Anastassios A. Drakos

The impact of stock incremental information on the volatility of the Athens stock exchange

In this paper we model the volatility of the Athens Stock Exchange general index. With the use of alternative conditional heteroskedasticity models (Glonsten et al., 1993; Bollerslev, 1986; Zakoian, 1991) we investigate whether stock returns include incremental information when we model index volatility. Whereas empirically much is known about the volatility of the Athens General Index, very little has been done on the impact the stock increments have on the General Index volatility. Our econometric approach relies on the comparison between TARCH and modified GARCH estimation techniques, on a sample of 48 shares included in the Athens General Index, using daily data over the period 1993–2003. After capturing for any possible qualitative effects, such as the cut-off points indicating a “bearish” or “bullish” capital market, the results clearly indicate that the shares include incremental volatility information in their returns.1 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2nd Meeting of the Hellenic Finance and Accounting Association, as well as at seminars at Athens University of Economics and Business and University of Crete and thanks are due to seminar participants for numerous helpful comments. We also thank without implicating George Kouretas, Dan Busca and Ionut Dumitru for many helpful comments and discussions.

Saving, investment and capital mobility in EU member countries: a panel data analysis of the Feldstein–Horioka puzzle

ABSTRACT In this paper, we reexamine the long-standing and puzzling correlation between national saving and investment in 14 European Union (EU) countries. We employ a panel data set for the period 1970–2015 and we apply recently developed maximum likelihood panel cointegration methodologies. We find that there exists a long-run relationship between savings and investment for this panel of EU member countries, with the savings retention coefficient being low in magnitude but statistically different than zero. Therefore, we argue that there is weak evidence in favour of the Feldstein–Horioka puzzle and that the long-run international solvency condition is maintained in most of these countries. This evidence implies a moderate degree of capital mobility which is consistent with the macroeconomic experience of these countries during the period under investigation.

Exchange Rates, Fundamentals, and Nonlinearities: A Review and Some Further Evidence from a Century of Data

Abstract Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide an extensive review of the monetary model of exchange rate determination which is the main theoretical framework on analyzing exchange rate behavior over the last 40 years. Furthermore, we test the flexible price monetarist variant and the sticky price Keynesian variant of the monetary model. We conduct our analysis employing a sample of 14 advanced economies using annual data spanning the period 1880–2012. Design/methodology/approach The theoretical background of the paper relies on the monetary model to the exchange rate determination. We provide a thorough econometric analysis using a battery of unit root and cointegration testing techniques. We test the price-flexible monetarist version and the sticky-price version of the model using annual data from 1880 to 2012 for a group of industrialized countries. Findings We provide strong evidence of the existence of a nonlinear relationship between exchange rates and fundamentals. Therefore, we model the time-varying nature of this relationship by allowing for Markov regime switches for the exchange rate regimes. Modeling exchange rates within this context can be motivated by the fact that the change in regime should be considered as a random event and not predictable. These results show that linearity is rejected in favor of an MS-VECM specification which forms statistically an adequate representation of the data. Two regimes are implied by the model; the one of the estimated regimes describes the monetary model whereas the other matches in most cases the constant coefficient model with wrong signs. Furthermore it is shown that depending on the nominal exchange rate regime in operation, the adjustment to the long run implied by the monetary model of the exchange rate determination came either from the exchange rate or from the monetary fundamentals. Moreover, based on a Regime Classification Measure, we showed that our chosen Markov-switching specification performed well in distinguishing between the two regimes for all cases. Finally, it is shown that fundamentals are not only significant within each regime but are also significant for the switches between the two regimes. Practical implications The results are of interest to practitioners and policy makers since understanding the evolution and determination of exchange rates is of crucial importance. Furthermore, our results are linked to forecasting performance of exchange rate models. Originality/value The present analysis extends previous analyses on exchange rate determination and it provides further support in favor of the monetary model as a long-run framework to understand the evolution of exchange rates.