Libo Yin

Spillovers of macroeconomic uncertainty among major economies

Using the forecast error variance decomposition from a vector auto-regression, this article examines both average and time-varying spillovers of macroeconomic uncertainty across major economies since 1997 and compares the ongoing crisis with earlier episodes. We show that spillover effects of macroeconomic uncertainty across major economies display no trend but clear bursts and reach its respective peaks during the 2008 global financial crisis, which attests to the severity of the current episode.

Macroeconomic policy uncertainty shocks on the Chinese economy: a GVAR analysis

ABSTRACT This article studies the spillovers of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) from developed economies to China in terms of the source, extent and persistence by estimating a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model with both financial and trade variables acting as the transmission channels. Our findings confirm the existence of international transmissions of policy uncertainty, while the patterns differ markedly. The US EPU appears to be the most significant cause of the fall of export, industrial production, equity price and exchange rate, meanwhile, the EU EPU is also to be blamed for the depreciation of RMB. In contrast to industrial production, which shows the largest negative impact, Chinese inflation increases to a relatively smaller extent with the EPU shocks ranking as the US, Japanese and the EU. Regardless of the minor impact on a long-term interest rate, the short-term interest rate in China reacts positively to the European and US EPU shocks. Despite the independent national monetary policies, EPUs from the EU, Japan and the UK can decrease the Chinese monetary aggregate. In summary, the Chinese economy responds the most to the US EPU, especially to its inflation expectation disagreement component, whereas it responds the least to the UK EPU.

Options strategies for international portfolios with overall risk management via multi-stage stochastic programming

This paper proposes a multi-stage stochastic programming model to explore optimal options strategies for international portfolios with overall risk management on Greek letters, extending existing Greek-based analysis to dynamic and nondeterministic programming under uncertainty. The contribution to the existing literature are overall control on the time-varying Greek letters, state-contingent decision dynamics in consistent with the projected outcomes of the changing information, and a holistic view for optimizing the portfolio of assets and options. Empirical results show the model possesses considerable benefits in terms of larger profit margins, greater stability of returns and higher hedging efficiency compared to traditional methods.

Investor attention and currency performance: international evidence

ABSTRACT This article investigates the relationship between investor attention measured by Google search volume index and the performance of several currencies. We find that currency performance is remarkably responsive to changes in investor attention. These impacts, generated rapidly, are present over the relatively long term, especially for emerging currencies, and are intensified during periods of high uncertainty. We also demonstrate that there is a prominent asymmetric effect for the impact of attention, as past currency performance also influences attention. Typically, past currency performance can determine the magnitude of the impact on current currency performance. Moreover, we confirm that investor attention has a predictive power for forecasting emerging currency performance in the out-of-sample analysis. Further, these forecasts generate substantial economic value in the framework of asset allocation. By contrast, statistical predictability and economic value do not exist in the currencies from developed markets. These results indicate that investor attention can alter currency performance and its predictability. More broadly, our study emphasizes the potential of employing investor attention for emerging currency performance forecasting applications.

Systemic risk and dynamics of contagion: a duplex inter-bank network

This paper constructs a duplex banking network formed by credit relationships and information interaction via the banks’ balance sheet to model the structure of systemic risk and investigate the dynamic mechanism of contagion in terms of default and liquidity infection along with the factors that affect the extent of the contagion. We systematically explain the role that duplex banking networks play in different aspects of risk contagion. Through theoretical analysis and simulations, we conclude that asymmetric information interaction would increase the inflexibility of the system, which leads to liquidity shortage and possibly the collapse of the whole market. The weakness of systemic risk in the interior of the complex banking system can be characterized by the partial discount factor using illiquid assets in the information network. By improving the connectedness of the information network of the duplex networks, the spread of contagion can be partially slowed.

The predictive performance of the currency futures basis for spot returns

This paper investigates the predictive performance of the futures basis in directly forecasting currency spot returns and compares it with that of the one-month forward basis. We consider the settle prices of both front-month and nearby-month continuous futures contracts and find that the futures basis exhibits statistically and economically significant in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting power, which clearly exceeds that of the well-known forward basis. The empirical results show that spot returns correspond negatively to both the front-month futures basis and nearby-month futures basis. Furthermore, the futures basis reveals substantial economic value for investors in terms of sizable and tangible portfolio gains, which are consistent with statistical measures. The difference in the forecasting ability of the futures basis and forward basis can be explained by the level of exposure to the time-varying risk premium. Finally, we find that impacts of the futures basis on spot returns vary with time and experienced substantial structural changes during the Global Financial Crisis.

Stock Net Entropy: Evidence from the Chinese Growth Enterprise Market

By introducing net entropy into a stock network, this paper focuses on investigating the impact of network entropy on market returns and trading in the Chinese Growth Enterprise Market (GEM). In this paper, indices of Wu structure entropy (WSE) and SD structure entropy (SDSE) are considered as indicators of network heterogeneity to present market diversification. A series of dynamic financial networks consisting of 1066 daily nets is constructed by applying the dynamic conditional correlation multivariate GARCH (DCC-MV-GARCH) model with a threshold adjustment. Then, we evaluate the quantitative relationships between network entropy indices and market trading-variables and their bilateral information spillover effects by applying the bivariate EGARCH model. There are two main findings in the paper. Firstly, the evidence significantly ensures that both market returns and trading volumes associate negatively with the network entropy indices, which indicates that stock heterogeneity, which is negative with the value of network entropy indices by definition, can help to improve market returns and increase market trading volumes. Secondly, results show significant information transmission between the indicators of network entropy and stock market trading variables.

Is the relationship between gold and the U.S. dollar always negative? The role of macroeconomic uncertainty

ABSTRACT The main work of this article is to access the role of macroeconomic uncertainty in effecting the correlation between gold and the dollar. The empirical analysis is divided into two parts. Firstly, we examine the impact of macroeconomic uncertainty on short and long correlation between gold and the dollar. Secondly, we analyse the explanatory power of economic uncertainty for the abnormal market relation between gold and the dollar with a threshold model. In particular, we investigate impacts of economic uncertainty sourced from different economies. The empirical results indicate that economic uncertainty generates direct impacts on the correlation between gold and the dollar. Moreover, our results emphasize that uncertainty sourced from different economies have different impacts on the dynamics between gold and the dollar. This article also presents the relative contribution of gold and the dollar shocks to the likelihood of being in the high-uncertainty regime. These results have implications for risk management, international asset allocation and hedging strategies.

Predictability of structural co-movement in commodity prices: the role of technical indicators

This paper investigates the financialization and structural co-movement of several commodity futures using factor variance decomposition and predictability of technical indicators and macro variables. We find that financialization is still a dominant player in the commodity market and that recent commodity price fluctuations can be significantly and robustly forecasted by technical analyses of commodity index investments. Moreover, the co-movement of commodities is demonstrated by variance decomposition and explained as commodity index investment, which provides evidence of financialization. The overall empirical analysis reveals that technical indicators and macro variables can statistically and economically forecast the indexed investment and off-index trading, respectively, which indicates that they are suitable predictors of the commodity markets.

Optimize International Portfolio via Stochastic Programming

We propose a two-stage stochastic programming method for dynamic international portfolio management in a holistic view aiming at attaining an effective balance between portfolios currency risk exposure and its realized expected return. By modeling the uncertainty with a scenario tree that reflects the historical distribution as well as related information, and elaborating an integrated optimization framework for asset allocation and currency risk hedging, state-contingent rebalancing decisions including capital allocation, asset selection, and appropriate currency hedging levels can be considered dynamically and automatically. According to extensive empirical analysis, our approach not only provides an effective decision tool for international asset allocation but also pay attention to incremental advantages arising from the jointly realization of currency forward contracts. We also illustrate potential benefits stemming from unrestricted application of currency forward contracts for speculative trading.