Giovanna Paladino

Oil price Dynamics and Speculation. A Multivariate Financial Approach

This paper assesses empirically whether speculation affects oil price dynamics. The growing presence of financial operators in the oil markets has led to the diffusion of trading techniques based on extrapolative expectations. Strategies of this kind foster feedback trading that may cause large departures of prices from their fundamental values. We investigate this hypothesis using a modified CAPM that follows Shiller (1984) and Sentana and Wadhwani (1992). At first, a univariate GARCH(1,1)-M is estimated assuming that the risk premium is a function of the conditional oil price volatility. The single factor model, however, is outperformed by the multifactor ICAPM (Merton, 1973) which takes into account a larger investment opportunity set. The analysis is then carried out using a trivariate CCC GARCH-M model with complex nonlinear conditional mean equations where oil price dynamics are associated with both stock market and exchange rate behavior. We find strong evidence that oil price shifts are negatively related to stock price and exchange rate changes and that a complex web of time varying first and second order conditional moment interactions affect both the CAPM and feedback trading components of the model. Despite the difficulties, we identify a significant role of speculation in the oil market which is consistent with the observed large daily upward and downward shifts in prices. A clear evidence that it is not a fundamentals-driven market. Thus, from a policy point of view - given the impact of volatile oil prices on global inflation and growth - actions that monitor more effectively speculative activities on commodity markets are to be welcomed.

Is M&A different during a crisis? Evidence from the European banking sector.

The financial crisis has affected the landscape of the banking sector around the world. We use a sample of transactions taking place in Europe in 2007-2010 to study the acquirer’s stock price market reaction to announcements and completions of acquisitions. We find that there are no significant abnormal returns around the announcement of an acquisition while there are positive abnormal returns at completions. We study the cross-sectional determinants of abnormal returns and find that announcement returns are mainly explained by the acquirer bank characteristics, while completion returns depend on opacity of the target and in large part on the drop in volatility associated with a reduction of uncertainty.

The Impact of the Argentine Default on Volatility Co-Movements in Emerging Bond Markets

This paper analyses the dynamic interrelationship between sovereign bond spreads in ten emerging markets. It investigates the nature of the volatility transmission in secondary bond markets through conditional covariance estimates obtained by orthogonal methods. This approach, which combines PCA with GARCH volatility modelling, filters away idiosyncratic news and focuses on spreads dynamics driven by common factors. We find convincing evidence of co-movements between spread changes; more within than across geographical areas. Conditional covariations increase in periods of turbulence and subsequently subside. The time varying minimum variance artificial portfolios, which are used here for model validation, show that, in spite of systemic risk, international portfolio diversification is still a powerful strategy for risk reduction.

Special issue on: Real and nominal exchange ratesExchange rate determination: Single-equation or economy-wide models?: A test against the random walk☆

We first give a brief presentation of the existing single-equation structural models of exchange-rate determination and a survey of how the exchange rate is modeled in the main economy-wide macroeconometric models. We then show, with respect to the lira/

Why Do Banks Optimize Risk Weights? The Relevance of the Cost of Equity Capital

exchange rate, that the out-of-sample predictive performance of the single-equation models is inferior to that of the simple random walk model. This confirms the thesis that only by moving away from these single-equation, semi-reduced form models towards suitable economy-wide macroeconometric models can one hope to beat the random walk. Following this course, we finally show that the Mark V version of our continuous time macroeconometric model of the Italian economy outperforms both the existing structural models and the random-walk process, in out-of-sample forecasting tests concerning the lira/

The buffer stock model redux? An analysis of the dynamics of foreign reserve accumulation

exchange rate.

Is Oil a Financial Asset? An Empirical Investigation Spanning the Last Fifteen Years

Banks use internal models to optimize risk weights and better account for the specific risk of each asset class. As the choice of a set of risk weights directly amounts to affecting the regulatory capital ratio, economic theory suggests that banks should optimize their risk weights also with respect to the cost and benefit of holding equity capital. Banks with a higher cost of capital, and banks with better growth opportunities, should be more aggressive in reducing risk weights. We consider a large panel of international banks and find that, after controlling for a number of bank and country characteristics, banks do respond to the cost and benefit of holding capital when selecting their average risk weights. We also find that banks that are more aggressive in terms of such optimization have a subsequent lower return on equity and are more likely to have raised capital during the credit crisis.

One Size Does Not Fit All. A Non-Linear Analysis of European Monetary Transmission

Emerging market economies have recently accumulated large stocks of foreign reserves. In this paper we address the question of what are the main factors accounting for reserve holdings in nine developing countries located in Asia and Latin America. Monthly data from January 1985 to May 2006 are used to estimate for each country the long run equilibrium reserve demand, based on the buffer stock model, the short run dynamics governing the process of reserve accumulation (decumulation) and the factors which may influence the speed of adjustment of actual to desired reserves. Cointegration analysis suggests that the buffer stock precautionary model accounts for the optimal reserve demand. The corresponding VECMs are further interpolated, using the permanent and transitory innovations decomposition procedure of Gonzalo and Ng (2001), in order to assess the relative impact of the time series on the convergence to equilibrium after a shock. Finally the (asymmetric) effect on the speed of convergence of positive/negative changes in signal variables - such as the excess reserves of the previous period, relative competitiveness and US monetary stance - is found to be significant, in line with mercantilistic and fear of floating motives for hoarding international reserves.

Oil Futures Market: A Dynamic Model of Hedging and Speculation

The growing presence of financial operators in the oil markets has modified oil price dynamics. The diffusion of techniques based on extrapolative expectations – such as feedback trading – leads to departures of prices from their fundamental values and increases their variability. Oil price changes are here associated with changes in stocks, bonds and effective USD exchange rate. The feedback trading mechanism is combined with an ICAPM and provides a model which is then estimated in a CCC GARCH-M framework, both the risk premium and the feedback trading components of the conditional means being nonlinear functions of the system’s conditional variances and covariances. The empirical analysis identifies a structural change in the year 2000. From then on oil returns tend to become more reactive to the remaining assets of the model and feedback trading more pervasive. A comparison is drawn between three and four asset minimum variance portfolios in the two sub-periods, 1992-1999 and 2000-2008. Oil acquires in the second period, besides its standard properties as a physical commodity, the characteristics of a financial asset. Indeed, the trade-off between risk and returns – measured here by the average return per unit of risk index – indicates that in the last decade oil diversifies away the empirical risk of our portfolio.

Reserve overstocking in a highly integrated world. New evidence from Asia and Latin America

This paper investigates the interest rate pass-through in eight European countries analyzing their short-run and long-run monetary transmission mechanisms. We investigate the relationship between the Euribor and the long-run interest rate on loans to non-financial corporations and allow for a mark-up which can be affected by country specific funding conditions and/or stochastic structural breaks. We detect significant differences across countries. Cointegration between the Euribor and the long-term bank loan interest rates holds for Germany, France, and the Netherlands, where banks seem to apply a constant mark-up. In the remaining countries of the sample the long-run pass-through is directly affected by changes in banks’ cost of funding, due to shifts in the spread between domestic and German long-term government bond interest rates. The selection of the country specific ESTAR/LSTAR parameterization of the short-run dynamics detects a high degree of heterogeneity. The transition variables vary from the government bond spreads, in countries which were involved in the European debt crisis via sovereign bond market contagion, to the VXO index and to the Euribor monthly volatility.