Journal of Financial Econometrics - recent issues

Time-Varying Arrival Rates of Informed and Uninformed Trades

Easley, D., Engle, R. F., O'Hara, M., Wu, L. — 2008-03-10

We propose a dynamic econometric microstructure model of trading, and we investigate how the dynamics of trades and trade composition interact with the evolution of market liquidity, market depth, and order flow. We estimate a bivariate generalized autoregressive intensity process for the arrival rates of informed and uninformed trades for 16 actively traded stocks over 15 years of transaction data. Our results show that both informed and uninformed trades are highly persistent, but that the uninformed arrival forecasts respond negatively to past forecasts of the informed intensity. Our estimation generates daily conditional arrival rates of informed and uninformed trades, which we use to construct forecasts of the probability of information-based trade (PIN). These forecasts are used in turn to forecast market liquidity as measured by bid-ask spreads and the price impact of orders. We observe that PINs vary across assets and over time, and most importantly that they are correlated across assets. Our analysis shows that one principal component explains much of the daily variation in PINs and that this systemic liquidity factor may be important for asset pricing. We also find that PINs tend to rise before earnings announcement days and decline afterwards.

Parameterizing Unconditional Skewness in Models for Financial Time Series

He, C., Silvennoinen, A., Terasvirta, T. — 2008-03-10

In this paper we consider the third-moment structure of a class of time series models. It is often argued that the marginal distribution of financial time series such as returns is skewed. Therefore it is of importance to know what properties a model should possess if it is to accommodate unconditional skewness. We consider modeling the unconditional mean and variance using models that respond nonlinearly or asymmetrically to shocks. We investigate the implications of these models on the third-moment structure of the marginal distribution as well as conditions under which the unconditional distribution exhibits skewness and nonzero third-order autocovariance structure. In this respect, an asymmetric or nonlinear specification of the conditional mean is found to be of greater importance than the properties of the conditional variance. Several examples are discussed and, whenever possible, explicit analytical expressions provided for all third-order moments and cross-moments. Finally, we introduce a new tool, the shock impact curve, for investigating the impact of shocks on the conditional mean squared error of return series.

Estimating Value at Risk and Expected Shortfall Using Expectiles

Taylor, J. W. — 2008-03-10

Expectile models are derived using asymmetric least squares. A simple formula has been presented that relates the expectile to the expectation of exceedances beyond the expectile. We use this as the basis for estimating the expected shortfall. It has been proposed that the quantile be estimated by the expectile for which the proportion of observations below the expectile is . In this way, an expectile can be used to estimate value at risk. Using expectiles has the appeal of avoiding distributional assumptions. For univariate modeling, we introduce conditional autoregressive expectiles (CARE). Empirical results for the new approach are competitive with established benchmarks methods.

Kernel Conditional Quantile Estimation for Stationary Processes with Application to Conditional Value-at-Risk

Wu, W. B., Yu, K., Mitra, G. — 2008-03-10

The paper considers kernel estimation of conditional quantiles for both short-range and long-range-dependent processes. Under mild regularity conditions, we obtain Bahadur representations and central limit theorems for kernel quantile estimates of those processes. Our theory is applicable to many price processes of assets in finance. In particular, we present an asymptotic theory for kernel estimates of the value-at-risk (VaR) of the market value of an asset conditional on the historical information or a state process. The results are assessed based on a small simulation and are applied to AT&T monthly returns.

Detecting ARCH Effects in Non-Gaussian Time Series

Raunig, B. — 2008-03-10

Engles ARCH test has become the standard test for ARCH effects in applied work. Under non-normality the true rejection probability of this test can differ substantially from the nominal level, however. Bootstrap and Monte Carlo versions of the test may then be used instead. This paper proposes an alternative test procedure. The new test exploits the empirical distribution of the data and an extended probability integral transformation. The test is compared with the former tests in Monte Carlo experiments. Under normality, the new test works as well as the conventional Monte Carlo test and the bootstrap. Under non-normality, the test tends to be more accurate and more powerful than the bootstrapped ARCH test. The procedure is then used to test for ARCH effects in S&P 500 returns sampled at different frequencies. In contrast to the standard and the bootstrapped ARCH tests, the new test detects ARCH effects in the transformed low-frequency returns.

Size and Value Anomalies under Regime Shifts

Guidolin, M., Timmermann, A. — 2007-12-26

This paper finds strong evidence of time-variations in the joint distribution of returns on a stock market portfolio and portfolios tracking size- and value effects. Mean returns, volatilities and correlations between these equity portfolios are found to be driven by underlying regimes that introduce short-run market timing opportunities for investors. The magnitude of the premia on the size and value portfolios and their hedging properties are found to vary across regimes. Regimes are shown to have a large impact both on the optimal asset allocation—especially under rebalancing—and on investors' utility. Regimes also have a considerable impact on hedging demands, which are positive when the investor starts from more favorable regimes and negative when starting from bad states. Recursive out-of-sample forecasting experiments show that portfolio strategies based on models that account for regimes dominate single-state benchmarks.

Sorting, Firm Characteristics, and Time-varying Risk: An Econometric Analysis

Fan, X., Liu, M. — 2007-12-26

We show that sorting reveals the time-varying market risk exposures of the firm-specific investment opportunity set. Sorting on the basis of firm characteristics uncovers information on firm-specific distress or growth, and this leads to more efficient estimation of conditional risk sensitivity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the sorting methodology with an empirical exercise that tests the conditional capital asset pricing model (CAPM). When measured properly using sorting and firm characteristics, conditional betas, along with size and the book-market ratio, are significant drivers of expected returns.

Nonparametric Estimation of Expected Shortfall

Chen, S. X. — 2007-12-26

The expected shortfall is an increasingly popular risk measure in financial risk management and it possesses the desired sub-additivity property, which is lacking for the value at risk (VaR). We consider two nonparametric expected shortfall estimators for dependent financial losses. One is a sample average of excessive losses larger than a VaR. The other is a kernel smoothed version of the first estimator (Scaillet, 2004 Mathematical Finance), hoping that more accurate estimation can be achieved by smoothing. Our analysis reveals that the extra kernel smoothing does not produce more accurate estimation of the shortfall. This is different from the estimation of the VaR where smoothing has been shown to produce reduction in both the variance and the mean square error of estimation. Therefore, the simpler ES estimator based on the sample average of excessive losses is attractive for the shortfall estimation.

Evidence on Simulation Inference for Near Unit-Root Processes with Implications for Term Structure Estimation

Duffee, G. R., Stanton, R. H. — 2007-12-26

The high persistence of interest rates has important implications for the preferred method used to estimate term structure models. We study the finite-sample properties of two standard dynamic simulation methods—efficient method of moments (EMM) and indirect inference—when they are applied to an first order autoregressive (AR[1]) process with Gaussian innovations. When simulated data are as persistent as interest rates, the finite-sample properties of EMM differ both from their asymptotic properties and from the finite-sample properties of indirect inference and maximum likelihood. EMM produces larger confidence bounds than indirect inference and maximum likelihood, yet is much less likely to contain the true parameter value. This is primarily because the population variance of the data plays a much larger role in the EMM conditions than in the moment conditions for either indirect inference or maximum likelihood. These results suggest that, under Gaussian assumptions, indirect inference (if practical) is preferable to EMM when working with persistent data such as interest rates. EMM's emphasis on the population variance strongly enforces stationarity on the underlying process, so this same reasoning suggests that EMM may be preferable in settings where stability and stationarity are important and difficult to impose.

Modeling a Multivariate Transaction Process

Nolte, I. — 2007-12-26

In this paper the dynamics of a joint transaction process are investigated. The transaction process is characterized by four marks: price changes, transaction volumes, bid–ask spreads and intertrade durations. Based on a copula approach, a model for their joint density is proposed, which avoids forcing a priori assumptions on the instantaneous causality relationships between the four variables as necessary in decomposition models, where the joint density is decomposed into its conditional and unconditional densities. The price change process is treated as a discrete process and specified with an integer count hurdle model and the transaction volumes, bid–ask spreads, and trade durations processes are modeled along the lines of fractionally integrated autoregressive conditional models, which are suited very well to capture the high persistency, empirically observed in these processes. The model is applied to three stocks traded at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in May, 2001 and we investigate several market microstructure hypotheses in the empirical part of this paper.

A Statistical Inquiry into the Plausibility of Recursive Utility

Gallant, A. R., Hong, H. — 2007-09-12

We use purely statistical methods to determine if the pricing kernel is the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution under recursive utility. We introduce a nonparametric Bayesian method that treats the pricing kernel as a latent variable and extracts it and its transition density from payoffs on 24 Fama-French portfolios, on bonds, and on payoffs that use conditioning information available when portfolios are formed. Our priors are formed from an examination of a Bansal-Yaron economy. Using both monthly data and annual data, we find that the data support recursive utility.

Components of Market Risk and Return

Maheu, J. M., McCurdy, T. H. — 2007-09-12

This article proposes a flexible but parsimonious specification of the joint dynamics of market risk and return to produce forecasts of a time-varying market equity premium. Our parsimonious volatility model allows components to decay at different rates, generates mean-reverting forecasts, and allows variance targeting. These features contribute to realistic equity premium forecasts for the U.S. market over the 1840–2006 period. For example, the premium forecast was low in the mid-1990s but has recently increased. Although the market's total conditional variance has a positive effect on returns, the smooth long-run component of volatility is more important for capturing the dynamics of the premium. This result is robust to univariate specifications that condition on either levels or logs of past realized volatility (RV), as well as to a new bivariate model of returns and RV.

Accurate Short-Term Yield Curve Forecasting using Functional Gradient Descent

Audrino, F., Trojani, F. — 2007-09-12

We propose a multivariate nonparametric technique for generating reliable short-term historical yield curve scenarios and confidence intervals. The approach is based on a Functional Gradient Descent (FGD) estimation of the conditional mean vector and covariance matrix of a multivariate interest rate series. It is computationally feasible in large dimensions and it can account for nonlinearities in the dependence of interest rates at all available maturities. Based on FGD we apply filtered historical simulation to compute reliable out-of-sample yield curve scenarios and confidence intervals. We back-test our methodology on daily USD bond data for forecasting horizons from 1 to 10 days. Based on several statistical performance measures we find significant evidence of a higher predictive power of our method when compared to scenarios generating techniques based on (i) factor analysis, (ii) a multivariate CCC-GARCH model, or (iii) an exponential smoothing covariances estimator as in the RiskMetrics^TM approach.

Positivity Conditions for a Bivariate Autoregressive Volatility Specification

Gourieroux, C. — 2007-09-12

We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the positive definiteness of the predicted volatility matrix in a bivariate autoregressive volatility specification. These nonlinear inequality restrictions have strong implications in terms of causality between volatilities and covolatilities.