Determinants of stock market volatility and risk premia

Summary. We show the dynamics of diverse beliefs is the primary propagation mechanism of volatility in asset markets. Hence, we treat the characteristics of the market beliefs as a primary, primitive, explanation of market volatility. We study an economy with stock and riskless bond markets and formulate a financial equilibrium model with diverse and time varying beliefs. Agents states of belief play a key role in the market, requiring an endogenous expansion of the state space. To forecast prices agents must forecast market states of belief which are beliefs of others hence our equilibrium embodies the Keynes Beauty Contest. A market state of belief is a vector which uniquely identifies the distribution of conditional probabilities of agents. Restricting beliefs to satisfy the rationality principle of Rational Belief (see Kurz, 1994, 1997) our economy replicates well the empirical record of the (i) moments of the price/dividend ratio, risky stock return, riskless interest rate and the equity premium; (ii) Sharpe ratio and the correlation between risky returns and consumption growth; (iii) predictability of stock returns and price/dividend ratio as expressed by: (I) Variance Ratio statistic for long lags, (II) autocorrelation of these variables, and (III) mean reversion of the risky returns and the predictive power of the price/dividend ratio. Also, our model explains the presence of stochastic volatility in asset prices and returns. Two properties of beliefs drive market volatility: (i) rationalizable over confidence implying belief densities with fat tails, and (ii) rationalizable asymmetry in frequencies of bull or bear states.This research was supported by a grant of the Smith Richardson Foundation to the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). We thank Kenneth Judd for constant advice which was crucial at several points in the development of this work. We also thank Kenneth Arrow, Min Fan, Michael Magill, Carsten Nielsen, Manuel Santos, Nicholas Yannelis, Ho-Mou Wu and Woody Brock for comments on earlier drafts. The RBE model developed in this paper and the associated programs used to compute it are available to the public on Mordecai Kurzs web page at http://www.stanford.edu/ mordecai.This revised version was published online in January 2005 with corrections to the Cover date.     

Effectiveness and Effects of China’s Capital Controls

I. IntroductionNations at every stage of development and in every region of the world are more closelylinked through trade in goods and services, through flows of funds and investments ineach others’ economies than ever before. But in sharp contrast to more and more nationsloosening restrictions on international trade, controls over capital flows are still substantialnearly everywhere except in the most developed economies. This is certainly the case inChina, where restrictions on movements …     

The Policy Challenge with Floating Exchange Rates: Turkey’s Recent Experience

This paper evaluates the developments in the Turkish economy in light of the Central Bank of Turkey’s (CBT) policies during a recent period of floating exchange rate system (March 2001–July 2003). It is found that the CBT was effective in containing volatility and reducing the average inflation rate while there was a strong recovery of output. However, there are accumulated risks in the economy. Particularly, the extreme appreciation of the Turkish lira during this period and the record level of real interest rates give the impression that the current state of the economy is fragile. Unless the government accelerates the structural reform process and pursues sound fiscal policies to reduce the public sector borrowing requirement and the debt ratio, an adverse shock to the system may trigger a reversal of fortune.     

MACROECONOMIC UNCERTAINTY AND CONDITIONAL STOCK MARKET VOLATILITY IN SOUTH AFRICA*

This paper analyses how systematic risk emanating from the macroeconomy is transmitted into stock market volatility using augmented autoregressive Generalised Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedastic (AR‐GARCH) and vector autoregression (VAR) models. Also examined is whether the relationship between the two is bidirectional. By imposing dummies for the 1997‐1998 Asian and the 2007‐2009 sub‐prime financial crises, the study further analyses whether financial crises affect the relationship between macroeconomic uncertainty and stock market volatility. The findings show that macroeconomic uncertainty significantly influences stock market volatility. Although volatilities in inflation, the gold price and the oil price seem to play a role, it is found that volatility in short‐term interest rates and exchange rates are the most important, suggesting that South African domestic financial markets are increasingly becoming interdependent. Finally, the results show that financial crises increase volatility in the stock market and in most macroeconomic variables, and, by so doing, strengthen the effects of changes in macroeconomic variables on the stock market.     

基于展望理论的投资组合保险均衡研究

投资组合保险交易策略是在保证一定财富水平的情况下,又不失去从有利市场中获利的机会。投资组合保险者将最低要保金额作为赢得或损失的参照点,这与展望理论所描述的决策行为是一致的。文章引入展望理论的价值函数建立一般均衡模型,模型推广了Basak的一般均衡模型,使其成为一个特例;同时,模型表明投资组合保险的存在将有效地降低市场波动率,进而降低风险溢价。     

Intraday return and volatility spillover mechanism from Chinese to Japanese stock market

We analyze the mechanism of return and volatility spillover effects from the Chinese to the Japanese stock market. We construct a stock price index comprised of those companies that have substantial operations in China. This China-related index responds to changes in the Shanghai Composite Index more strongly than does the TOPIX (the market index of the Tokyo Stock Exchange). This result suggests that China has a large impact on Japanese stocks via China-related firms in Japan. Furthermore, we find evidence that this response has become stronger as the Chinese economy has gained importance in recent years.     

Automatic stabilizers in the Japanese tax system

When studying the role of taxes as an automatic stabilizer, excluding the effects of discretionary tax reform is troublesome. A fruitful approach to identifying tax movements over business cycles would be to utilize cyclical information. From this perspective, we exploit wavelets in order to characterize the automatic response of taxes to output at business cycle frequencies in the postwar Japanese economy. We find the presence of automatic stabilizers in the Japanese tax system under the influence of relatively high output volatility but the absence of such stabilizers during the period of the “Great Moderation” in Japan in the 1980s.     

The Impact of Political Instability on Inflation Volatility in Africa

This paper investigates whether political instability leads to volatile inflation using a panel of 49 African countries. The study uses novel measures of political instability, particularly the state failure index and state fragility index. In the field of political instability and inflation volatility, this is the first study to measure inflation volatility as the conditional variance of inflation estimated from GARCH (1, 1) model. Adopting the system‐generalized method of moments estimator for linear dynamic panel models for the sample period 1985‐2009, the study documents a positive statistically significant effect of political instability on inflation volatility.     

Spillovers in Exchange Rates and the Effects of Global Shocks on Emerging Market Currencies

This paper provides an investigation into the spillover effects of exchange rate returns and volatility for developed and emerging market currencies, using data from 1997 to 2011. The results suggest that spillovers in exchange rate returns have increased steadily over time, in moderate reaction to economic events. In contrast, spillovers in total observed volatility (measured by squared returns) react more strongly to economic events, and this transmission has remained at a relatively high level since the global financial crisis. Furthermore, over the course of time, global shocks would appear to account for a larger proportion of aggregate exchange rate volatility (and the relative importance of domestic shocks has declined). The paper also considers whether the increase in volatility spillover is due to sudden shocks, or whether it is due to changes in the stochastic trend of the underlying volatility process. The results suggests that in most cases, this increase is due to sudden shocks, however, in certain instances country‐specific events may perpetuate changes to the trend of the underlying volatility spillover.