discuss the in- and out-of-sample option pricing performance and provide detailed evidence of jump risk premia. Models with double-gamma jump size distributions are found to outperform benchmark models with normally distributed jump sizes.     

Shock and volatility spillovers among equity sectors of the Gulf Arab stock markets

The major objectives of this study are twofold. The first objective is to examine the dynamic volatility and volatility transmission in a multivariate setting using the VAR(1)–GARCH(1,1) model for three major sectors, namely, Service, Banking and Industrial/or Insurance, in four Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)’s economies (Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE). The second is to use the models’ results to compute and analyze the optimal weights and hedge ratios for two-sector portfolio holdings, comprised of the three sectors for each country. The results suggest that past own volatilities matter more than past shocks and there are moderate volatility spillovers between the sectors within the individual countries, with the exception of Qatar. Moreover, the values for ratios of hedging long positions with short positions in the GCC sectors are smaller than those for the US equity sectors. The optimal portfolio weights favor the Banking/financial sector for Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE and the Industrial sector for Kuwait.