Testing for Structural Breaks and Dynamic Changes in Emerging Market Volatility

This paper aims to test for structural breaks and dynamic changes in emerging market volatility. We typically relate these issues to stock market liberalization since the latter is often considered as one of the most important forces that promote economic growth and rapid maturation of the emerging markets of the world. Using a bivariate GARCH-M model, stability tests in a linear framework and a pooled time-series cross-section model, we show that structural breaks detected in emerging market volatility series do not happen together with official liberalization dates, but they rather coincide with dates of the first ADR/Country Fund introduction and with dates of large increases in the US capital flows. Consistently, the pooled estimation results indicate that liberalization methods other than liberalization via a formal policy decree are the ones that significantly affect volatility.Stock Market Liberalization, Return Volatility, Emerging Markets, Bivariate GARCH-M models, Structural Breaks, Pooled Time-Series Analysis

How strong is the global integration of emerging market regions? An empirical assessment

In recent years, various emerging market regions have actively taken part in the movements of globalization and world market integration. However, the process of financial integration appears to vary over time and differs significantly across emerging market regions. This paper attempts to evaluate the time-varying integration of emerging markets from a regional perspective (Asia, Latin America, Middle East, and Southeast Europe) based on a conditional version of the International Capital Asset Pricing Model (ICAPM) with DCC-GARCH parameters that allows for dynamic changes in the degree of market integration, global market risk premium, regional exchange-rate risk premium, and local market risk premium. Overall, our findings reveal several interesting facts. First, the time-varying degree of integration of four emerging regions, satisfactorily explained by the regional level of trade openness and the term premium of US interest rates, has recently tended to increase, but these markets still remain substantially segmented from the world market. Second, the local market risk premium is found to explain more than 50% of the total risk premium for emerging market returns. Finally, we show that conditional correlations usually underestimate and overstate the measure of time-varying market integration. The empirical results of this study have some important implications for both global investors and policy makers with respect to dedicated portfolio investments in emerging markets and policy adjustments.time-varying integration, emerging markets, ICAPM, risk premium, DCC-GARCH

Does Macroeconomic Transparency Help Governments Be Solvent? Evidence from Recent Data

This paper investigates whether macroeconomic and data transparency standards lead to lower borrowing costs in sovereign bond markets. We essentially show that emerging market countries which subscribed to the Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS) experienced a significant decline in borrowing cost proxied by sovereign yield spreads on secondary markets. However, the adherence of these markets to the Code of Good Practices on Transparency in Monetary and Financial Policies caused a significant increase in the yield spreads. There is no impact of the adherence to the Code of Good Practices in Fiscal Transparency on the changes of sovereign spreads. In addition, the results suggest that a debtor country’s internal liquidity factor (measured by the total reserves to total external debt service ratio) and external liquidity conditions (measured by the yield on US longterm bond) are the most important determinants of emerging market spreads.Emerging markets, Transparency, Standards and Codes, International financial architecture, Sovereign debt and yield spreads

Does financing behavior of Tunisian firms follow the predictions of the market timing theory of capital structure?

In this paper, we show how capital structure decisions made by non-financial firms listed in the Tunis Stock Exchange are affected by the predictions of the so-called market timing theory. Using a set of some relevant variables which reflect the market-timing signals, the firm fundamentals, and the performance of local stock market, we mainly find that leverage ratio of Tunisian firms is short-term driven by their current market valuations. In the long run, the market timing effects are not present at all. Rather, Tunisian firms seem to behave according to the tradeoff theory of capital structure by attempting to adjust their leverage levels towards a target ratio.Market timing theory

Modeling the volatility of Mediterranean stock markets: a regime-switching approach

In this paper we use the Markov regime-switching model to investigate the volatility behavior of six Mediterranean stock markets (France, Spain, Greece, Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey) over the turbulent period 1995-2010. Our results show strong evidence of regime shifts in each of these markets. We also find that the Mediterranean developed markets are less affected by international market events such as Asian and Russian financial crisis than emerging markets.Stock return volatility, Markov regime-switching model, Mediterranean stock markets

Oil Prices, Stock Markets and Portfolio Investment: Evidence from Sector Analysis in Europe over the Last Decade

This article extends the understanding of oil–stock market relationships over the last turbulent decade. Unlike previous empirical investigations, which have largely focused on broad-based market indices (national and/or regional indices), we examine short-term linkages in the aggregate as well as sector by sector levels in Europe using different econometric techniques. Our main findings suggest that the reactions of stock returns to oil price changes differ greatly depending on the activity sector. In the out-of-sample analysis we show that introducing oil asset into a diversified portfolio of stocks allows to significantly improve its risk-return characteristics.

Time-Scale Comovement Between The Indian And World Stock Markets

We propose a wavelet-based dynamic conditional correlation – GARCH approach to investigate the time-scale comovement between the Indian and world stock markets. Our empirical analysis reveals the existence of time-scale-dependent comovement between Indian and world stock markets. The results can thus be used by heterogeneous groups of foreign and Indian investors who trade in different time horizons to actively manage and hedge against the risk of their portfolios

THE COMOVEMENTS IN INTERNATIONAL STOCK MARKETS: NEW EVIDENCE FROM LATIN AMERICAN EMERGING COUNTRIES

We analyze the time-variations of conditional correlations between selected Latin American emerging markets and between them and the World stock market to further shed light on the issues of capital market integration and portfolio diversification. The cross-market correlations are empirically estimated from the Engle (2002)'s DCC-GARCH model. Bai and Perron (2003)'s structural break analysis technique is also employed to test for possibly changing nature of stock market comovements. Main findings of the paper are as follows. First, the degree of cross-market comovements changed over time and has significantly increased since 1994 and onwards, which is to the large extent informative of increasing market integration. Despite the significant interdependencies among the studied markets, room for international portfolio diversification nevertheless seems largely possible. Second, it is demonstrated that the cross-market comovements are subjected to various regime shifts due essentially to major stock market events. Finally, the purpose that stock markets move much more together in times of crisis than in normal times can not be rejected according to our empirical evidence.Stock market comovements, Latin American emerging markets, Multivariate GARCH models, Structural breaks.

What can we tell about monetary policy synchronization and interdependence over the 2007-2009 global financial crisis?

We investigate the synchronization and nonlinear adjustment dynamics of short-term interest rates for France, the UK and the US using the bi-directional feedback measures proposed by Geweke (1982) and appropriate smooth transition error-correction models (STECM). We find strong evidence of continual increases in bilateral synchroni-zation of these rates from 2005 to 2009 as well as of their lead-lag causal interactions with a slight dominance of the US rate. Our results also indicate that short-term interest rates converge towards a common long-run equilibrium in a nonlinear manner and their time dynamics exhibit regime-switching behavior.

Global financial crisis, liquidity pressure in stock markets and efficiency of central bank interventions

In this article, we investigate the hypothesis of efficiency of central bank intervention policies within the current global financial crisis. We firstly discuss the major existing interventions of central banks around the world to improve liquidity, restore investor confidence and avoid a global credit crunch. We then evaluate the short-term efficiency of these policies in the context of the UK, the US and the French financial markets using different modelling techniques. On the one hand, the impulse response functions in a Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) model are used to apprehend stock market reactions to central bank policies. On the other hand, since these reactions are likely to be of an asymmetric and nonlinear nature, a two-regime Smooth Transition Regression-Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (STR-GARCH) model is estimated to explore the complexity and nonlinear responses of stock markets to exogenous shifts in monetary policy shocks. As expected, our findings show strong repercussions from interest rate changes on stock markets, indicating that investors keep a close eye on central bank intervention policies to make their trading decisions. The stock markets lead monetary markets, however, when central banks are slow to adjust their benchmark interest rates