Abstract
AbstractThis paper investigates whether macroeconomic shocks, such as the UK's referendum decision to leave the European Union (“Brexit”), the 2008 Financial Crisis, the 1992 ERM Crisis (“Black Wednesday”), and the 1987 stock market crash (“Black Monday”), had a positive impact on portfolio risk diversification. We estimate weekly dynamic conditional correlations and then optimal sectoral portfolio allocations between 1973 and 2019. Our results show that correlations of equity returns increased as a consequence of economic integration among European countries from the mid‐1980s until the late 2000s, and decreased in the United Kingdom after Black Wednesday and the Brexit referendum. We tested the existence of a correlation change‐point on June 27, 2016 by applying Wied et al. (2012)'s [Econometric Theory, 28(3), 570–589] correlation structural break test, which we modified to account for dynamic conditional correlations. Application of this test confirms that the referendum date was a break‐point in nearly all UK manufacturing industries. The failure of Lehman Brothers and the 1987 stock market crash were also identified as structural breaks in equity correlations. Moreover, our findings suggest that the Brexit vote may constitute a long‐term trend reversal of the convergence of equity return correlations in European markets, akin to Black Wednesday, rather than a shock like the 1987 and 2008 financial crises, which merely intensified a historical upward trend in correlations of European equity returns.
Highlights
Since the 2016 UK referendum on membership of the European Union, there has been a flurry of research on the implications of the British decision to leave the European Union (“Brexit”) on the United Kingdom and European economies
Black Wednesday is still viewed as a traumatic economic event in the United Kingdom, and is considered by analysts as the beginning of the political process that led to Brexit (Keegan, Marsh, & Roberts, 2017)
We analyse the correlations of equity returns of listed companies in the five largest European economies from the date the United Kingdom joined the European Union on January 1, 1973 until November 25, 2019
Summary
Since the 2016 UK referendum on membership of the European Union, there has been a flurry of research on the implications of the British decision to leave the European Union (“Brexit”) on the United Kingdom and European economies. KEYWORDS Brexit, dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) of equity returns, European financial integration, portfolio diversification, structural break in dynamic correlations We test whether the date of the Brexit vote, the 2008 Financial Crisis, the 1992 Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) crisis, and the 1987 stock market crash constitute break-points in pairwise equity correlations between UK firms and French, German, Italian, and Spanish companies.
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