Essays On The Economic Relevance Of Volatility Spillovers

Download or read book Essays on the Economic Relevance of Volatility Spillovers written by Katja Ida Maria Gisler and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first chapter focuses on the relevance of covariances in the transmission mechanism of variance spillovers across the US stock, US bond and gold markets. For that purpose, we perform a comparative spillover analysis between a model that considers covariances and a model that considers only variances. Our results emphasise the importance of covariances in the transmission mechanism. Including covariances leads to an overall increase of the spillover level and detects the beginnings of the financial crisis and of the US debt-ceiling crisis earlier than the spillover measure that considers only variances. The second chapter evaluates the role of the United States as a source of important spillover information in forecasting realised volatility for a large cross-section of international equity markets. For this purpose, we extend the heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) model of realised volatility of Corsi (2009) by including US equity volatility information. More precisely, we augment the standard HAR model by US realised volatility and VIX HAR components, and compare it to the original HAR model across 17 international equity markets. Our in-sample and out-of-sample findings show that the US equity market volatility information is statistically significant and sizeable economically across all equity markets that we consider. The last chapter introduces a new system-wide network-based risk factor into the empirical asset pricing literature and examines its pricing ability for carry trade returns in currency markets. I find that system-wide volatility connectedness risk carries a significant and negative risk premium. That is, I show that low interest rate currencies are positively related to system-wide volatility connectedness risk, while high interest rate currencies display a negative correlation. Low interest rate currencies thus serve as a hedge during unexpectedly high system-wide volatility connectedness episodes, typical.