Country and industry effects in CEE stock market networks: Preliminary results

In this working paper, the topic of country vs. industry effects in stock returns is explored. An approach based on stock market network modeling is used to assess both effects. Three different network subgraphs are employed: Minimum Spanning Trees, Planar Maximal Filtered Graphs and Threshold Graphs. By constructing the networks for the whole sample covering 2003 – 2012, significance of country and industry effects are shown both by visual inspection, as well as simulation and fitting of Exponential Random Graph Models. The relative importance of country/industry effects are assessed using the indicators “Relative Country Links” and “Relative Industry Links”, in a rolling windows analysis covering the sample period, indicating dominance of country effects

What Drives the Stock Market Integration in the CEE-3?

In this article, we study the possible explanatory power of macroeconomic factors that may drive the stock market integration between the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary (CEE-3) and developed countries, using Germany as a benchmark. Our findings suggest that the recent global financial crisis has affected time-varying correlations between certain stock markets more substantially than the entry of the CEE-3 into the EU. The results of our analysis of the effects of these macroeconomic factors were inconclusive. Only our proxy of exchange rate risk was significant in all cases, with positive effects on integration, thus supporting the presence of contagion among different markets

Fear of the coronavirus and the stock markets

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, stock markets around the world have experienced unprecedented declines amid high uncertainty. In this paper, we use Google search volume activity as a gauge of panic and fear. The chosen search terms are specific to the coronavirus crisis and correspond to phrases related to nonpharmaceutical intervention policies to fight physical contagion. We show that during this period, fear of the coronavirus – manifested as excess search volume – represents a timely and valuable data source for forecasting stock price variation around the world.publishedVersio

Stablecoins as a crypto safe haven? Not all of them!

We test the safe haven properties of the largest stablecoins (USDT, USDC, TUSD, PAX, DAI, GUSD) against the standard “nonstable” coins (BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, LTC). Our dataset comprises high-frequency 1-minute data calculated as volume-weighted averages across 18 exchanges where these cryptocurrencies are traded, thus capturing the entire price movement around the world. Using a quantile coherency cross-spectral measure, we find that only TUSD, PAX, and GUSD can serve as safe havens

The Stock Markets and Real Economic Activity

The goal of this paper is to provide new evidence on the bidirectional relationships between economic activity indicators and stock market returns in four Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries: Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia. Using the single equation error correction model (SEECM) framework of cointegration analysis, the Engle-Granger two-step procedure, single-equation Granger causality tests, and the Toda-Yamamoto (1995) approach, this paper presents results for the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary that are generally in accordance with the present value theory of stock prices. Thus, the stock market indexes for these countries are leading indicators of the state of the real economy. However, as explained here, the results for Hungary must be interpreted with greater caution. In addition, as was expected, the results for Slovakia were very different from those of the other countries.