The hedging effectiveness of constant and time-varying hedge ratios using three Pacific Basin stock futures

This paper investigates the hedging effectiveness of Australian, Hong Kong, and Japanese stock futures markets. The traditional hedge and the minimum variance hedge ratios are all constant whereas the bivariate GARCH hedge ratio is time varying. The effectiveness of the hedge ratio is compared by investigating the out-of-sample performance of the three ratios. The whole sample consists of weekly returns from January 1990 to December 2000. Two 1-year, out-of-sample periods are used: January 1999 to December 1999 and January 2000 to December 2000. Results show that the time-varying GARCH hedge ratio outperforms the constant ratios in most of the cases. This is true using both out-of-sample periods.