Dilip K. Patro

Explaining Exchange Rate Risk in World Stock Markets: A Panel Approach

Using a GARCH approach, we estimate a time-varying two-factor international asset pricing model for weekly equity index returns of 16 OECD countries. A trade-weighted basket of exchange rates and the MSCI world market index are used as risk factors. We find significant currency risk exposures in country equity index returns. We then explain these currency betas using several country-specific macroeconomic variables with a panel approach. We find that imports, exports, credit ratings, and tax revenues significantly affect currency risks in a way that is consistent with some economic hypotheses. Similar conclusions are obtained by using lagged explanatory variables, and thus these macroeconomic variables may be useful as predictors of currency risk exposures. Our results are robust to a number of alternative specifications.

Return behavior and pricing of American depositary receipts

Abstract This paper provides an empirical analysis of 123 American depositary receipts (ADRs) from 16 countries. The paper finds that the returns on ADRs have significant risk exposures to the returns on the world market portfolio and their respective home market portfolios. Further, ADRs do not have significant risk exposures to changes in their home currency’s exchange rates. In explaining variations in ADR returns, a multi-factor model with the world market return and the home market return as the risk factors performs better than models with just the world market return, the home market return or a set of global factors as the risk factors.

A Simple Indicator of Systemic Risk

We examine the relevance and effectiveness of stock return correlations among financial institutions as an indicator of systemic risk. By analyzing the trends and fluctuations of daily stock return correlations and default correlations among the 22 largest bank holding companies and investment banks from 1988 to 2008, we find that daily stock return correlation is a simple, robust, forward-looking, and timely systemic risk indicator. There is an increasing trend in stock return correlation among banks, whereas there is no obvious correlation trend among non-banks. We also disaggregate the stock returns into systematic and idiosyncratic components and find that the correlation increases are largely driven by the increases in correlations between banks’ idiosyncratic risks, which give rise to increasing systemic risk. Correlation spikes tend to predict or coincide with significant economic or market events, especially during the 2007–2008 financial crisis. Furthermore, we show that stock return correlations offer a perspective on the level of systemic risk in the financial sector that is not already captured by default correlations. Stock return correlations are not subject to data limitations or model specification errors that other potential systemic risk measures may face. Therefore, we recommend that regulators and businesses monitor daily stock return correlations among those large and highly leveraged financial institutions to track the level of systemic risk.

Why do closed-end country funds trade at enormous premiums during currency crises?

Abstract We investigate the response of US traded country fund premiums to currency crises in related foreign (local) markets. Our analysis includes 25 currency crises over the past decade involving 18 funds investing in 12 emerging markets, and 7 funds investing in 6 developed markets. We find that fund premiums and the volatility of the premiums increase dramatically in response to a currency crisis, both for emerging and developed markets funds, and that these effects dissipate slowly over time. Our results show that country fund shares and net asset values (NAVs) have differential risk exposures and that these differences are exacerbated during a crisis. While the NAV returns show sensitivity to changes in the local market index, share returns are sensitive to changes in both local and world market indices. Therefore, in response to a currency crisis, when local stock markets decrease in value, fund NAVs react more strongly than their share prices which have a strong global component. We also show that the high premiums observed during currency crises are not due to the reluctance of investors to trade and realize losses.

Measuring Performance of International Closed-End Funds

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the performance of 45 international closed-end funds and compares alternate measures of performance using the sample of funds and 35 national market indices. The empirical evidence indicates that the risk-adjusted performance of the shares or the net asset values of the funds match the performance of their respective local market indices as well as the world market index and do not exhibit superior timing ability. These findings are robust to conditioning on information.

Valuing Financial Assets with Liquidity Discount:An Implication for Basel III

The unprecedented financial crisis in 2007 and 2008 and the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history prompted expedited regulation in the financial industry. A new Basel Accord has been proposed to further regulate the main risk that caused the crisis: liquidity risk. In a recent article, Chen [2012] presents a liquidity discount model in which financial securities can be evaluated with substantial discounts at the presence of a liquidity squeeze in the marketplace. In this article, we adopt this model to evaluate a selection of the 23 largest U.S. financial institutions (assets over

Re-Examining the Role of Market Discipline for Bank Supervision: Evidence from the Subprime Crisis

100 billion) to investigate the liquidity impact during the crisis period. We calibrate the model to market information such as market capitalization and volatility. We find that the model can provide significant predictive power of a bank’s liquidity health.

Exploiting Closed-End Fund Discounts: A Systematic Examination of Alphas

We reexamine the effectiveness of markets in monitoring bank riskiness using a panel of large commercial and investment banks for the period just before and during the subprime financial crises. We find that market based bank specific indicators such as credit default swap premiums, implied volatilities of equity options, credit ratings from rating firms, short interest and equity analysts’ recommendations were informative about future cross-sectional bank performance. Therefore, our panel analysis supports the view that markets are able to distinguish between risky and less risky banks reinforcing the role of ‘market discipline’ as one of the pillars of bank supervision.

Functional Forms for Performance Evaluation: Evidence from Closed-End Country Funds *

We systematically study the value of the information contained in closed-end fund (CEF) premiums. We parametrically estimate CEF expected returns as a function of the history of CEF premiums, in addition to the current premium, and buy the quintile of funds with the highest expected returns and sell the quintile of funds with the lowest expected returns. The return on this portfolio suggests that previous studies, which examine the information in current premiums only, have understated the value of the information in premiums. Our strategy values the information in the history of CEF premiums at an annualized return of 18.2%.We find significant evidence of mean reversion in closed-end fund premiums. Previous studies understate the magnitudes of arbitrage profits. Capitalizing on mean reversion, we devise a parametric model to estimate expected fund returns. Our strategy of buying the quintile of funds with highest expected returns and selling the quintile of funds with lowest expected returns yields an annualized arbitrage return of 18.2% and a Sharpe ratio of 1.918, higher than corresponding figures produced using extant methods. Results are robust to a wide range of tests. They greatly deepen the puzzle and pose a challenge to market efficiency in these products. JEL Classification: G01, G11, G12

Determinants of Flows into U.S.-Based International Mutual Funds

This paper proposes a generalized functional form CAPM model for international closed-end country funds performance evaluation. It examines the effect of heterogeneous investment horizons on the portfolio choices in the global market. Empirical evidences suggest that there exist some empirical anomalies that are inconsistent with the traditional CAPM. These inconsistencies arise because the specification of the CAPM ignores the discrepancy between observed and true investment horizons. A comparison between the functional forms for share returns and NAV returns of closed-end country funds suggests that foreign investors may have more heterogeneous investment horizons compared to the U.S. counterparts. Market segmentation and government regulation does have some effect on the market efficiency. No matter which generalized functional model we use, the empirical evidence indicates that, on average, the risk-adjusted performance of international closed-end fund is negative even before the expenses.