An important question in international finance is to what extent stock return volatility is influenced by country location, industry affiliation, and global factors. This Paper develops a new methodology to measure these effects, in which portfolios mimicking ‘pure’ country and industry factors are first constructed and their joint dynamics then modelled as regime-switching processes. Applying this methodology to a uniquely long set of international firm level data, we identify well-defined high and low volatility states over the past 30 years, and show that the contribution of industry and country factors to stock return volatility varies markedly across such states. In particular, we find that the country factor contribution drops markedly when global equity market volatility rises, and that country return correlations become tighter when global and industry factors are both in a high volatility state. Key implications for global portfolio allocation are discussed.
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Paper provided by C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers in its series CEPR Discussion Papers with number
4368.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C10 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: General - - - General G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions G15 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - International Financial Markets
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James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson, 1998.
"Diffusion Indexes,"
NBER Working Papers
6702, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Bekaert, Geert & Hodrick, Robert J. & Zhang, Xiaoyan, 2005.
"International Stock Return Comovements,"
Working Papers
06-3, University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School, Weiss Center.
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