Christos S. Savva

Spillovers and Correlations between US and Major European Stock Markets: The Role of the Euro

This article investigates the impact of the introduction of the euro on the interactions across the New York, London, Frankfurt and Paris stock markets. After controlling for possible returns and volatility spillovers, we focus on the correlations of shocks using the framework of Dynamic Conditional Correlations (DCC). Daily pseudo-closing prices (recorded at 16:00 London time) are used to avoid conflating correlation and spillover effects. Statistical break tests confirm that the introduction of the euro significantly affects the cross-market correlations. Although dynamic correlations of shocks between all market pairs increase, the correlation in the post-euro period is highest between Frankfurt and Paris, indicating increased integration of these markets. Other findings include the presence of spillover effects from foreign markets for both returns and volatilities, with asymmetries in volatilities and conditional correlations such that negative shocks have larger effects than positive ones.

Skewness and the Relation Between Risk and Return

The relationship between risk and return has been one of the most important and extensively investigated issues in the financial economics literature. The theoretical results predict a positive relation between the two. Nevertheless, the empirical findings so far have been contradictory. Evidence presented in this paper shows that these contradictions are the result of negative skewness in the distribution of portfolio excess return and the fact that the estimation of intertemporal asset pricing models are based on symmetric log-likelihood specifications.Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2201 . This paper was accepted by Jerome Detemple, finance .

Are There Still Portfolio Diversification Benefits in Eastern Europe? Aggregate Versus Sectoral Stock Market Data

In this paper we measure the increase in stock integration between the three largest new European Union members (Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland) and the Euro-zone using both country and industry level data. At the country market index level all three Eastern European markets show a considerable increase in correlations in 2006. At the industry level the dates and transition periods for the correlations differ and the correlations are lower, although also increasing. The results show that sectoral indices in Eastern European markets may provide larger diversification opportunities than the aggregate market.

Idiosyncratic Volatility Puzzle: Influence of Macro-Finance Factors

We analyze the cross-sectional relation between expected idiosyncratic volatility and stock returns. The expected idiosyncratic volatility is conditioned on macro-finance factors as well as traditional asset pricing factors. The macro-finance factors are constructed from a large set of macroeconomic and financial variables. Our results show that the negative relation between expected idiosyncratic volatility and stock returns reverses to a positive one when accounting for the macro-finance effects. Portfolio analysis shows that the positive relation is economically important. The relation between expected idiosyncratic volatility and returns is not affected by business cycle variations. The empirical results are highly robust.

The effect of smoke-free policies on hospitality industry revenues in Cyprus: an econometric approach

Objective Smoke-free policies aiming to improve quality of indoor air and significantly reduce exposure to secondhand smoke in the hospitality industry are faced with strong opposition from the tobacco industry and hospitality venue owners claiming that they lead to reductions of revenues. The objective of our study was to examine the impact of a recently introduced smoke-free legislation on the revenues of the hospitality industry in Cyprus. Methods Anonymous information on revenues was obtained from the Cyprus government value added tax office for the entire hospitality industry in Cyprus including hotels, bars, restaurants and cafeterias between 2005 and 2011. Panel data methodology was used to examine the effect of a smoke-free legislation, on tourism, businesses’ revenues adjusting for gross domestic product, inflation, unemployment rate, tourists’ arrivals, seasonal variation and the economic crisis. Results Our study showed that the implementation of the smoke-free policy did not have negative effects on the hospitality industry profitability. Conclusions We conclude that even in regions with relatively high smoking rates, pro-smoking societal attitudes and weak social norms against tobacco control, and even during periods of economic crisis, smoke-free legislation does not impact negatively on hospitality industry revenues and if anything may lead to a small positive increase.

Sentiment, order imbalance, and co-movement: An examination of shocks to retail and institutional trading activity

Using order flow imbalance as a measure of sentiment we show that positive and negative shocks to sentiment lead to lower co-movement between portfolio and market returns in the post-shock period. Furthermore, an asymmetry is present as positive shocks to sentiment have less impact on co-movement changes than negative shocks. Moreover, shocks to retail sentiment and the sentiment of two types of institutional investors lead to a reduction in co-movement. Positive shocks to institutional order flow imbalance lead to smaller reductions in co-movement than associated with retail shocks. These effects exist even after controlling for firm-specific and market-wide news.

Idiosyncratic volatility puzzle : influence of macro-finance factors

We analyze the cross-sectional relation between expected idiosyncratic volatility and stock returns. The expected idiosyncratic volatility is conditioned on macro-finance factors as well as traditional asset pricing factors. The macro-finance factors are constructed from a large set of macroeconomic and financial variables. Our results show that the negative relation between expected idiosyncratic volatility and stock returns reverses to a positive one when accounting for the macro-finance effects. Portfolio analysis shows that the positive relation is economically important. The relation between expected idiosyncratic volatility and returns is not affected by business cycle variations. The empirical results are highly robust.

Tourism Stocks in Times of Crises: An Econometric Investigation of Unexpected Non-macroeconomic Factors

The relationship between the tourism industry and unexpected nonmacro incidents has received limited academic coverage. As a result, the quantifiable impact of such events on tourism-specific stock values, both in terms of returns and volatility, remains grossly underexamined. Motivated by the reasoning that the well-established features inherent to the tourism industry may trigger a different pattern of stock price movement compared with other industries, and by using econometric methodology, this article investigates the reaction of five hospitality/tourism stock indices to 150 incidents, depicting major Acts of Terrorism, natural catastrophes, and War conflicts that have taken place since the year 2000. Empirical findings underscore the effect of such incidents on stock indices, with distinctive differences among the types and specificities of each event under investigation. This article contributes to the extant literature and enhances our conceptual capital pertaining to the tourism industry’s current financial practices related to stock performance and behavior.

Tourism, Instability and Regional Interdependency: Evidence from the Eastern-Mediterranean

ABSTRACT Over the last three decades, we have widely witnessed the peculiar relationship between tourism and incidents of political instability. Responding to the urgent call for additional empirical inquiries, we conducted an econometric study, using the VAR-EGARCH-DCC model, on the regional tourism interdependency (volatility) between four Eastern Mediterranean countries, namely Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and Israel. Monthly arrival data from 1987 to 2012, along with a series of political instability variables collected from machine-coded databases, were utilized to model effects and to add empirical substance to contemporary and emerging theories. Our findings are relevant to industry stakeholders in that they explore tourism demand and volatilities. The findings indicate a positive effect on tourism demand in the presence of verbal or material cooperation between a destination country and others. In contrast, when investigating verbal conflict between a destination country and others, our findings reveal a negative impact on tourist arrivals and an increase in volatility in the destination country. Finally, in our investigation of incidents of material conflict, we saw a strong negative impact on tourist arrivals in all four destinations, accompanied by a significant increase in volatility.

Neglecting structural breaks when estimating and valuing dynamic correlations for asset allocation

ABSTRACT This paper assesses the econometric and economic value consequences of neglecting structural breaks in dynamic correlation models and in the context of asset allocation framework. It is shown that changes in the parameters of the conditional correlation process can lead to biased estimates of persistence. Monte Carlo simulations reveal that short-run persistence is downward biased while long-run persistence is severely upward biased, leading to spurious high persistence of shocks to conditional correlation. An application to stock returns supports these results and concludes that neglecting such structural shifts could lead to misleading decisions on portfolio diversification, hedging, and risk management.