Hélène Raymond

International nonlinear causality between stock markets

In this paper, we test for linear and nonlinear Granger causality between the French, German, Japanese, UK and US daily stock index returns from 1973 to 2003. We find a strong contemporaneous linear dependence between European countries and a directional linear dependence from the US towards the other markets. Besides, linear causality increases after 1987, a finding consistent with the expected effects of financial liberalization of the 1980s and the 1990s. Above all, we document the presence of bidirectional nonlinear causality between daily returns. To check for spurious nonlinear causality, we filter out heteroskedasticity using a FIGARCH model. The dramatic decrease in the number of significant nonlinear causality lags confirms that heteroskedasticity played a major part in the previous findings. We then check if a few structural breaks can explain the remaining nonlinear causality. We find that a large number of nonlinear relationships vanish when we control for structural breaks, whereas linear causality remains.

Sovereign Wealth Funds as domestic investors of last resort during crises

Usual definitions of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) put emphasis on their foreign investments. But after September 2008, some Sovereign Wealth Funds refrained from foreign investments and turned to the support of their home economies. We show that these interventions of Sovereign Wealth Funds as domestic “investors of last resort” are far from marginal and that they are not a passing innovation of the last global crisis. We review first the cases of interventions of SWFs as “shareholders of last resort” and differentiate interventions targeted on banks, from more general interventions designed to support non financial firms. We then turn to the interventions of SWFs as “lenders of last resort” and insurance funds against major crises.