Can the evolution of implied volatility be forecasted? Evidence from European and US implied volatility indices

We address the question whether the evolution of implied volatility can be forecasted by studying a number of European and US implied volatility indices. Both point and interval forecasts are formed by alternative model specifications. The statistical and economic significance of these forecasts is examined. The latter is assessed by trading strategies in the recently inaugurated CBOE volatility futures markets. Predictable patterns are detected from a statistical point of view. However, these are not economically significant since no abnormal profits can be attained. Hence, the hypothesis that the volatility futures markets are efficient cannot be rejected.     

Are interest rate options important for the assessment of interest rate risk?

Fixed income options contain substantial information on the price of interest rate volatility risk. In this paper, we ask if those options will also provide information related to other moments of the objective distribution of interest rates. Based on dynamic term structure models within the class of affine models, we find that interest rate options are useful for the identification of interest rate quantiles. Two three-factor models are adopted and their adequacy to estimate Value at Risk of zero-coupon bonds is tested. We find significant difference on the quantitative assessment of risk when options are (or not) included in the estimation process of each of these dynamic models. Statistical backtests indicate that bond estimated risk is clearly more adequate when options are adopted, although not yet completely satisfactory.     

Can interest rate factors explain exchange rate fluctuations?

The level, slope, and curvature of the yield curve reflect time variation in investors’ risk premia and are known predictors of excess bond returns and economic activity. In this paper, I develop a term structure model under complete markets and no arbitrage to relate these interest rate factors to exchange rate fluctuations. The Gaussian properties of the stochastic discount factors imply non-linearities in exchange rate risk premia that are shown to account for up to half of the in-sample variation in one-year currency returns for different country pairs during the 1980s–2015 period. I find that interest rate factors help explain exchange rate fluctuations in and out of sample, particularly at longer horizons, and yield profitable currency portfolios relative to standard carry trade strategies.     

Can exchange rate volatility explain persistence in the forward premium?

The persistence of the forward premium has been cited both as evidence of the failure of the unbiasedness hypothesis and as rationale for the forward premium anomaly. This paper examines the recent proposition that forward premium persistence can be explained solely by the conditional variance of the spot rate. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence to challenge this proposition. Our empirical results are shown to be robust to the presence of structural breaks. A corollary of the results is that the ‘true’ risk premium contains a long memory component. This is non-standard and has implications for the construction of rational expectations models of the foreign exchange market.     

Do bond yields follow the hierarchy of risk post BRRD?

With a sample of 4,065 bonds issued by 63 banks from 12 euro area countries during 2013–2017, this study investigates how introducing bail-in regulation has influenced bond yields in secondary markets, by distinguishing between non-bail-inable and different classes of bail-inable bonds. The bail-in risk premium does not follow the hierarchy of risk; it is stronger for less risky bonds. The effect on the spread between senior unsecured and non-bail-inable bonds is much higher than for subordinated bonds. Regarding subordinated bonds, the impact is higher for securities excluded from regulatory capital than for those included.     

Idiosyncratic volatility vs. liquidity? Evidence from the US corporate bond market

Our objective in this paper is to determine empirically the extent to which fixed-income investors are concerned about the relative effects of equity volatility and bond liquidity in the cross-section of corporate bond spreads. Our tests reveal that while both volatility and liquidity effects are significant, volatility, representing ex-ante credit shock, has the first-order impact, and liquidity represented by bond characteristics and price impact measure has the secondary impact on bond spreads. Conditional analysis further reveals that distressed bonds and distress regimes are both associated with significantly higher impact of volatility and liquidity shocks. However, the relative impact of these effects varies conditional on the underlying bond attributes and overall market conditions.     

Does interest rate and its volatility affect banking sector development? Empirical evidence from emerging market economies

This study investigates the relationship between interest rate, interest rate volatility, and banking sector development in 12 emerging market economies located around the world. For this purpose, panel data analysis was conducted using annual data from 1980 to 2014. In parallel to the financial development literature, which asserts that banking sector development, as a broad and complex concept, cannot be measured by a single indicator, this study adopts a set of measures of banking sector development. The empirical results reveal that while interest rate has a positive impact on all banking sector indicators, this relationship weakens at higher interest levels, showing a concave relationship between interest rate and banking sector development. In addition, the empirical results provide evidence that interest rate fluctuations have a negative impact on most banking sector development (BSD) indicators, suggesting that the banking sectors of emerging countries are vulnerable to interest rate risks. Furthermore, all measures of the banking sector indicators are positively affected by economic growth rates, while this association weakens at higher levels of income, confirming a nonlinear relationship. Thus, the results have important implications for policymakers in improving the banking system and promoting the economic growth of these emerging economies.     

Can negative interest rates really affect option pricing? Empirical evidence from an explicitly solvable stochastic volatility model

The profound financial crisis generated by the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the European sovereign debt crisis in 2011 have caused negative values of government bond yields both in the USA and in the EURO area. This paper investigates whether the use of models which allow for negative interest rates can improve option pricing and implied volatility forecasting. This is done with special attention to foreign exchange and index options. To this end, we carried out an empirical analysis on the prices of call and put options on the US S&P 500 index and Eurodollar futures using a generalization of the Heston model in the stochastic interest rate framework. Specifically, the dynamics of the option’s underlying asset is described by two factors: a stochastic variance and a stochastic interest rate. The volatility is not allowed to be negative, but the interest rate is. Explicit formulas for the transition probability density function and moments are derived. These formulas are used to estimate the model parameters efficiently. Three empirical analyses are illustrated. The first two show that the use of models which allow for negative interest rates can efficiently reproduce implied volatility and forecast option prices (i.e. S&P index and foreign exchange options). The last studies how the US three-month government bond yield affects the US S&P 500 index.     

International linkages and macroeconomic news effects on interest rate volatility — Australia and the US

We examine international linkages between daily time series of US and Australian 3-month treasury bills and 10-year government bonds from 1987–1995, paying particular attention to the effects of macroeconomic announcements in both countries. The two countries' interest rate data are modeled by a bivariate exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (EGARCH) formulation. The results suggest that market participants believed the Reserve Bank of Australia targeted the consumer price index (CPI), while the Federal Reserve targeted economic activity. Monetary policy announcements had significant effects on interest rates, as well as on their volatility in the short term. US macroeconomic activity announcements significantly moved Australian interest rates, particularly at the short end. Australian interest rates moved significantly in response to the previous day's US interest rate shocks. The conditional volatility of the Australian interest rate changes was also significantly influenced by lagged US interest rate shocks, as well as by surprises in US macroeconomic announcements. Some macroeconomic news announcements raised conditional volatilities, while others reduced them. Overall, there was a remarkable and complex array of linkages between the two countries.     

Can the probability of extreme returns be the basis for profitable portfolios? Evidence from China

Based on the generalized logit predicting model from Jang and Kang (2019), this paper estimates the ex-ante probability of extreme returns and finds that the significantly negative (positive) influence of the predicted crash (jackpot) probability is robust, whether based on the traditional portfolio construction, orthogonalized portfolio construction and Fame-Macbeth cross-section regression. Further analyses show both the behavioral speculators' trading and rational investors' arbitrage limits could be the sources of mispricing caused by extreme returns. Overall, this paper applies a predicting model to estimate the probabilities of the future extreme returns, and figures out the significant influence and possible sources of the crash and jackpot probabilities in China. Portfolios based on extreme return probabilities can be profitable and steady bases for uninformed investors in the Chinese stock market.     

Can the Chinese volatility index reflect investor sentiment?

The volatility index is the implied volatility calculated inversely from the option prices. This study investigates whether the official Chinese volatility index, iVX, can represent investor sentiment. In order to describe investor sentiment comprehensively, we build a three-dimensional investor sentiment measurement system composed of macro, meso and micro level, and decompose iVX into three components to obtain short-term, medium-term fluctuations and long-term trend by EEMD method. The relationships between iVX, its components and sentiment indexes at each level have been analyzed separately, and the empirical results reveal all components of iVX can reflect the investor sentiment at the corresponding level but to which extent they can reflect are not the same. Further we introduce the mixed-frequency dynamic factor analysis to extract the common sentiment factor, which shows stronger correlation with contemporaneous iVX, compared with the sentiment indexes at each level. The ADL model in robustness check also demonstrates the results. Our findings confirm iVX can represent the common sentiment and expectations of Chinese investors in different time scales.     

Can the implied volatility surface move by parallel shifts?

This note explores the analogy between the dynamics of the interest rate term structure and the implied volatility surface of a stock. In particular, we prove an impossibility theorem conjectured by Steve Ross.     

Can central banks be heard over the sound of gunfire?

In this study, we examined the effectiveness of central bank communications during times of significant adverse shocks. Specifically, we examined how the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) regulated foreign exchange (FX) markets during the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022. Data collected from both the black and authorized FX markets suggested that the content of the NBU's announcements significantly impacted FX market agents. Announcements aimed at maintaining a fixed (floating) FX rate prompted an increase (decrease) in the black market premium in cash transactions. Moreover, the NBU's announcements influenced the sale side of foreign currency more than any other aspect, an area where the black market FX traders held near monopolistic power.     

Can science be a business? Lessons from biotech

In 1976, Genentech, the first biotechnology company, was founded by a young venture capitalist and a university professor to exploit recombinant DNA technology. Thirty years and more than 300 billion dollars in investments later, only a handful of biotech firms have matched Genentech's success or even shown a profit. No avalanche of new drugs has hit the market, and the long-awaited breakthrough in R&D productivity has yet to materialize. This disappointing performance raises a question: Can organizations motivated by the need to make profits and please shareholders successfully conduct basic scientific research as a core activity? The question has largely been ignored, despite intense debate over whether business's invasion of basic science-long the domain of universities and nonprofit research institutions- is limiting access to discoveries, thereby slowing advances in science. Biotech has not lived up to its promise, says the author, because its anatomy, which has worked well in other high-tech sectors, can't handle the fundamental challenges facing drug R&D: profound, persistent uncertainty and high risks rooted in the limited knowledge of human biology; the need for the diverse disciplines involved in drug discovery to work together in an integrated fashion; and barriers to learning, including tacit knowledge and murky intellectual property rights, which can slow the pace of scientific advance. A more suitable anatomy would include increased vertical integration; a smaller number of closer, longer collaborations; an emphasis by universities on sharing rather than patenting scientific discoveries; more cross-disciplinary academic research; and more federal and private funding for translational research, which bridges basic and applied science. With such modifications, science can be a business.     

Can trade costs explain why exchange rate volatility does not feed into consumer prices?

If countries specialize in imperfectly substitutable goods, trade costs increase the share of expenditure devoted to domestic output, reducing the exposure of consumer price inflation to exchange rate changes. I present a multi-country flexible-price model where expenditure shares are inversely related to trade costs through a gravity equation. In this setting, consumer price inflation can be approximated as an expenditure-share-weighted average of the contributions to inflation from all countries. I use data from 24 OECD countries, 1970-2003, to estimate a structural gravity model. I combine the fitted expenditure shares from the estimation with actual data on exchange rates to construct predictions of inflation. The behavior of these predictions indicates that trade costs can explain both qualitatively and quantitatively the failure of exchange rate volatility to feed into inflation.     

Does q-theory with investment frictions explain anomalies in the cross section of returns?

Q-theory predicts that investment frictions steepen the relation between expected returns and firm investment. Using financing constraints to proxy for investment frictions, we show only weak evidence that the investment-to-assets and asset growth effects in the cross section of returns are stronger in financially more constrained firms than in financially less constrained firms. There is no evidence that q-theory with investment frictions explains the investment growth, net stock issues, abnormal corporate investment, or net operating assets anomalies. Limits-to-arbitrage proxies dominate q-theory with investment frictions in explaining the magnitude of the investment-to-assets and asset growth anomalies in direct comparisons.     

Can the traditional Asian US dollar peg exchange rate regime be extended to include the Japanese yen?

Using daily data for a select set of four Asian exchange rates, namely the Hong Kong dollar, the Singapore dollar, the Taiwan dollar and the Thailand baht, from October 1985 to October 2002, we apply principal components analysis and the O-GARCH model to describe the evolution and persistence in the correlations over time. We also estimate 2-, 3- and 4-variable multivariate GARCH models, without imposing the assumption of constant correlations, to investigate volatility interaction amongst the currencies. To allow for fat tails in the distributions of exchange rate changes, we use the multivariate student-t distribution in maximising our log-likelihood functions. Our results indicate the possibility of designing an Asian exchange rate system involving a number of the region's currencies.     

Can non-interest rate policies stabilize housing markets? Evidence from a panel of 57 economies

This paper investigates the effectiveness of nine non-interest rate policies on house prices and housing credit using data from 57 economies and periods of up to three decades. We find that introductions or reductions in the maximum debt-service-to-income ratio, and increases in housing-related taxes, have significant negative effects on housing credit, with a typical tightening action lowering the real credit growth rate by 4–6 percentage points and by 3–4 percentage points, respectively, over the subsequent four quarters. Increases in housing-related taxes moderate house price growth, with a typical increase slowing real house price appreciation by 3–4 percentage points over the same horizon.     

Can investors benefit from the performance of alternative UCITS funds?

We study the performance persistence of alternative UCITS funds, which are a hybrid between mutual funds and hedge funds. Persistence is gauged by alternative measures of performance and risk. Based on contingency tables, we find that performance persists for up to 2 years following ranking. However, persistence is stronger in the short run, and ranked portfolio tests indicate that investors can benefit from persistence for only up to 1 year. The evidence for persistence in risk is ambiguous. We link fund characteristics to performance persistence and find that offshore hedge fund experience enhances persistence. Our results are robust against survivorship bias and other potential database biases.