International Stock Return Comovements

We examine international stock return comovements using country-industry and country-style portfolios. We first establish that parsimonious risk-based factor models capture the covariance structure of the data better than the popular Heston-Rouwenhorst (1994) model. We then establish the following stylized facts regarding stock return comovements. First, we do not find evidence for an upward trend in return correlations, excpet for the European stock markets. Second, the increasing imporatnce of industry factors relative to country factors was a short-lived, temporary phenomenon. Third, we find no evidence for a trend in idiosyncratic risk in any of the countries we examine.

International stock return comovements

We examine international stock return comovements using country-industry and country-style portfolios as the base portfolios. We first establish that parsimonious risk-based factor models capture the covariance structure of the data better than the popular Heston- ouwenhorst (1994) model. We then establish the following stylized facts regarding stock return comovements. First, we do not find evidence for an upward trend in return correlations, except for the European stock markets. Second, the increasing importance of industry factors relative to country factors was a short-lived, temporary phenomenon. JEL Classification: C52, G11, G12APT model, Comovements, correlation dynamics, Factor models, global market integration, industry country debate, international diversification

Evaluating the Specification Errors of Asset Pricing Models

This paper examines the specification errors of several asset pricing models using the methodology of Hansen and Jagannathan (1997) and a common data set. The models are the CAPM, the Consumption CAPM, the Jagannathan and Wang (1996) conditional CAPM, the Campbell (1996) dynamic asset pricing model, the Cochrane (1996) production-based model, and the Fama-French (1993) three-factor and five-factor models. We use returns on the Fama-French twenty-five portfolios sorted by size and book-to-market ratio and the risk-free rate as our test assets. The sample is 1952 to 1997. We allow the parameters of the models' pricing kernels to fluctuate with the business cycle which we measure in two ways. One uses the Hodrick-Prescott (1997) filter applied to either industrial production for monthly models or real GNP for quarterly models. The second approach for quarterly models uses the consumption-wealth measure developed by Lettau and Ludvigson (1999). While we cannot reject correct pricing for Campbell's model, a stability test indicates that the parameters may not be stable. None of the models correctly prices returns that are scaled by the term premium.

Empirical evaluation of asset pricing models: Arbitrage and pricing errors over contingent claims

Hansen and Jagannathan (1997) have developed two measures of pricing errors for asset pricing models: the maximum pricing error in all static portfolios of the test assets and the maximum pricing error in all contingent claims of the assets. In this paper, we develop simulation-based Bayesian inference for these measures. While the literature reports that the time-varying extensions substantially reduce pricing errors of classic models on the standard test assets, our analysis shows that the reduction is much smaller based on the second measure. Those time-varying models have pricing errors on the contingent claims of the test assets because their stochastic discount factors are often negative and admit arbitrage opportunities