Essays on Risk and Uncertainty in Economics and Finance

Essays on Risk and Uncertainty in Economics and Finance
Author: Jorge Mario Uribe Gil
Publisher: Ed. Universidad de Cantabria
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2022-11-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 8417888756

This book adds to the resolution of two problems in finance and economics: i) what is macro-financial uncertainty? : How to measure it? How is it different from risk? How important is it for the financial markets? And ii) what sort of asymmetries underlie financial risk and uncertainty propagation across the global financial markets? That is, how risk and uncertainty change according to factors such as market states or market participants. In Chapter 2, which is entitled “Momentum Uncertainties”, the relationship between macroeconomic uncertainty and the abnormal returns of a momentum trading strategy in the stock market is studies. We show that high levels of uncertainty in the economy impact negatively and significantly the returns of a portfolio of stocks that consist of buying past winners and selling past losers. High uncertainty reduces below zero the abnormal returns of momentum, extinguishes the Sharpe ratio of the momentum strategy, while increases the probability of momentum crashes both by increasing the skewness and the kurtosis of the momentum return distribution. Uncertainty acts as an economic regime that underlies abrupt changes over time of the returns generated by momentum strategies. In Chapter 3, “Measuring Uncertainty in the Stock Market”, a new index for measuring stock market uncertainty on a daily basis is proposed. The index considers the inherent differentiation between uncertainty and the common variations between the series. The second contribution of chapter 3 is to show how this financial uncertainty index can also serve as an indicator of macroeconomic uncertainty. Finally, the dynamic relationship between uncertainty and the series of consumption, interest rates, production and stock market prices, among others, is analized. In chapter 4: “Uncertainty, Systemic Shocks and the Global Banking Sector: Has the Crisis Modified their Relationship?” we explore the stability of systemic risk and uncertainty propagation among financial institutions in the global economy, and show that it has remained stable over the last decade. Additionally, a new simple tool for measuring the resilience of financial institutions to these systemic shocks is provided. We examine the characteristics and stability of systemic risk and uncertainty, in relation to the dynamics of the banking sector stock returns. This sort of evidence is supportive of past claims, made in the field of macroeconomics, which hold that during the global financial crisis the financial system may have faced stronger versions of traditional shocks rather than a new type of shock. In chapter 5, “Currency downside risk, liquidity, and financial stability”, downside risk propagation across global currency markets and the ways in which it is related to liquidity is analyzed. Two primary contributions to the literature follow. First, tail-spillovers between currencies in the global FX market are estimated. This index is easy to build and does not require intraday data, which constitutes an important advantage. Second, we show that turnover is related to risk spillovers in global currency markets. Chapter 6 is entitled “Spillovers from the United States to Latin American and G7 Stock Markets: A VAR-Quantile Analysis”. This chapter contributes to the studies of contagion, market integration and cross-border spillovers during both regular and crisis episodes by carrying out a multivariate quantile analysis. It focuses on Latin American stock markets, which have been characterized by a highly positive dynamic in recent decades, in terms of market capitalization and liquidity ratios, after a far-reaching process of market liberalization and reforms to pension funds across the continent during the 80s and 90s. We document smaller dependences between the LA markets and the US market than those between the US and the developed economies, especially in the highest and lowest quantiles.

Essays in Financial Economics

Essays in Financial Economics
Author: Rita Biswas
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2019-10-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1789733898

This volume, dedicated to John W. Kensinger, explores a variety of topics in financial economics, including firm growth, investment risks, and the profitability of the banking industry. With its global perspective, Essays in Financial Economics is a valuable addition to the bookshelf of any researcher in finance.

Essays on Transparency, Systemic Risk, and Liquidity in Real Estate Markets

Essays on Transparency, Systemic Risk, and Liquidity in Real Estate Markets
Author: Daniel Ruf
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2018
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation consists of three essays on transparency, systemic risk, and liquidity in real estate markets. The first essay proposes a benchmark portfolio that contains property markets with a higher level of pre-trade transparency to assess expected returns in opaque commercial real estate markets. We find empirical evidence of abnormal returns in opaque markets relative to the benchmark portfolio. Based on pre-trade transparency, we test for information-based co-movements between transparent and less transparent property markets. Revealed post-trade information of how changes in macroeconomic fundamentals affect the valuation of commercial real estate in transparent markets leads to spillover effects to less transparent markets. We also test for learning externalities from the benchmark portfolio to opaque markets. These externalities can be related to different learning-based investment strategies such as cultural familiarity or information advantages from specializing in opaque markets. The second essay analyzes systemic risk in financial center office markets. Based on the expected capital shortfall of financial institutions, we compute the total systemic risk in the banking sector of financial centers. We show that cross-sectional dependence and return co-movements among financial center office markets arise due to the systemic banking sector risk during financial turmoil periods. As crisis periods, we use the dotcom bubble burst in 2001 and the recent financial crisis 2007/2008. Exploiting spatial econometrics, we test for return co-movements among office markets during normal times as a placebo test and among counterfactual retail markets. We also show that the decline in office market returns during financial turmoil is larger in financial centers compared to non-financial centers. The last essay analyzes the impact of nearby located urban agglomeration centers on local rental housing market liquidity. The empirical.

Systemic Risk, Institutional Design, and the Regulation of Financial Markets

Systemic Risk, Institutional Design, and the Regulation of Financial Markets
Author: Anita Anand
Publisher:
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2016
Genre: LAW
ISBN: 9780191823183

A collection of essays from an impressive group of scholars, this volume disseminates the type of regulation that can be devised and implemented to respond to systemic risk as well as how systemic risk can be regulated in both a domestic and international market.

Essays on Systemic Risk and Financial Regulation

Essays on Systemic Risk and Financial Regulation
Author: David Antonius Pankoke
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre:
ISBN:

The first paper with the title "Systemic Risk in the Insurance Sector: Review and Directions for Future Research" is written by Martin Eling and David Pankoke. This paper reviews the extant research on systemic risk in the insurance sector and outlines new areas of research in this field. We summarize and classify 43 theoretical and empirical research papers from both academia and practitioner organizations. The survey reveals that traditional insurance activity in the life, non-life, and reinsurance sectors neither contributes to systemic risk, nor increases insurers' vulnerability to impairments of the financial system. However, non-traditional activities (e.g., CDS underwriting) might increase vulnerability and life insurers might be more vulnerable than non-life insurers due to higher leverage. Whether non-traditional activities also contribute to systemic risk is not entirely clear; however, the activities with the potential to contribute to systemic risk include underwriting financial derivatives, providing financial guarantees, and short-term funding. This paper is of interest not only to academics, but is also highly relevant for the industry, regulators, and policymakers. We submitted the paper to the Risk Management and Insurance Review where it is in the third round of the review process. The second paper of this dissertation has the title "Sophisticated vs. Simple Systemic Risk Measures" and is single-authored. This paper evaluates whether sophisticated or simple systemic risk measures are more suitable to identify institutions which contribute to systemic risk. As sophisticated systemic risk measures I consider CoVaR, Marginal Expected Shortfall (MES), SRISK and Granger-Causality Networks. As simple systemic risk measures I consider the market capitalization, total debt, leverage and stock market returns of an institution as well as the correlation between stock market returns of an institution and the market.

Three Essays on Financial Markets

Three Essays on Financial Markets
Author: Pawan Jain
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation is composed of three essays. The first essay investigates the information content of the limit order book (LOB) on the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SHSE), a purely order-driven market, for predicting future stock price volatility. We find that the LOB supply schedule consistently and significantly predicts the future price volatility. But this predictive power of LOB declines during the extreme market wide movements. We also find that buy orders are more informative over future price volatility than sell orders but sell (buy) orders becomes more informative during the extreme market wide down (up) movement days. Finally, we document that predictive power of LOB is short lived and markets are efficient over the longer time horizon. The second essay examines the effect of high frequency trading on market quality, systemic risk and trading strategies. In 2010 the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the largest exchange headquartered outside the US, introduced a new trading platform, Arrowhead, which reduced latency by 99.97% and increased co-located high-frequency trading from zero to 36% of volume. Arrowhead improved market liquidity and reduced volatility, but it also amplified systematic risks factors like quotes to trade ratio, order-flow autocorrelation and cross correlation, and tail risks. Arrowhead also affected trading strategies by increasing trade price predictability and the use of fleeting orders. Cost of immediacy serves as a channel through which reduced latency affects market quality, systematic risks, and trading outcome. The third essay analyzes the links between corporate finance policies and investment clienteles by comparing the cross-sectional variation in the dividend payout policies of companies across 32 countries. Beyond the impact of firm-specific accounting and financial variables, this study investigates how the country level variations: shareholder demand due to demographic variations and consumption needs, agency problems manifested in the extent of minority shareholder protection and business disclosures, and market quality in terms of transparency and liquidity; affect dividend payout policies. We find that firms have generous dividend payout policies when diverse shareholder demands are strong, extents of business disclosures and legal protections are weak, and the market qualities are poor. The empirical evidence supports the presence of strong dividend clienteles in a global setting. .

Essays on Systemic Risk

Essays on Systemic Risk
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2009
Genre:
ISBN:

Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Systemic Risk: Is the Banking Sector Special? In this paper we empirically investigate the degree of systemic risk in the banking sector versus other industry sectors in the United States and in Germany. We characterize the systemic risk in each sector by the lower tail dependence of stock returns. Our study differs from the existing literature in three aspects. First, we compare the degree of systemic risk in the banking sector with other sectors in the economy. Second, we analyze how the systemic risk depends on the state of the economy. Third, we address the problem of systemic risk in an international context by comparing the US and the German banking system. Our study shows in most cases considered that the systemic risk of the banking sector is significantly larger than in all other sectors. Especially it differs from the systemic risk in the insurance sector, the second strongly regulated financial subsystem. Moreover, the degree of systemic risk is higher under adverse market conditions. Finally, we find that the banking sector in Germany shows a lower systemic risk than the US banking sector. Chapter 3: Intra-Industry Contagion Effects of Earnings Surprises in the Banking Sector In this paper we investigate whether contagion is present in the banking sector by analyzing how banks are affected by negative earnings surprises from their competitors. The banking sector is of crucial importance for the economy and, thus, highly regulated on an individual bank level. However, a high degree of contagion risk should call for a regulation of the financial network rather than solely regulating on an individual level. To be able to make a judgment about the magnitude of possible contagion effects we compare the results of the banking sector with the results of the non-banking industries. We find that earnings surprises cause significant contagion in the banking sector. In contrast, we do not find this effect in the non-banking sector.