Modelling stock price-exchange rate nexus in OECD countries - A new perspective

This paper subjects the Portfolio Balance Theory to empirical scrutiny using panel data of OECD countries. Thus, it examines the response of exchange rate to stock price changes contrary to the prominent practice in the literature where the former is hypothesized as the predictor. It also tests for the role of asymmetries in the nexus in response to the increasing evidence in the literature suggesting that most financial series tend to exhibit leverage effects. Given the significance of Euro currency in the OECD, we further partition the full data into Euro and Non-Euro areas. In addition, separate regressions are conducted for the pre- and post-Global Financial Crises (GFC) in order to account for the role of financial crisis in the nexus. For robustness, we consider both nominal and real variables and multiple data frequencies. In all, our findings validate the Portfolio Balance Theory for the full OECD, the Euro area, and the non-Euro area, albeit with lesser evidence for the latter. Also, the validity of the theory became more evident after the global financial crises while both long-run and short-run asymmetries are present in the nexus regardless of the data sample. Interestingly, our findings that give rise to this conclusion are robust to different data frequencies and variable measurements.