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Financial volatility and economic activity

Author Info

  • Fabio Fornari
  • Antonio Mele

Abstract

Does capital markets uncertainty affect the business cycle? We find that financial volatility predicts 30% of post-war economic activity in the United States, and that during the Great Moderation, aggregate stock market volatility explains, alone, up to 55% of real growth. In out- of-sample tests, we find that stock volatility helps predict turning points over and above traditional financial variables such as credit or term spreads, and other leading indicators. Combining stock volatility and the term spread leads to a proxy for (i) aggregate risk, (ii) risk-premiums and (iii) monetary policy, which is found to track, and anticipate, the business cycle. At the heart of our analysis is a notion of volatility based on a slowly changing measure of return variability. This volatility is designed to capture long-run uncertainty in capital markets, and is particularly successful at explaining trends in the economic activity at horizons of six months and one year.

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File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/29309/
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Paper provided by London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library in its series LSE Research Online Documents on Economics with number 29309.

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Length: 60 pages
Date of creation: 2009
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:29309
Contact details of provider: Postal: LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.
Phone: +44 (020) 7405 7686
Web page: http://www.lse.ac.uk/
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Find related papers by JEL classification:
  • F3 - International Economics - - International Finance
  • G3 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance
  • J1 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics

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  1. Nicholas BARBERIS & Ming HUANG & Tano SANTOS, 2000. "Prospect Theory and Asset Prices," FAME Research Paper Series rp16, International Center for Financial Asset Management and Engineering.
  2. Tobias Adrian & Joshua Rosenberg, 2008. "Stock Returns and Volatility: Pricing the Short-Run and Long-Run Components of Market Risk," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 63(6), pages 2997-3030, December.
  3. Malkiel, Burton & Campbell, John & Lettau, Martin & Xu, Yexiao, 2001. "Have Individual Stocks Become More Volatile? An Empirical Exploration of Idiosyncratic Risk," Scholarly Articles 3128707, Harvard University Department of Economics.
  4. Robert C. Merton, 1980. "On Estimating the Expected Return on the Market: An Exploratory Investigation," NBER Working Papers 0444, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  5. James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson, 1992. "A Procedure for Predicting Recessions With Leading Indicators: Econometric Issues and Recent Experience," NBER Working Papers 4014, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  6. Diebold, Francis X & Mariano, Roberto S, 1995. "Comparing Predictive Accuracy," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 13(3), pages 253-63, July.
  7. Robert F. Engle & Jose Gonzalo Rangel, 2008. "The Spline-GARCH Model for Low-Frequency Volatility and Its Global Macroeconomic Causes," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 21(3), pages 1187-1222, May.
  8. Arturo Estrella & Gikas A. Hardouvelis, 1989. "The term structure as a predictor of real economic activity," Research Paper 8907, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
  9. Olivier Blanchard & John Simon, 2001. "The Long and Large Decline in U.S. Output Volatility," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 32(1), pages 135-174.
  10. James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson, 1989. "New Indexes of Coincident and Leading Economic Indicators," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1989, Volume 4, pages 351-409 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  11. Ser-Huang Poon & Clive W.J. Granger, 2003. "Forecasting Volatility in Financial Markets: A Review," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 41(2), pages 478-539, June.
  12. Mele, Antonio, 2007. "Asymmetric stock market volatility and the cyclical behavior of expected returns," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 86(2), pages 446-478, November.
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Cited by:

  1. Nieto, Belén & Rubio, Gonzalo, 2011. "The volatility of consumption-based stochastic discount factors and economic cycles," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 35(9), pages 2197-2216, September.
  2. Todd E. Clark & Michael W. McCracken, 2011. "Tests of equal forecast accuracy for overlapping models," Working Papers 2011-024, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
  3. di Mauro, Filippo & Fornari, Fabio & Mannucci, Dario, 2011. "Stock market firm-level information and real economic activity," Working Paper Series 1366, European Central Bank.
  4. Chauvet, Marcelle & Senyuz, Zeynep & Yoldas, Emre, 2010. "What does financial volatility tell us about macroeconomic fluctuations?," MPRA Paper 34104, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised Jun 2011.
  5. Marco Lombardi & Raphael A. Espinoza & Fabio Fornari, 2009. "The Role of Financial Variables in Predicting Economic Activity in the Euro Area," IMF Working Papers 09/241, International Monetary Fund.
  6. Charlotte Christiansen & Maik Schmeling & Andreas Schrimpf, 2012. "A comprehensive look at financial volatility prediction by economic variables," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 27(6), pages 956-977, 09.
  7. Chris Florakis & Gianluigi Giorgioni & Alexandros Kostakis & Costas Milas, 2012. "The Impact of Stock Market Illiquidity on Real UK GDP Growth," Working Paper Series 65_12, The Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis.
  8. Florackis, Chris & Giorgioni, Gianluigi & Kostakis, Alexandros & Milas, Costas, 2014. "On stock market illiquidity and real-time GDP growth," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 210-229.
  9. de Bondt, Gabe & Maddaloni, Angela & Peydró, José-Luis & Scopel, Silvia, 2010. "The euro area Bank Lending Survey matters: empirical evidence for credit and output growth," Working Paper Series 1160, European Central Bank.
  10. Mario Jovanovic, 2011. "Does Monetary Policy Affect Stock Market Uncertainty? – Empirical Evidence from the United States," Ruhr Economic Papers 0240, Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universität Dortmund, Universität Duisburg-Essen.
  11. Choi, Sangyup, 2013. "Are the effects of Bloom’s uncertainty shocks robust?," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 119(2), pages 216-220.
  12. Mario Meichle & Angelo Ranaldo & Attilio Zanetti, 2011. "Do financial variables help predict the state of the business cycle in small open economies? Evidence from Switzerland," Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, Springer, vol. 25(4), pages 435-453, December.

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