settlement tax and non synchronous effects in the basis of u k stock index futures abstract the basis in stock index futures markets is analytically and empirically studied in this paper within a no arbitrage cost of carry framework explanatory power improved when the implications of the u k stock exchange settlement system were introduced into the modelling process and until recently with the maturity of the market evidence indicating the presence of non synchronicities between the cash and futures markets was found strong evidence for tax effects upon the basis was not found to be present in the data analysed statistically significant relationships between basis mispricing and volume and volatility were found

the internationalisation of stock markets and the abolition of u k exchange control this paper aims to assess the impact of the abolition of u k exchange control on the degre of integration of u k and overseas stock markets using cointegration techniques we find that although there is no significant increase in the correlation of short run stock market returns for the united kingdom and certain overseas markets post 1979 there does appear to be a marked increase in the degree to which these markets move together in the long run after this date there appears to be no long run gain from diversification since cointegration of two variables implies that at least one of them can be used to help forecast the other our findings also imply the inefficiency of a number of stock markets

forecasting metal prices do forecasters herd abstract we analyze more than 20 000 forecasts of nine metal prices at four different forecast horizons we document that forecasts are heterogeneous and report that anti herding appears to be a source of this heterogeneity forecaster anti herding reflects strategic interactions among forecasters that foster incentives to scatter forecasts around a consensus forecast

cointegration and the us term structure abstract using the maximum likelihood analysis of cointegration developed by johansen 1988 1991 we test the cointegration implications of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure on a sample of us pure discount yields by using this approach we are able to analyze systems of more than two interest rates simultaneously as opposed to most previous studies which examine interest rates only in pairs one of the main results is that for the period 1952 1987 the cointegration implications generally seem to hold

testing the unbiasedness hypothesis in the forward foreign exchange market a specification analysis abstract this paper evaluates two popular regression methods of testing the unbiasedness hypothesis in the forward foreign exchange market for the 30 day canada united states forward foreign exchange market the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that it is inappropriate to treat the structure of the systematic and stochastic components of the test relations as constant over time hence conclusions inferred from parameter significance testing based upon full sample estimation can be very misleading accordingly we argue for a specification analysis of the test relations and more explicit modelling of market fundamentals

ants rationality and recruitment this paper offers an explanation of behavior that puzzled entomologists and economists ants faced with two identical food sources were observed to concentrate more on one of these but after a period they would turn their attention to the other the same phenomenon has been observed in humans choosing between restaurants after discussing the nature of foraging and recruitment behavior in ants a simple model of stochastic recruitment is suggested this explains the herding and epidemics described in the literature on financial markets as corresponding to the equilibrium distribution of a stochastic process rather than to switching between multiple equilibria

a two factor cointegrated commodity price model with an application to spread option pricing in this paper we propose an easy to use yet comprehensive model for a system of cointegrated commodity prices while retaining the exponential affine structure of previous approaches our model allows for an arbitrary number of cointegration relationships we show that the cointegration component allows capturing well known features of commodity prices i e upward sloping contango and downward sloping backwardation term structures smaller volatilities for longer maturities and an upward sloping correlation term structure the model is calibrated to futures price data of ten commodities the results provide compelling evidence of cointegration in the data implications for the prices of futures and options written on common commodity spreads e g spark spread and crack spread are thoroughly investigated

testing the efficiency of the canadian u s exchange market under the assumption of no risk premium the efficiency of the canadian u s exchange market for the current float is examined more extensively than previously semi strong form tests which admit the lagged spot rate as a predictor are considered in addition to the standard weak form test these stronger tests reject the joint null hypothesis of an efficient exchange market and no risk premium for the period ending in october 1976 although not for the entire period for almost every year the current spot rate provided a better forecast of the future spot rate than did the current forward rate there is now an extensive empirical literature on testing the efficiency of various foreign exchange markets see 16 for a survey yet almost all of these tests are weak form tests or tests of the bias of the forward exchange rate as a predictor of the future spot rate such tests in the canadian u s exchange market can be found in the work of porter 20 eastman 5 kaserman 10 kohihagen 11 cornell 3 and levich 14 for the canadian float of the 1950s porter 20 and kaserman 10 found that one could not reject the unbiasedness of the forward rate eastman 5 and kohlhagen 11 rejected the unbiasedness of the forward rate for the floating period although not for the subsequent fixed period but their use of overlapping contracts means that their standard errors are biased cornell 3 and levich 14 found that in terms of the root meansquared error criterion the lagged spot rate and the lagged forward rate predicted the current spot rate equally well for more recent periods this paper examines the efficiency of the canadian u s exchange market for the current float july 1970 to december 1978 in a more extensive way than it has been previously examined from the weak form test the paper proceeds to two semi strong form tests which admit the lagged spot rate as a possible predictor throughout the paper various subperiods are considered in addition to the period as a whole

trading and pricing in upstairs and downstairs stock markets we provide empirical evidence on the economic benefits of negotiating trades in the upstairs trading room of brokerage firms relative to the downstairs market using helsinki stock exchange data we find that upstairs trades tend to have lower information content and lower price impacts than downstairs trades this is consistent with the hypotheses that the upstairs market is better at pricing uninformed liquidity trades and that upstairs brokers can give better prices to their customers if they know the unexpressed demands of other customers we find that these economic benefits depend on price discovery occurring in the downstairs market copyright 2002 oxford university press

the speculative efficiency hypothesis the hypothesis that forward prices are the best unbiased forecast of future spot prices is often presented in the economic and financial analysis of futures markets this paper considers the hypothesis independently of its implications for rational expectations or market efficiency and in order to stress this fact the term speculative efficiency is used to characterize the state envisaged under the hypothesis if a market is subject to efficient speculation the supply of speculative funds is infinitely elastic at the forward price that is equal to the expected future spot price the expected future spot price is a market price determined as the solution to the underlying rational expectations macroeconomic model although the paper is primarily concerned with testing this hypothesis in the foreign exchange market the methodology introduced in the paper is of general application to all futures markets this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

co learning patterns as emergent market phenomena an electricity market illustration abstract the definition of emergence remains problematic particularly for systems with purposeful human interactions this study explores the practical import of this concept within a specific market context namely a double auction market for wholesale electric power that operates over a transmission grid with spatially located buyers and sellers each profit seeking seller is a learning agent that attempts to adjust its daily supply offers to its best advantage the sellers are co learners in the sense that their supply offer adjustments are in response to past market outcomes that reflect the past supply offer choices of all sellers attention is focused on the emergence of co learning patterns that is global market patterns that arise and persist over time as a result of seller co learning examples of co learning patterns include correlated seller supply offer behaviors and correlated seller net earnings outcomes heat maps are used to display and interpret co learning pattern findings one key finding is that co learning strongly matters in this auction market environment sellers that behave as gode sunder budget constrained zero intelligence agents randomly selecting their supply offers subject only to a break even constraint tend to realize substantially lower net earnings than sellers that tacitly co learn to correlate their supply offers for market power advantages

bond pricing and the term structure of interest rates a new methodology for contingent claims valuation this paper presents a unifying theory for valuing contingent claims under a stochastic term structure of interest rates the methodology based on the equivalent martingale measure technique takes as given an initial forward rate curve and a family of potential stochastic processee for its subsequent movements a no arbitrage condition restricts this family of processes yielding valuation formulae for interest rate sensitive contingent claims which do not explicitly depend on the market prices of risk examples are provided to illustrate the key results in relation to the term structure of interest rates arbitrage pricing theory has two purposes the first is to price all zero coupon default free bonds of varying maturities from a finite number of economic fundamentals called state variables the second is to price all interest rate sensitive contingent claims taking as given the prices of the zero coupon bonds this paper presents a general theory and a unifying framework for understanding arbitrage pricing theory in this context of which all existing arbitrage pricing models are special cases in particular vasicek 1977 brennan and schwartz 1979 langetieg 1980 ball and torous 1983 ho and lee 1986 schaefer and schwartz 1987 and artzner and delbaen 1988 the primary contribution of this paper however is a new methodology for solving the second problem i e the pricing of interest rate sensitive contingent claims given the prices of all zero coupon bonds the methodology is new because i it imposes its stochastic structure directly on the evolution of the forward rate curve ii it does not require an inversion of the term structure to eliminate the market prices of risk from contingent claim values and iii it has a stochastic spot rate process with multiple stochastic factors influencing the term structure the model can be used to consistently price and hedge all contingent claims american or european on the term structure and it is derived from necessary and more importantly sufficient conditions for the absence of arbitrage the arbitrage pricing models of vasicek 1977 brennan and schwartz 1979 langetieg 1980 and artzner and delbaen 1988 all require an iformerly titled bond pricing and the term structure of interest rates a new methodology

a cointegration analysis of treasury bill yields this paper shows that yields to maturity of u s treasury bills are cointegrated and that during periods when the federal reserve specifically targeted short term interest rates the spreads between yields of different maturity define the cointegrating vectors this cointegrating relationship implies that a single nonstationary common factor underlies the time series behavior of each yield to maturity and that risk premia are stationary an error correction model that uses spreads as the error correction terms is unstable over the federal reserve s policy regime changes but a model using post 1982 data is stable and is shown to be useful for forecasting changes in yields copyright 1992 by mit press

international stock market linkages evidence from the pre and post october 1987 period abstract this paper uses recent developments in the theory of cointegration to provide new methods of testing the linkage and dynamic interactions among stock market movements our findings are in sharp contrast with previous research which discovered strong interdependence among national stock markets prior to october 1987 for the post october 1987 period however our results show that the degree of international co movements among stock price indices has increased substantially with the nikkei index the only exception furthermore the us stock market is found to have a considerable impact on the french german and uk markets in the post crash period we also find the response of the french german and uk markets to us stock market innovations to be consistent with the view of cross border informationally efficient stock markets finally we find the japanese equity market performance to have no links with both the us stock market and the stock markets in france germany and uk during the pre and post october crash period

the efficiency of the london metal exchange in this paper the three approaches available to test the hypothesis that the futures price is an unbiased predictor of future spot prices are utilized to analyze the efficiency of the london metal exchange for the period january 1975 december 1983 the first technique uses non overlapping observation and derives a test of this hypothesis using ols the second uses overlapping data and models explicitly the moving average process in the error structure using arma procedures the third uses a fiml technique to estimate a bivariate stochastic stationary process of the spot and futures prices and tests the unbiased predictor hypothesis in the form of complex non linear cross equation restrictions the results conform to the predictions of the unbiased predictor hypothesis regardless of the methodology and or data employed

testing mean reversion in target zone exchange rates the aim of the paper is to assess to what extent european monetary system ems target zone exchange rates have been characterized by mean reverting behaviour to this purpose a new class of mean reversion tests is introduced with respect to standard approaches the proposed tests which are based on the sample excursion of the exchange rate within the band have a better ability to detect target zone mean reverting dynamics the empirical analysis of the exchange rates among the main ems currencies shows that the degree of mean reversion is much higher than what has been reported in the literature both before and after the target zone widening of 1993 finally the proposed tests have a wider range of applications since they originate a new approach to unit root testing

maximum likelihood estimation of fractional cointegration with an application to u s and canadian bond rates we estimate a multivariate arfima model to illustrate a cointegration testing methodology based on joint estimates of the fractional orders of integration of a cointegrating vector and its parent series previous cointegration tests relied on a two step testing procedure and maintained the assumption in the second step that the parent series were known to have a unit root in our empirical example of fractional cointegration we illustrate how uncertainty regarding the order of integration of the parent series can be even more important than uncertainty regarding the order of integration of the cointegrating vector when testing for cointegration

bivariate garch estimation of the optimal commodity futures hedge six different commodities are examined using daily data over two futures contract periods cash and futures prices for all six commodities are found to be well described as martingales with near integrated garch innovations bivariate garch models of cash and futures prices are estimated for the same six commodities the optimal hedge ratio ohr is then calculated as a ratio of the conditional covariance between cash and futures to the conditional variance of futures the estimated ohrs reveal that the standard assumption of a time invariant ohr is inappropriate for each commodity the estimated ohr path appears non stationary which has important implications for hedging strategies

the market efficiency hypothesis the case of coffee and cocoa futures this study tests the market efficiency hypothesis for coffee and cocoa futures using daily data for contracts with a maturity of 2 and 6 months the hypothesis is tested sequentially the first condition is that future spot and futures prices be cointegrated if this condition is maintained market efficiency requires the cointegrating vector to support a 0 1 restriction that can be likened to an unbiasedness condition finally market efficiency imposes zero restrictions on the parameters of the variables expressed in first differences in the specification of the error correction representation of the relationship between future spot and futures prices brenner and kroner brenner r kroner k 1995 arbitrage cointegration and testing the unbiasedness hypothesis in financial markets journal of financial and quantitative analysis 30 pp 23 42 argue that the cointegration condition is rarely met in practice they attribute this outcome to potentially non stationary net cost of carry which would make the parameters of the cointegration relation unstable it is for this reason that hansen s tests hansen b e 1992 tests of parameter instability in regressions with i 1 processes journal of business and economic statistics 10 about the stability of the parameters in cointegration regressions were used to supplement more traditional cointegration tests johansen and juselius cointegration tests johansen s juselius k 1993 testing structural hypotheses in a multivariate cointegration analysis of the ppp and the uip for uk journal of econometrics 53 could not reject cointegration for all four contracts while hansen s lc test favored cointegration only for the cocoa contracts nested and non nested testing procedures were used to test the 0 1 restriction on the cointegration vector unbiasedness was found to be robust across testing procedures however further testing about the specification of the error correction representation revealed the existence of important short run deviations from unbiasedness even though these results hold strictly for a rather limited number of contracts and commodities they are encouraging for futures markets advocates in developing countries

optimal hedging under departures from the cost of carry valuation evidence from the spanish stock index futures market abstract we provide an analytical discussion of the optimal hedge ratio under discrepancies between the futures market price and its theoretical valuation according to the cost of carry model assuming a geometric brownian motion for spot prices we model mispricing as a specific noise component in the dynamics of futures market prices empirical evidence on the model is provided for the spanish stock index futures ex ante simulations with actual data reveal that hedge ratios that take into account the estimated time varying correlation between the common and specific disturbances lead to using a lower number of futures contracts than under a systematic unit ratio without generally losing hedging effectiveness while reducing transaction costs and capital requirements besides the reduction in the number of contracts can be substantial over some periods finally a mean variance expected utility function suggests that the economic benefits from an optimal hedge can be substantial

a note on exchange rate expectations and nominal interest differentials a test of the fisher hypothesis this note tests the hypothesis that nominal interest differentials between similar assets denominated in different currencies can be explained entirely by the expected change in the exchange rate over the holding period this proposition often called the fisher open hypothesis or the hypothesis of perfect asset substitutability has been a major component of recent theories of exchange rate determination and has important implications for monetary policy 1 the fisher hypothesis differs from the covered interest parity theorem enunciated by keynes 11 while covered interest parity equates the nominal interest differential between financial centers to a known premium or discount on forward foreign exchange and is thus in principle riskless fisher parity involves risk in an essential way the two conditions are equivalent only when forward exchange rates equal expected future spot rates recent theoretical work for example that of grauer litzenberger and stehle 8 kouri 12 and frankel 6 shows that this need not be the case when market participants are risk averse thus while covered interest parity must always hold exactly in an informationally efficient asset market with no transactions costs fisher parity need not nominal interest differentials may reflect risk premia in addition to expected exchange rate movements 2 it should be emphasized at the outset that the tests conducted in this paper are really joint tests of the fisher hypothesis and a weak form of foreign exchange market informational efficiency levich 14 has argued that tests of market efficiency are always joint tests involving some hypothesized structure of normal equilibrium returns below we assume informational efficiency and instead test fisher s hypothesized arbitrage condition that nominal interest differentials equal expected percentage changes in exchange rates

optimal convergence trade strategies convergence trades exploit temporary mispricing by simultaneously buying relatively underpriced assets and selling short relatively overpriced assets this paper studies optimal convergence trades under both recurring and nonrecurring arbitrage opportunities represented by continuing and stopped cointegrated price processes and considers both fixed and stochastic poisson horizons conventional long short delta neutral strategies are generally suboptimal and it can be optimal to simultaneously go long or short in two mispriced assets optimal portfolio holdings critically depend on whether the risky asset position is liquidated when prices converge our theoretical results are illustrated on pairs of chinese bank shares traded on both the hong kong and china stock exchanges the author 2013 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oup com oxford university press

the inefficiency of reuters foreign exchange quotes abstract reuters foreign exchange fxfx page is the world wide predominant information source to foreign exchange traders in this study we compare the indicative spot exchange rate quotes from reuters with their matching futures exchange rates from the chicago mercantile exchange we find that the indicative quotes on reuters fxfx page are inefficient and could be improved by incorporating information from the futures market this casts doubt on the way banks determine these quotes as well as on the informational content of these quotes as an indicator of the current exchange rate

cointegration and market efficiency abstract recently many economists have asserted that asset prices determined in efficient asset markets cannot be cointegrated we show that there is no general equivalence between the existence of arbitrage opportunities and cointegration or for that matter a lack of cointegration whether asset prices are cointegrated is a function of the relevant model we first show a convenient way to calculate the cointegrating vector based on necessary and sufficient conditions for cointegration we then examine particular cases including exchange rates interest rates and spot and forward exchange rates and asset prices with incoem flows reinvested and not reinvested jel f31

when will occur the crude oil bubbles abstract in this paper we apply a recursive unit root test to investigate whether there exist multiple bubbles in crude oil price the method is best suited for a practical implementation of a time series and delivers a consistent date stamping strategy for the origination and termination of multiple bubbles the empirical result indicates that there exist six bubbles during 1986 2016 when the oil price deviate from its intrinsic value based on market fundamentals specifically oil price contains the fundamentals and bubble components the dates of the bubbles correspond to specific events in the politics and financial markets the authorities should actively fight speculative bubbles or just observe their evolutions and speculation activities may decrease which is favour of the stabilisation of the staple commodities including crude oil price these findings have important economic and policy implications to recognise the cause of bubbles and take corresponding measures to reduce the impact on the real economy cause of the fluctuation of crude oil price

how reliable are hog futures as forecasts the chicago mercantile exchange hog futures contract was revamped in 1997 and it is one of the largest futures markets for a nonstorable commodity the literature is divided on whether or not futures prices for nonstorables provide reliable forecasts of cash prices we find that from 1998 to 2004 the hog futures market was an unbiased predictor of cash prices copyright 2008 oxford university press

a common features analysis of amsterdam and london financial markets during the eighteenth century we examine the financial linkage between the london and amsterdam financial markets using stock prices recorded in each market over the period 1723 94 in conjunction with tests for common trends cycles and regime shifts these tests reveal a surprising degree of integration between the markets as their prices move together in both the short and long run moreover shocks to the assets translate quickly and accurately between markets it also appears that dutch investment did not destabilize london markets and stock prices in london were the primary determinant of prices in amsterdam

mean reversion in interest rates new evidence from a panel of oecd countries previous studies show that the standard univariate unit root tests cannot reject the hypothesis that interest rates follow integrated processes in this paper the authors pool interest rate data of twelve oecd countries and implement a multivariate test it is found that the unit root hypothesis can be decisively rejected copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

convergence to the long run equilibrium the case of natural gas markets abstract intuitively the persistence of a shock may last longer in futures contracts with a longer maturity estimation of the speed with which different contract lengths converges to the long run equilibrium following a shock provides a means for comparing the informational efficiency of the contracts standard empirical investigation of the response of a market to a shock utilizes impulse response analysis however this analysis is problematic since there is not a unique variance covariance decomposition pesaran and shin pesaran m h shin y 1996 cointegration and speed of convergence to equilibrium j econ 71 117 143 introduced an alternative to the standard impulse response analysis the persistence profile by estimating the one step ahead forecast error for the entire system the persistence profile provides a unique measure of the effect of the shock this paper empirically estimates persistence profiles for the natural gas futures market the findings indicate that the persistence of a shock does increase with the contract length

dividend policy and earnings a study of short and long term causality this research examines whether earnings per share eps and dividends per share dps exhibit a short and long causality the data employed in this study consist of quarterly eps and dps for 28 of the djia companies obtained from bloomberg over a recent 10 year period the companies under investigation all have eps and dps data available over the period studied dividends are generally paid out of earnings the amount and timing of the dividend paid is a function of the respective company s dividend policy therefore the epst can be expressed in terms of the dpst as follows epst dpst where is a nonnegative constant the equation suggests that there is a linear relationship between the epst and the dpst the results of this study indicate that bi directional causality exists for some of the companies

iso net surplus collection and allocation in wholesale power markets under lmp this study uses five bus and 30 bus test cases to explore iso net surplus congestion rent collections and allocations in wholesale power markets with grid congestion managed by locational marginal prices lmps price sensitivity of demand and generator learning capabilities are taken as experimental treatment factors a key finding is that conditions resulting in greater generator capacity withholding hence higher and more volatile lmps also result in greater iso net surplus collections that can be substantial in size a key conclusion is that iso net surplus collections should be used pro actively to mitigate the conditions encouraging generator capacity withholding and hence high and volatile lmps rather than to provide ex post support for lmp payment offsets and lmp volatility risk hedging as is currently the norm

rational expectations and risk premia in forward markets primary metals at the london metals exchange this paper tests whether forward prices equal the traders expectations of the future spot prices at maturity under two different models of expectations formation full information rational expectations and incomplete information mechanical forecasting rule the tests are performed over the period january 1970 through september 1980 on the forward markets for the primary metals copper tin lead and zinc traded in the london metals exchange we find evidence consistent with the existence of time varying risk premia the way in which traders form expectations about future price is of great interest to economists as well as to market participants and forward prices have often been used as indicators of these otherwise unobservable expectations forward prices however include not only the expectation of future spot prices but also a component reflecting the riskiness of the contract therefore the risk premium can be defined as the difference between the forward price and the expected future spot at the maturity date of the forward contract there is a longstanding debate on the nature of this risk premium the hickskeynes view2 is that in futures markets speculators provide insurance against the risk of fluctuations in the price of the spot commodity and hedgers pay a premium for this risk transfer in the way of a forward price that is higher than the expected spot price in other words the risk premium should be positive 3 hardy 11 has suggested however that a future market is merely a casino in which speculators can participate in a legalized form of gambling for this privilege they have to pay a price in the form of a negative expected return thus resulting in a negative risk premium 4

near unit roots cointegration and the term structure of interest rates the term structure of interest rates is often modelled as a cointegrated system with the yield spreads forming the cointegrating vectors testing whether the yield spreads span the cointegration space is problematic because conventional tests on the cointegration vectors tend to overreject when the largest autoregressive roots deviate from unity as is likely to be the case with interest rates a new test that is robust w r t deviations from the exact unit root assumption is developed and applied to monthly us interest rate data from 1952 1 1991 2 taking into account the regime shift in 1979 the hypothesis of the yield spreads being the cointegrating vectors cannot be rejected using the robust test copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

agent based analysis of capacity withholding and tacit collusion in electricity markets this paper employs agent based simulation to study energy market performance and in particular capacity withholding and the emergence of tacit collusion among the market participants the energy market is formulated as a repeated game where each stage game corresponds to an hourly energy auction each hourly energy auction is cleared using locational marginal pricing generators are modeled as adaptive agents capable of learning through the interaction with their environment following a reinforcement learning algorithm the sa q learning algorithm a modified version of the popular q learning is used test results on a two node power system with two and eight competing generator agents demonstrate the development of tacit collusion among generators even under competitive conditions

misspecification versus bubbles in hyperinflation data monte carlo and interwar european evidence abstract this paper analyzes some new tests of the cagan hyperinflation money demand model which have several advantages relative to those in the literature they do not confound specification error with rational bubbles can be implemented with a linear procedure and are frequently able to detect periodically collapsing bubbles which have challenged existing tests after a monte carlo analysis the tests are applied to data from hyperinflations in austria germany hungary and poland evidence of misspecification is found for austria germany and hungary while the model without a rational bubble component appears to fit the data for poland

index arbitrage and dynamics between reit index futures and spot prices abstractthis article contributes to the real estate literature by investigating the pricing relationship between reit index futures and spot based on the cost of carry model we first show that there exist three arbitrage regimes in australia s reit spot futures price dynamics further analysis indicates that the two thresholds which separate the regimes are largely consistent with the level dictated by transaction costs we then estimate a threshold vector error correction model tvecm the results show that mean reversion of the mispricing error only takes place in the two outer regimes furthermore we find evidence that reit spot market is more informationally efficient than the futures market given its short history it will take time for reit index futures market to mature finally we find that we can enhance hedging performance by accommodating the feature of threshold cointegration displayed by the data as the futures spot relationship differs across regimes we can develop a hedging strate

on the intertemporal behavior of the short term rate of interest this paper examines the intertemporal behavior of the short term rate of interest in a mean reverting model vasicek s elastic random walk model using the goldfeldquandt switching regressions technique we show that the mean reverting model switched regimes three times over the sample period march 1959 to december 1985 and that two of these switches coincide with the 1979 and 1982 changes in federal reserve monetary policy on interest rates parameter estimates prove to be unstable over the sample period there is evidence of slow mean reversion over the entire sample period yet significant mean reversion emerges only in the 1979 1982 regime

the covariation of risk premiums and expected future spot exchange rates abstract eugene fama 1984 analyzed the variability and the covariation of risk premiums and expected rates of depreciation we employ three statistical techniques that do not suffer from a potential bias in fama s analysis but we nevertheless conffirms his findings in contrast to his interpretation the results are not necessarily at variance with the predictions of a theoretical model of the risk premium increases in expected rates of depreciation of the dollar relative to five foreign currencies are positively correlated with increases in the expected profitability of purchasing these currencies in the forward market and risk premiums have larger variancies than expected rates of depreciation

health insurance and the demand for medical care evidence from a randomized experiment we estimate how cost sharing the portion of the bill the patient pays affects the demand for medical services the data come from a randomized experiment a catastrophic insurance plan reduces expenditures 31 percent relative to zero out of pocket price the price elasticity is approximately 0 2 we reject the hypothesis that less favorable coverage of outpatient services increases total expenditure for example by deterring preventive care or inducing hospitalization

pricing foreign currency options under stochastic interest rates abstract in this paper we build a general framework to price contingent claims on foreign currencies using the heath et al 1987 model of the term structure closed form solutions are obtained for european options on currencies and currency futures assuming that the volatility functions determining the term structure are deterministic as such this paper provides an example of a bond price process for both the domestic and foreign economies consistent with grabbe s 1983 formulation of the same problem

arbitrage cointegration and testing the unbiasedness hypothesis in financial markets we use a no arbitrage cost of carry asset pricing model to show that the existence of coin tegration between spot and forward futures prices depends on the time series properties of the cost of carry we argue that the conditions for cointegration are more likely to hold in currency markets than in commodity markets explaining many of the empirical results in the literature we also use this model to demonstrate why the forward rate forecast error the basis and the forward premium are serially correlated and to develop econometric tests ofthe unbiasedness hypothesis sometimes called the simple efficiency hypothesis in various financial markets the unbiasedness hypothesis is so prevalent in the finance liter ature that many tests for it have been developed we examine four of the common tests and and use our cointegration results to demonstrate why each of these tests should reject the null hypothesis of unbiasedness we find strong support for our hypothesis in the existing empirical literature

index arbitrage with heterogeneous investors a smooth transition error correction analysis abstract the traditional index arbitrage model assumes a constant threshold mispricing between the futures and cash prices for all investors allowing for heterogeneity in investors transaction costs objectives and capital constraints we model the intraday mispricing of djia futures as a smooth transition autoregressive star process with the speed of adjustment toward equilibrium varying directly with the mispricing we show that the observed mean reversion in mispricing changes is induced by heterogeneous arbitrageurs instead of a statistical illusion infrequent trading of index portfolio stocks we further use a star error correction model to describe the nonlinear dynamics between the djia futures and index this model describes not only which market is more informationally efficient than the other but also the legging process the nonsimultaneous establishing of cash and futures positions

market efficiency and cointegration an application to the sterling and deutschemark exchange markets abstract the assumption that the foreign exchange market is efficient that is that agents are risk neutral and use all available information rationally so that the forward exchange rate is an unbiased predictor of the future spot rate is a property often imposed in theoretical international macroeconomic models although a vast empirical literature has evolved to test market efficiency we use recent developments in the theory of cointegration to provide new methods of testing several aspects of foreign exchange market efficiency we ffind evidence inconsistent with market efficiency for both germany and the united kingdom

econometric modelling of non ferrous metal prices abstract this article evaluates the significance of the empirical models and the distributional properties of prices in non ferrous metal spots and futures markets published in leading refereed economics and finance journals between 1980 and 2002 the survey focuses on econometric analyses of pricing and return models applied to exchange based spot and futures markets for the main industrially used non ferrous metals namely aluminium copper lead nickel tin and zinc published empirical research is evaluated in the light of the type of contract examined frequency of data used choice of both dependent and explanatory variables use of proxy variables type of model chosen economic hypotheses tested methods of estimation and calculation of ses for inference reported descriptive statistics use of diagnostic tests of auxiliary assumptions use of nested and non nested tests use of information criteria and empirical implications for non ferrous metals

revisiting the relationship between spot and futures oil prices evidence from quantile cointegrating regression article i nfo since most real decisions depend upon current market states or whether it is advantageous to the participants themselves this paper revisits the relationship between spot and futures oil prices of west texas intermediate covering 1986 to 2009 with an innovative approach named quantile cointegration different to previous perspectives we target the issues of cointegrating relationships causalities and market efficiency based on different market states under different maturities of oil futures in our empirical analysis except for market efficiency long run cointegrating relationships and causalities between spot and futures oil prices have significant differentials among futures maturities and the performances of spot oil markets furthermore the response of spot prices to shocks in 1 month futures oil prices is much steeper in high spot prices than in low spot prices this phenomenon is consistent with the prospect theory kahneman and tversky 1979 in that the value function is generally steeper for losses than for gains

efficiency tests in the french derivatives market abstract the french derivatives market the marche a terme international de france matif or the french international futures and options exchange is one of the major derivatives markets in the world the efficiency of four financial contracts traded on the matif cac40 index futures ecu bond futures national bond futures and pibor 3 month futures are examined in this paper test results from serial correlations unit root tests and variance ratio tests provide overwhelming evidence that the random walk hypothesis cannot be rejected for these contracts

on risk rationality and the predictive ability of european short term adjusted yield spreads abstract in this paper a rolling vector error correction model vecm is proposed to construct measures of the market s time varying conditional expectations of the 3 month money rates starting 13 weeks hence for several major ems member countries vecm based predictions provide the basis for computing ex ante out of sample estimates of the term premia these term premia are then used to adjust the yield spreads as a prelude to investigating their ability to predict future interest rates the source s of the yield spread bias are discussed while the expectations hypothesis is resoundingly rejected using the standard test specification yield spreads adjusted for time varying term premia are found to possess substantial predictive ability and in many instances the expectations hypothesis is not rejected the robustness of the results across the different european money markets and sample periods is highly encouraging the test results underscore the importance of incorporating into the test specification the equilibrium cointegrating constraints if they exist jel g15 1997 elsevier science ltd

flexible exchange rates prices and the role of news lessons from the 1970s recent experience with flexible exchange rate systems has led to renewed interest in the operation of foreign exchange markets as reflected in many recent studies of the principal determinants of exchange rates the 1970s witnessed the dramatic alteration of the international monetary system from a regime of pegged exchange rates which prevailed for about a quarter of a century since the bretton woods conference into a regime of flexible though managed rates as a consequence of the emergence of the new legal and economic system traders national governments and international organisations were confronted with new economic problems choices and instruments during the 1970s ex change rates fluctuated widely and inflation rates accelerated the international monetary system had to accommodate extraordinarily large oil related shocks which affected trade flows in goods and assets huge oil payments had to be recycled uncertainties concerning future developments in international politics reached new heights and the prospects for the world economy got gloomier these developments placed unprecedented pressures on the markets for foreign exchange as well as on other asset markets they were associated with a large slide in the value of the us dollar and resulted in speeding up the creation of new institutions like the european monetary system which provided the formal framework for the management of exchange rates among members

equilibrium and efficiency of exchange rates in a silver based monetary system the cases of india and iran this paper examines the issue of equilibrium and efficiency of exchange rates in a silver based monetary system during nineteenth century india and iran the results based on co integration tests indicate a reliable long run relationship between the metallic value and the exchange value of currencies in a silver based monetary standard our results also validate the necessary and sufficient conditions of the efficient market hypothesis

trading the forward bias are there limits to speculation abstract in this paper we investigate whether trading the forward bias allows for economically significant excess returns we find that bias trading strategies can be viewed as attractive investment opportunities per se useful diversification devices and promising portfolio extensions for active fund managers trying to beat their benchmarks the empirical results which also mirror the problems arising in attempts to explain the puzzle by risk premia are consistent with market evidence that the bias is traded in practice overall our findings suggest that limits to speculation are unlikely to provide a stand alone explanation for the persistence of the forward bias

testing the expectations hypothesis in eurodeposits abstract analyzing data on euro rates for 1978 1998 we find some consistent evidence in favor of the expectations hypothesis eh of the term structure a interest rates offered on deposits in a given currency form a cointegrated system b the restrictions of the eh on the cointegrating relationships are not rejected c forward rates contain significant explanatory power on future interest rates unbiasedness being an acceptable hypothesis as a cointegrating relationship between forward rates and the appropriate future value of the corresponding short term interest rate however we also provide evidence that past rates contain information additional to that in forward rates to predict future short term rates against the rational expectations version of the eh and market efficiency

benchmarking the expectations hypothesis of the interest rate term structure an analysis of cointegration vectors i test cointegration restrictions that are consistent with the expectations hypothesis of the term structure by employing the full information maximum likelihood methods developed by johansen yield curves appear to be the result of cointegration among interest rates the cointegration vectors that best describe the long term impact of interest rate levels on interest rate changes can often be written as linear combinations of interest rate spreads there is however difficulty in keeping short term yields in such a restricted cointegrated system with other interest rates short term speculative returns from long term bonds do not conform to the expectations hypothesis

forecasting canadian short term interest rates the author investigates the forecasting performance of a number of simple prediction techniques for short term interest rates in particular quarterly forecasts of canadian three month t bill rates from one to forty quarters in the future are generated during 1963 92 using several time series methods and market based yield curve strategies comparison is made with the martingale and for a shorter recent sample with the predictions made by several economic forecasters for the most part utilization of the yield curve proved best though it must be granted that no methodology was able to outperform the martingale for horizons up to a year

the utilization of outpatient medical services in japan we estimate the price elasticity of demand for outpatient care in japan we use a nationally representative microdata set consisting of nearly 440 000 japanese patients using time between outpatient visits as a demand measure we estimate a cox proportional hazards model to calculate price effects with predicted probabilities we simulate yearly utilization and obtain elasticity estimates for most diagnostic categories we obtain inelastic downward sloping demand curves with price elasticities from 0 12 to 0 54 for the anomalous category we cannot reject a zero slope the elasticity estimates for japan are similar to u s estimates despite institutional differences

bayesian arbitrage threshold analysis a bayesian estimation procedure is developed for estimating multiple regime multiple threshold error correction models appropriate for deviations from financial arbitrage relationships this approach has clear advantages over classical stepwise threshold autoregressive analysis unlike many other applications of threshold models the knowledge of some costs involved in setting up arbitrage positions allows us to specify an informative prior to illustrate the bayesian procedure we estimate a no arbitrage band within which index futures arbitrage is not profitable despite persistent deviations from parity

cointegration and detectable linear and nonlinear causality analysis using the london metal exchange lead contract this study applies linear and nonlinear granger causality tests to examine the dynamic relation between london metal exchange lme cash prices and three possible predictors the analysis uses matched quarterly inventory uk treasury bill interest rates futures prices and cash prices for the commodity lead traded on the lme the effects of cointegration on both linear and nonlinear granger causality tests is also examined when cointegration is not modelled evidence is found of both linear and nonlinear causality between cash prices and analysed predictor variables however after controlling for cointegration evidence of significant nonlinear causality is no longer found these results contribute to the empirical literature on commodity price forecasting by highlighting the relationship between cointegration and detectable linear and nonlinear causality the importance of interest rate and inventory as well as futures price in forecasting cash prices is also illustrated failure to detect significant

tests of exchange market efficiency fragile evidence from cointegration tests abstract several recent papers have employed engle and granger 1987 cointegration tests to determine whether or not markets are efficient we use a new test for cointegration due to johansen 1988 to examine market efficiency with respect to the us dollar exchange rates for canadian japanese and west german currencies the fragile nature of the test indications suggests that cointegration methodologies cannot be relied upon to provide reliable evidence on market efficiency

heterogeneous effect of coinsurance rate on healthcare expenditure generalized finite mixtures and matching estimators the article proposes a combination of finite mixture models and matching estimators to account for heterogeneous and nonlinear effects of the coinsurance rate on healthcare expenditure the analysis with panel data for adult japanese consumers in 2008 2010 and for female consumers in 2000 2010 demonstrates the presence of subpopulations with high medium and low healthcare expenditure and subpopulation membership is explained by lifestyle variables generalized finite mixtures provide adequate fit compared to loglinear model conditional average treatment effect estimations reveal the existence of nonlinear effects of the coinsurance rate in the subpopulation with high expenditure

futures cross hedging with a stationary basis when managing risk frequently only imperfect hedging instruments are at hand we show how to optimally cross hedge risk when the spread between the hedging instrument and the risk is stationary for linear risk positions we derive explicit formulas for the hedge error and for nonlinear positions we show how to obtain numerically efficient estimates finally we demonstrate that even in cases with no clear cut decision concerning the stationarity of the spread it is better to allow for mean reversion of the spread rather than to neglect it

floating exchange rates expectations and new information abstract this paper analyzes the relationship between forward exchange rates future spot rates and new information a stochastic model of exchange rate determination is used to formally show how unanticipated changes in the exchange rate determinants or news affect the spot rate the empirical analysis indicates that new information plays an important role in explaining the market forecasting error or difference between the spot rate and the forward rate determined in the previous period

allocative efficiency of markets with zero intelligence traders market as a partial substitute for individual rationality we report market experiments in which human traders are replaced by zero intelligence programs that submit random bids and offers imposing a budget constraint i e not permitting traders to sell below their costs or buy above their values is sufficient to raise the allocative efficiency of these auctions close to 100 percent allocative efficiency of a double auction derives largely from its structure independent of traders motivation intelligence or learning adam smith s invisible hand may be more powerful than some may have thought it can generate aggregate rationality not only from individual rationality but also from individual irrationality

cointegration and tests of purchasing power parity nonstationarity in the levels of spot exchange rates and domestic and foreign price indices makes the use of conventional tests of the absolute version of purchasing power parity ppp inappropriate if ppp is true inter country commodity arbitrage ensures that deviations from a linear combination of spot exchange rates and domestic and foreign price levels should be stationary under these conditions exchange rates and price levels should form a cointegrated system we find the null hypothesis of no cointegration cannot be rejected for all five countries thus violating the long run absolute version of ppp

common stochastic trends in a system of eurocurrency rates abstract this paper investigates the temporal relationship between interest rates on eurodeposit instruments ranging in maturity from seven days to one year for seven different currency denominations over the 1986 1992 period multivariate tests of cointegration reveal strong evidence in favor of the presence of common factors in the univariate time series representation of each eurocurrency term structure specifically the hypothesis of noncointegration was rejected in all seven eurocurrency term structures of interest rates examined in this study this is consistent with the hypothesis that each eurocurrency term structure of interest rates possesses a cointegrating structure that prevents these rates from drifting too far apart from equilibrium so that profitable opportunities do not persist the estimation of an error correction model which used this information i e the cointegrating equilibrium error term produced interest rate forecasts that outperformed the forecasts of a naive and a var model that ignore the cointegration of eurodeposit rates finally we examined the extent of interdependence among five maturities of seven dimensional intercurrency eurodeposit rate series and found a strong cointegrating structure across intercurrency eurodeposit rates that forces convergence among these rates

value at risk models for dutch bond portfolios this study investigates the consequences of dynamics in the term structure of dutch interest rates for the accurateness of value at risk models therefore value at risk measures are calculated using both historical simulation variance covariance and monte carlo simulation methods for a ten days holding period the best results were obtained for a combined variance covariance monte carlo method using a term structure model with a normal distribution and garch specification term structure models with a t distribution or with cointegration performed much worse 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved jel classification e43 g28

risk premia carry trade dynamics and economic value of currency speculation in this paper we derive the dynamics and assess the economic value of currency speculation by formalizing the concept of a trader inaction range we show that exchange rate returns comprise a time varying risk premium and that uncovered interest parity uip holds in a speculative sense the often cited forward bias puzzle originates from the omission of the risk premium in standard uip tests consistent with its popularity among market professionals the carry trade strategy can be rationalized as it systematically collects risk premia and generates economic value when applied in multi currency portfolios

foreign exchange market efficiency tests implications of recent empirical findings abstract the recent empirical literature on the efficiency of the foreign exchange market has been characterized by strikingly contradictory conclusions drawn from similar empirical evidence these contradictions result because 1 different maintained hypotheses are held and 2 different criteria e g micro versus macroeconomic are used to judge the evidence in this survey we organize the empirical literature under several headings the presence of risk premiums empirical regularities in regression tests profitable trading rules and advanced econometric techniques in integrating this material we consider the implications of the current evidence for investors forecasters policy makers and theorists

testing for cointegration abstract monte carlo experiments indicate that temporal disaggregation often yields significant power increases in augmented dickey fuller cointegration tests this result is contrary to the properties of adf unit root tests and is robust to several lag specifications and test misspecifications

common nonstationary components of asset prices abstract portfolio separation in a multi period general equilibrium context implies that asset prices are collinear in economies that do not exhibit separation but that move close to separation approximate collinearity or cointegration emerges as a statistical model of actual data a new test for cointegration is proposed it is based on time series canonical correlation analysis and solves the problem of unidentified parameters under the null hypothesis and of identification of the cointegrating vectors when more than two time series are investigated an empirical analysis of prices of five size based portfolios and five industry based portfolios of common stock reveals substantial evidence of cointegration

a novel market efficiency index for energy futures and their term structure risk premiums abstract this paper proposes a novel futures market efficiency index which aggregates the efficiencies of futures contracts across their term structure spanning from one month to 12 months the index measures the ability for price discovery of a long term futures contract on its nearby short term contract consistently across its terms the index uses a recently developed futures market efficiency test which accounts for heteroscedastic prices and time varying risk premiums it simultaneously estimates the term premiums of futures providing valuable information for the investor the proposed index is employed to investigate the efficiencies of four major energy commodities namely crude oil natural gas heating oil and gasoil during the sample period 1990 2016 numerical results indicate that the market efficiencies vary across terms and across energy commodities gasoil futures traded on the intercontinental exchange ice are the most efficient and natural gas futures are the least efficient in prices the spillover dynamics of market risk information across futures markets are investigated using conditionally heteroscedastic common factors chcfs extracted for each commodity using the estimated term premiums there exist significant delayed contemporaneous and potential information spillovers among term premiums of the energy commodities in our sample our findings are robust and they can help investors to optimally diversify their portfolios

explorations into factors explaining money market returns in this article we measure and interpret the common factors that describe money market returns results are presented for both three and four factor models we find that the three factor model explains on average 86 percent of the total variation in most money market returns while the four factor model explains on average 90 percent of this variation using mimicking portfolios we provide an interpretation of the systematic risks represented by these factors in this article we attempt to measure and interpret the common factors that describe money market returns the factor approach we employ assumes that the covariance matrix of a set of random variables in this case excess returns can be decomposed into common or systematic components and idiosyncratic or nonsystematic components this decomposition into systematic and nonsystematic components is based on an assumption of a linear relationship between the returns of each security and a set of common factors this is the assumption of linear return generating models which form an integral part of the structure of many asset pricing theories for example arbitrage pricing theory apt as developed by ross 1976 the interpretation is that the common factors represent sources of systematic or nondiversifiable risk and the idiosyncratic component of returns represents diversifiable risks our focus here is not on testing a particular asset pricing model per se but on developing empirical evidence for the existence of stylized facts regarding money market returns the stylized facts take the form of the existence measurement and interpretation of the common factors that are found in money markets our attempt to measure and interpret these sources of systematic risk may eventually lead to the construction of observable eco

cointegration and stock prices the random walk on wall street revisited abstract one of the more famous and empirically regular instances of unit roots occurs in stock price series where they are consistent with rational expectations and efficient markets under certain assumptions in this paper we investigate the dynamic behavior of five stock prices over the volatile period from january 1972 through december 1979 finding that the series are cointegrated with one dominant common trend a component with an estimated root of 0 95 in addition we find a lesser trend and two complex roots in the cycle model these findings are validated by out of sample forecasts beginning in january 1980 in addition to mean squared error criteria the forecasts are evaluated nonparametrically in two separate applications of a test due to henriksson and merton

forward and futures prices evidence from the foreign exchange markets empirical studies of the treasury bill markets have revealed substantial differences between the futures price and the implied forward price these differences have been attributed to taxes transaction costs and the settling up procedure employed in the futures market this paper examines the forward and futures prices in foreign exchange in an attempt to distinguish between the competing explanations empirical studies of the treasury bill market have revealed differences between the futures price or rate and the implicit forward price derived from the term structure of interest rates 1 these differences have generally been attributed to market imperfections such as taxes and transaction costs see for example arak 1 capozza and cornell 2 and rendelman and carabini 6 recently however cox ingersoll and ross 3 henceforth cir derived a model in which forward and futures prices need not be equal even in perfect markets without taxes as long as interest rates are stochastic the significance of the cir effect may be hard to investigate using only data from the bill market because of the potentially complicating effects of taxes and transaction costs unique to this market by using data from the foreign exchange market we are able to eliminate the tax effect and reduce the impact of transaction costs the question we address is whether the discrepancies observed in the treasury bill market are also observed in the foreign exchange market if they are then we have evidence that the differences are due to a combination of the cir effect and the transaction costs common to both markets if they are not then either the magnitude of the cir effect is much less in the foreign exchange market or the treasury bill results are due to the unique tax treatment and transaction costs of that market this paper is organized as follows in section i the trading mechanics of the forward and futures markets in foreign exchange are discussed section ii reviews the explanations for the discrepancies between the forward and futures prices for treasury bills the institutional differences between the foreign exchange and bill markets are also summarized to show which of these explanations cannot apply to the foreign exchange market in section iii the data are decribed and the empirical results are presented the conclusions are summarized in the final section

the treasury yield curve as a cointegrated system this paper examines the temporal relationship between interest rates on treasury securities ranging in maturity from three months to 30 years we find strong empirical support that the seven treasury rates selected are cointegrated a conclusion that is insensitive to the normalization chosen in particular the hypothesis of noncointegration is rejeeted decisively regardless of the rate selected as the dependent variable in the cointegrating equation to determine whether this information can be used to improve forecasts of treasury rates the seven rates are forecasted with a corresponding erroreorrection model that is shown to outperform an augmented var model that ignores the cointegration of the rates the results are consistent with the belief that arbitrage limits the extent to which rates on different maturities of a given security diverge in addition the results confirm the appropriateness of imposing a common stochastic process for interest rates in equilibrium models of the term structure

testing for cointegration power versus frequency of observation further monte carlo results abstract this paper studies the effects of increasing the frequency of observation and the data span on the johansen cointegration tests the ability of the tests to detect cointegration depends more on the total sample length than the number of observations

a synthetic factor approach to the estimation of value at risk of a portfolio of interest rate swaps in this paper we decompose the interest rate swap yield curves of 10 major currencies into their common factors and find that the first two factors interpreted as parallel shift and rotation explain between 97 1 and 98 6 of the variation in the interest rate swap rates across all 10 currencies the main contribution of the paper however is that we then model these two factors as simplified synthetic factors so that they may be used to develop an innovative approach to the computation of value at risk var for a portfolio of interest rate swaps 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

common stochastic trends in a system of exchange rates univariate tests reveal strong evidence for the presence of a unit root in the univariate time series representation for seven daily spot and forward exchange rate series furthermore all seven spot and forward rates appear to be cointegrated that is the forward premiums are stationary and one common unit root or stochastic trend is detectable in the multivariate time series models for the seven spot and forward rates respectively this is consistent with the hypothesis that the seven exchange rates possess one longrun relationship and that the disequilibrium error around that relationship partly accounts for subsequent movements in the exchange rates a general consensus has emerged in recent years that many macroeconomic time series such as gnp consumption expenditures disposable income etc can be characterized by a stochastic trend model in particular nelson and plosser 22 described this property as one of being difference stationary so that the first difference of a time series is stationary an alternative trend stationary model where a stationary component is added to a deterministic trend term has generally been found to be less appropriate 1 similarly it has long been recognized that many financial time series such as foreign exchange rates are nonstationary e g in meese and singleton 21 the issue of nonstationary is not merely a statistical curiosity but has several important implications for the modeling of exchange rates for instance many models of exchange rate determination under rational expectations require stationarity assumptions when solving out the expected future values of the fundamentals further there has been some controversy over the appropriate transformations to use when conducting tests of whether the forward rate is an unbiased and efficient predictor of the future spot exchange rate 2 some authors e g frenkel 11 12 have conducted tests in levels while geweke and feige 14