Geert Bekaert

Emerging equity market volatility

Returns in emerging capital markets are very different from returns in developed markets. While most previous research has focused on average returns, we analyze the volatility of the returns in emerging equity markets. We characterize the time-series of volatility in emerging markets and explore the distributional foundations of the variance process. Of particular interest is evidence of asymmetries in volatility and the evolution of the variance process after periods of capital market reform. We shed indirect light on the question of capital market integration by exploring the changing influence of world factors on the volatility in emerging markets. Finally, we investigate the cross-section of volatility. We use measures such as asset concentration, market capitalization to GDP, size of the trade sector, cross-sectional volatility of individual securities within each country, turnover, foreign exchange variability and national credit ratings to characterize why volatility is different across emerging markets.

Regime Switches in Interest Rates

Regime-switching models are well suited to capture the non-linearities in interest rates. This paper examines the econometric performance of regime-switching models for interest rate data from the US, Germany and the UK. There is strong evidence supporting the presence of regime switches but univariate models are unlikely to yield consistent estimates of the model parameters. Regime-switching models incorporating international short rate and term spread information forecast better, match sample moments better, and classify regimes better than univariate models. We show that the regimes in interest rates correspond reasonably well with business cycles, at least in the US. This may explain why regime-switching models forecast interest rates better than single regime models. Finally, the non-linear interest rate dynamics implied by regime-switching models have potentially important implications for the macroeconomic literature documenting the effects of monetary policy shocks on economic aggregates. Moreover, the implied volatility and drift functions are rich enough to resemble those recently estimated using non-parametric techniques.

Emerging Markets Finance

Emerging markets have long posed a challenge for finance. Standard models are often ill suited to deal with the specific circumstances arising in these markets. However, the interest in emerging markets has provided impetus for both the adaptation of current models to new circumstances in these markets and the development of new models. The model of market integration and segmentation is our starting point. Next, we emphasize the distinction between market liberalization and integration. We explore the financial effects of market integration as well as the impact on the real economy. We also consider a host of other issues such as contagion, corporate finance, market microstructure and stock selection in emerging markets. Apart from surveying the literature, this article contains new results regarding political risk and liberalization, the volatility of capital flows and the performance of emerging market investments. D 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Dating the integration of world equity markets

Measuring the integration of world capital markets is notoriously difficult. For example, regulatory changes which appear comprehensive may have little impact on the functioning of the capital market if they fail to lead to foreign portfolio inflows. In contrast to the usual practice of documenting the timing of regulatory changes, we specify a reduced-form model for a number of financial time-series (for example, equity returns and dividend yields) and search for a common break in the process generating the data. In addition, we estimate a confidence interval for the break. Information on a variety of financial and macroeconomic indicators is employed to interpret the results and to identify the likely date the equity market becomes financially integrated with world capital markets. We find endogenous break dates that are very accurately estimated but do not always correspond closely to dates of official capital market reforms. After the break, stock markets are on average larger and more liquid than before; returns are more volatile and more highly correlated with the world market return, dividend yields are lower and credit ratings improve.

On Biases in Tests of the Expecations Hypothesis of the Term Structure of Interest Rates

We document extreme bias and dispersion in the small sample distributions of five standard regression tests of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates. These biases derive from the extreme persistence in short interest rates. We derive approximate analytic expressions for these biases, and we characterize the small-sample distributions of these test statistics under a simple first-order autoregressive data generating process for the short rate. The biases are also present when the short rate is modeled with a more realistic regime-switching process. The differences between the small-sample distributions of test statistics and the asymptotic distributions partially reconcile the different inferences drawn when alternative tests are used to evaluate the expectations hypothesis. In general, the test statistics reject the expectations hypothesis more strongly and uniformly when they are evaluated using the small-sample distributions, as compared to the asymptotic distributions.

Research in Emerging Markets Finance: Looking to the Future

Much has been learned about emerging markets finance over the past 20 years. These markets have attracted a unique interdisciplinary interest that bridges both investment and corporate finance with international economics, development economics, law, demographics and political science. Our paper focuses on the research areas that are ripe for exploration. We provide new evidence on how emerging market returns, volatility, betas, correlations, skewness and kurtosis have changed as these markets become more financially open.

On biases in the measurement of foreign exchange risk premiums

The hypothesis that the forward rate is an unbiased predictor of the future spot rate has been consistently rejected in recent empirical studies. This paper examines several sources of measurement error and misspecification that might induce biases in such studies. Although previous inferences are shown to be robust to a failure to construct true returns and to omitted variable bias arising from conditional heteroskedasticity in spot rates, we show that the parameters were not stable over the 1975-1989 sample period. Estimation that allows for endogenous regime shifts in the parameters demonstrates that deviations from unbiasedness were more severe in the 1980s.

Expectations Hypotheses Tests

We investigate the expectations hypotheses of the term structure of interest rates and of the foreign exchange market using vector autoregressive methods for U.S. dollar, Deutsche mark, and British pound interest rates and exchange rates. We examine Wald, Lagrange multiplier, and distance metric tests by iterating on approximate solutions that require only matrix inversions. Bias-corrected, constrained VARs provide Monte Carlo simulations. Wald tests grossly overreject the null, Lagrange multiplier tests slightly underreject, and distance metric tests overreject. A common interpretation emerges from the small sample statistics. The evidence against the expectations hypotheses is much less strong than under asymptotic inference. Copyright The American Finance Association 2001.

The VIX, the Variance Premium and Stock Market Volatility

We decompose the squared VIX index, derived from US S&P500 options prices, into the conditional variance of stock returns and the equity variance premium. The latter is increasing in risk aversion in a wide variety of economic settings. We tackle several measurement issues assessing a plethora of state-of-the-art volatility forecasting models. We then examine the predictive power of the VIX and its two components for stock market returns and economic activity. The variance premium predicts stock returns but the conditional stock market variance predicts economic activity, and is more contemporaneously correlated with financial instability than is the variance premium.

Short rate nonlinearities and regime switches

Using non-parametric estimation methods, various authors have shown distinct non-linearities in the drift and volatility function of the US short rate, which are inconsistent with standard affine term structure models. We document how a regime-switching model with state dependent transition probabilities between regimes can replicate the patterns found by the non-parametric studies. To do so, we use data from the UK and Germany in addition to US data and include term spreads in some of our models. We also examine the drift and volatility function of the term spread.