Exchange-rate return predictability and the adaptive markets hypothesis: Evidence from major foreign exchange rates

This study examines return predictability of major foreign exchange rates by testing for martingale difference hypothesis (MDH) using daily and weekly nominal exchange rates from 1975 to 2009. We use three alternative tests for the MDH, which include the wild bootstrap automatic variance ratio test, generalized spectral test, and Dominguez–Lobato consistent tests. We evaluate time-varying return predictability by applying these tests with fixed-length moving sub-sample windows. While exchange rate returns are found to be unpredictable most of times, we do observe a number of episodes of statistically significant return predictability. They are mostly associated with the major events such as coordinated central bank interventions and financial crises. This finding suggests that return predictability of foreign exchange rates occurs from time to time depending on changing market conditions, consistent with the implications of the adaptive markets hypothesis.     

The 52-week high momentum strategy in international stock markets

We study the 52-week high momentum strategy in international stock markets proposed by George and Hwang [George, T., Hwang, C.Y., 2004. The 52-week high and momentum investing. Journal of Finance 59, 2145-2176.]. This strategy produces profits in 18 of the 20 markets studied, and the profits are significant in 10 markets. The 52-week high momentum profits exist independently from the Jegadeesh and Titman [Jegadeesh, N., Titman, S., 1993. Returns to buying winners and selling losers: implications for market efficiency. Journal of Finance 48, 65-91.] individual stock and Moskowitz and Grinblatt [Moskowitz, T.J., Grinblatt, M., 1999. Do industries explain momentum? Journal of Finance 54, 1249-1290] industry momentum strategies. These profits do not show reversals in the long run. We find that the 52-week high is a better predictor of future returns than macroeconomic risk factors or the acquisition price. The individualism index, a proxy to the level of overconfidence, has no explanatory power to the variations of the 52-week high momentum profits across different markets. However, the profits are no longer significant in most markets once transaction costs are taken into account.     

The asset growth effect: Insights from international equity markets

Firms with higher asset growth rates subsequently experience lower stock returns in international equity markets, consistent with the U.S. evidence. This negative effect of asset growth on returns is stronger in more developed capital markets and markets where stocks are more efficiently priced, but is unrelated to country characteristics representing limits to arbitrage, investor protection, and accounting quality. The evidence suggests that the cross-sectional relation between asset growth and stock return is more likely due to an optimal investment effect than due to overinvestment, market timing, or other forms of mispricing.     

Volume and skewness in international equity markets

We examine the relation between trading volume and skewness in 11 international stock markets using daily and monthly data from January 1980 to August 2004. We construct single equation and VAR models of the relation between the first three moments of market returns and trading volumes. Our results show hitherto unrecognised channels of influence, and support the investor heterogeneity approach to explaining return asymmetries.     

Stock returns and volatility following the September 11 attacks: Evidence from 53 equity markets

September 11 attacks matter, and why not? Given that globalization has integrated financial markets, the magnitudes of the effect of the September 11 attacks on global markets are expected to be pervasive. We used data from 53 equity markets to investigate the short term impact of the September 11 attacks on markets' returns and volatility. Our empirical findings indicate that the impact of the attacks resulted in significant increases in volatility across regions and over the study period. However, stock returns experienced significant negative returns in the short-run but recovered quickly afterwards. Nevertheless, we find that the impact of the attacks on financial markets varied across regions. The implication here is that the less integrated regions (e.g., Middle East and North Africa) are with the international economy, the less exposed they are to shocks.     

Global private information in international equity markets

This paper studies international equity markets when some investors have private information that is valuable for trading in many countries simultaneously. We use a dynamic model of equity trading to show that global private information helps explain US investors’ trading behavior and performance. In particular, the model predicts global return chasing (positive co-movement of US investors’ net purchases with returns in many countries) which we show to be present in the data. Return chasing in our model can be due to superior performance of US investors, not inferior knowledge or naive trend-following. We also show that trades due to private information are strongly correlated across countries. A common (global) factor accounts for about half their variation.     

International stock return predictability under model uncertainty

This paper examines return predictability when the investor is uncertain about the right state variables. A novel feature of the model averaging approach used in this paper is to account for finite-sample bias of the coefficients in the predictive regressions. Drawing on an extensive international dataset, we find that interest-rate related variables are usually among the most prominent predictive variables, whereas valuation ratios perform rather poorly. Yet, predictability of market excess returns weakens substantially, once model uncertainty is accounted for. We document notable differences in the degree of in-sample and out-of-sample predictability across different stock markets. Overall, these findings suggest that return predictability is neither a uniform, nor a universal feature across international capital markets.     

Do industries lead stock markets?

We investigate whether the returns of industry portfolios predict stock market movements. In the US, a significant number of industry returns, including retail, services, commercial real estate, metal, and petroleum, forecast the stock market by up to two months. Moreover, the propensity of an industry to predict the market is correlated with its propensity to forecast various indicators of economic activity. The eight largest non-US stock markets show remarkably similar patterns. These findings suggest that stock markets react with a delay to information contained in industry returns about their fundamentals and that information diffuses only gradually across markets.     

Correlation dynamics in equity markets: evidence from India

This study is aimed at understanding the correlation dynamics of the equity markets from a developing country perspective using daily data from July 1997 to August 2006. A simple unconditional correlation estimate and dynamic time varying correlation estimate from a DCC-MVGARCH of Engle and Sheppard (2001) are derived for S&P CNX Nifty and other 10 world indices that includes four developed and six Asian country indices. The results show low correlation across S&P CNX Nifty with both Asian and developed nations. In addition a Logistic Smooth Transition Regression (LSTR) model is implemented and finds that the S&P CNX Nifty index is moving towards a better integration with other world markets but not at a very noteworthy phase. The low correlation provides space for the global funds to diversify risk in Indian markets.     

Explaining underpricing of IPOs in frontier markets: Evidence from the Nigeria Stock Exchange

The paper provides empirical analyses of IPO underpricing on the Nigerian Stock Exchange, from the period 1990 to 2006. The results indicate an average abnormal initial day returns of 43.1%. There is evidence of long-run underperformance of 0.6%. Results from our regression model explaining initial abnormal returns for the IPOs of Nigeria show that size of firm and audit quality are important variables affecting underpricing. The results also show the presence of a non-linear relationship between the offer price and underpricing.     

Competitive inventory management in Treasury markets

We decompose US Treasury bid-ask spreads into inventory, adverse selection and order processing costs by using the fact that inventory trades have different effects on spreads than do proprietary trades. We exploit this asymmetry and develop a technique to identify the three components of the spread in order to test three hypotheses: dealers make larger changes to inventory (1) following macroeconomic announcements (2) at the start and toward the end of the New York trading hours, and (3) when transaction sizes are relatively large. We test these predictions using GovPX data for on-the-run 2-year and 10-year Treasury Notes. All three predictions are supported. We also assess how primary dealers react to the Federal Reserve’s open market operations (OMOs). Our findings reveal interesting intraday patterns in the inventory component for both securities.     

The wandering weekday effect in major stock markets

This paper reports a wandering weekday effect: the pattern of day seasonality in stock market returns is not fixed, as assumed in the Monday or weekend effects, but changes over time. Analysing daily closing prices in eleven major stock markets during 1993–2007, our results show that the wandering weekday is not conditional on average returns in the previous week (the “twist” in the Monday effect). Nor does it diminish through the period of analysis. The results have important implications for market efficiency, and help to reconcile mixed findings in previous studies, including the reported disappearance of the weekday effect in recent years.     

An empirical analysis of herd behavior in global stock markets

This paper examines herding behavior in global markets. By applying daily data for 18 countries from May 25, 1988, through April 24, 2009, we find evidence of herding in advanced stock markets (except the US) and in Asian markets. No evidence of herding is found in Latin American markets. Evidence suggests that stock return dispersions in the US play a significant role in explaining the non-US market’s herding activity. With the exceptions of the US and Latin American markets, herding is present in both up and down markets, although herding asymmetry is more profound in Asian markets during rising markets. Evidence suggests that crisis triggers herding activity in the crisis country of origin and then produces a contagion effect, which spreads the crisis to neighboring countries. During crisis periods, we find supportive evidence for herding formation in the US and Latin American markets.     

Asset fire sales (and purchases) in equity markets

This paper examines institutional price pressure in equity markets by studying mutual fund transactions caused by capital flows from 1980 to 2004. Funds experiencing large outflows tend to decrease existing positions, which creates price pressure in the securities held in common by distressed funds. Similarly, the tendency among funds experiencing large inflows to expand existing positions creates positive price pressure in overlapping holdings. Investors who trade against constrained mutual funds earn significant returns for providing liquidity. In addition, future flow-driven transactions are predictable, creating an incentive to front-run the anticipated forced trades by funds experiencing extreme capital flows.     

Simultaneous monetary policy announcements and international stock markets response: An intraday analysis

This paper investigates the return and volatility response of major European and US equity indices to monetary policy surprises by utilizing extensive intraday data on 5-min price quotes along with a comprehensive dataset on monetary policy decisions and macroeconomic news announcements. The results indicate that the monetary policy decisions generally exert immediate and significant influence on stock index returns and volatilities in both European and the US markets. The findings also show that press conferences held by the European Central Bank (ECB) that follow monetary policy decisions on the same day have a clear impact on European index return volatilities. This implies that they convey additional important information to market participants. Overall, our analysis suggests that the use of high frequency data is critical to separate the effect of monetary policy actions from those of macroeconomic news announcements on stock index returns and volatilities.     

Varying risk premia in international bond markets

Cochrane and Piazzesi [Cochrane, J.H., Piazzesi, M., 2005. Bond risk premia. American Economic Review 95, 138–160] use forward rates to forecast future bond returns. We extend their approach by applying their model to international bond markets. Our results indicate that the unrestricted Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005) model has a reasonable forecasting power for future bond returns. The restricted model, however, does not perform as well on an international level. Furthermore, we cannot confirm the systematic tent shape of the estimated parameters found by Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005). The forecasting models are used to implement various trading strategies. These strategies exhibit high information ratios when implemented in individual countries or on an international level and outperform alternative approaches. We introduce an alternative specification to forecast future bond returns and achieve superior risk-adjusted returns in our trading strategy. Bayesian model averaging is used to enhance the performance of the proposed trading strategy.     

Empirical relationship between macroeconomic volatility and stock returns: Evidence from Latin American markets

Emerging market stock returns have been characterized as having higher volatility than returns in the more developed markets. But previous studies give little attention to the fundamentals driving the reported levels of volatility. This paper investigates whether dynamics in key macroeconomic indicators like exchange rates, interest rates, industrial production and money supply in four Latin American countries significantly explain market returns. The MSCI world index and the U.S. 3-month T-bill yield are also included to proxy the effects of global variables. Using a six-variable vector autoregressive (VAR) model, the study finds that the global factors are consistently significant in explaining returns in all the markets. The country variables are found to impact the markets at varying significance and magnitudes. These findings may have important implications for decision-making by investors and national policymakers.     

Stock price synchronicity and analyst coverage in emerging markets

This paper examines the relation between the stock price synchronicity and analyst activity in emerging markets. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that security analysts specialize in the production of firm-specific information, we find that securities which are covered by more analysts incorporate greater (lesser) market-wide (firm-specific) information. Using the R² statistics of the market model as a measure of synchronicity of stock price movement, we find that greater analyst coverage increases stock price synchronicity. Furthermore, after controlling for the influence of firm size on the lead–lag relation, we find that the returns of high analyst-following portfolio lead returns of low analyst-following portfolio more than vice versa. We also find that the aggregate change in the earnings forecasts in a high analyst-following portfolio affects the aggregate returns of the portfolio itself as well as those of the low analyst-following portfolio, whereas the aggregate change in the earnings forecasts of the low analyst-following portfolio have no predictive ability. Finally, when the forecast dispersion is high, the effect of analyst coverage on stock price synchronicity is reduced.     

The relationship between risk and expected return in Europe

We employ MIDAS (mixed data sampling) to study the risk–expected return trade-off in several European stock indices. Using MIDAS, we report that in most indices there is a significant positive relationship between risk and expected return. This strongly contrasts with the result we obtain when we employ both symmetric and asymmetric GARCH models for conditional variance. We also find that asymmetric specifications of the variance process within the MIDAS framework improve the relationship between risk and expected return. As an additional application, we analyze the extent to which European stock markets are integrated, which is a particularly relevant issue, especially following the launch of the Euro in January 1999. Finally, we propose a bivariate MIDAS specification to test the pricing significance of the hedging component within an intertemporal risk–return trade-off with multiple European market indices.     

Time-varying market integration and stock and bond return concordance in emerging markets

We investigate the extent to which emerging stock market integration affects the joint behavior of stock and bond returns using a two-stage semi-parametric approach. Using a sample of 18 emerging markets, we find an unambiguous and robust link between emerging stock market integration and stock–bond return decoupling. We explain this with a decline in the segmentation risk premia in equities modeled by De Jong and De Roon [De Jong, F., De Roon, F.A., 2005. Time-varying market integration and expected returns in emerging markets. Journal of Financial Economics 78, 583–613] that leads to increased demand for stocks and reduced or unchanged demand for bonds. Our findings deliver new insights into the financial liberalization and stock–bond comovement literatures.