Search Results
Journal Article
Cross-country personal saving rates
Journal Article
Taming the long-term spreads
Given the size of the underlying markets, cutting the cost of capital to firms and households by reducing the yields required on long-term corporate bonds and mortgages is a key policy objective.
Working Paper
International asset allocation under regime switching, skew and kurtosis preferences
This paper proposes a new tractable approach to solving asset allocation problems in situations with a large number of risky assets which pose problems for standard approaches. Investor preferences are assumed to be defined over moments of the wealth distribution such as its mean, variance, skew and kurtosis. Time-variations in investment opportunities are represented by a flexible regime switching process. In the context of a four-moment international CAPM specification that relates stock returns in five regions to returns on a global market portfolio, we find evidence of distinct bull and ...
Working Paper
Are the dynamic linkages between the macroeconomy and asset prices time-varying?
We estimate a number of multivariate regime switching VAR models on a long monthly data set for eight variables that include excess stock and bond returns, the real T-bill yield, predictors used in the finance literature (default spread and the dividend yield), and three macroeconomic variables (inflation, real industrial production growth, and a measure of real money growth). Heteroskedasticity may be accounted for by making the covariance matrix a function of the regime. We find evidence of four regimes and of time-varying covariances. We provide evidence that the best in-sample fit is ...
Working Paper
Forecasts of U.S. short-term interest rates: a flexible forecast combination approach
This paper develops a flexible approach to combine forecasts of future spot rates with forecasts from time-series models or macroeconomic variables. We find empirical evidence that accounting for both regimes in interest rate dynamics and combining forecasts from different models helps improve the out-of-sample forecasting performance for US short-term rates. Imposing restrictions from the expectations hypothesis on the forecasting model are found to help at long forecasting horizons.
Working Paper
The economic effects of violent conflict: evidence from asset market reactions
This paper studies the effects of conflict onset on asset markets applying the event study methodology. We consider a sample of 112 conflicts during the period 1974-2004 and find that a sizeable fraction of them had a significant impact on stock market indices and on major commodity prices. Furthermore, our results suggest that we are more likely to see investor reactions in response to conflicts that occur in highly polarized settings, possibly because the expected duration and intensity of the conflict is higher.
Working Paper
Small caps in international equity portfolios: the effects of variance risk
We show that predictable covariances between means and variances of stock returns may have a first order effect on portfolio composition. In an international asset menu that includes both European and North American small capitalization equity indices, we find that a three-state, heteroskedastic regime switching VAR model is required to provide a good fit to weekly return data and to accurately predict the dynamics in the joint density of returns. As a result of the non-linear dynamic features revealed by the data, small cap portfolios become riskier in bear markets, i.e. display negative ...
Working Paper
Investing for the long-run in European real estate
We calculate optimal portfolio choices for a long-horizon, risk-averse investor who diversifies among European stocks, bonds, real estate, and cash, when excess asset returns are predictable. Simulations are performed for scenarios involving different risk aversion levels, horizons, and statistical models capturing predictability in risk premia. Importantly, under one of the scenarios, the investor takes into account the parameter uncertainty implied by the use of estimated coefficients to characterize predictability. We find that real estate ought to play a significant role in optimal ...
Working Paper
What tames the Celtic tiger? portfolio implications from a multivariate Markov switching model
We use multivariate regime switching vector autoregressive models to characterize the time-varying linkages among the Irish stock market, one of the top world performers of the 1990s, and the US and UK stock markets. We find that two regimes, characterized as bear and bull states, are required to characterize the dynamics of excess equity returns both at the univariate and multivariate level. This implies that the regimes driving the small open economy stock market are largely synchronous with those typical of the major markets. However, despite the existence of a persistent bull state in ...
Working Paper
Why do analysts continue to provide favorable coverage for seasoned stocks?
Research has documented that the first report an investment bank affiliated analyst issues on a newly listed stock tends to be favorable. Our analysis of 16,824 relationships between analyst teams and established listed companies during 1995-2003 indicates that analyst coverage decisions of seasoned stocks are influenced by their affiliations with investment banks and mutual funds. Controlling for market returns, stock characteristics, and a variety of performance indicators, we find analysts are more likely to issue favorable reports when the stock is held by affiliated mutual funds. The ...