Return Volatility Research Articles

Sectoral Corporate Profits and Long‐Run Stock Return Volatility in the United States: A GARCH‐MIDAS Approach

ABSTRACTThis study aims to examine the usefulness of corporate profits in predicting the return volatility of sectoral stocks in the United States. We use a GARCH‐MIDAS approach to keep the datasets in their original frequencies. The results show a consistently positive slope coefficient across various sectoral stocks. This implies that higher profits lead to increased trading of stocks and, subsequently, a higher volatility in the long run than usual. Furthermore, the analysis also extends to predictability beyond the in‐sample. We find strong evidence that corporate profits can predict the out‐of‐sample long‐run return volatility of sectoral stocks in the United States. These findings are significant for investors and portfolio managers.

Testing the waters meetings, retail trading, and capital market frictions

AbstractPre-IPO firms may “test the waters” by meeting privately with investors in order to allow access to management and more time to make an investment decision. However, these meetings have the potential to undermine the SEC’s objectives of protecting investors and supporting market efficiency by allowing institutional investors, but not retail investors, private access to management. We find lower retail trading after IPOs of firms that held testing-the-waters meetings, consistent with the meetings reducing retail investor participation. Moreover, retail investors that still participate in the market in the presence of testing-the-waters meetings have inferior investment outcomes. Nonetheless, we find no evidence of lower overall market liquidity or slower price discovery following testing-the-waters meetings. In fact, we observe a reduction in stock return volatility. Overall our evidence suggests that, while testing-the-waters meetings may harm retail investors, there does not appear to be a negative impact on overall market function.

Asymmetric Effects and Volatility Clustering in NSE NIFTY 50: A Comparative Analysis of GARCH Models

This study aims to analyze the volatility patterns, Clustering, and asymmetric effects in the NSE NIFTY 50 index. It involves using daily returns data from the NSE NIFTY 50 from 01 Jan 2010 to 31 Dec 2023. Daily closing prices are obtained from the official NSE website, and returns are calculated based on these prices. EGARCH (1, 1), TARCH (1, 1), GARCH (1, 1), GARCH-M (1,1), and models are utilized to predict volatility, capturing volatility clustering and leverage effects. Using both the Akaike and Schwarz criteria, EGARCH (1,1) was demonstrated to be the best model. The findings reveal that Fluctuations in the Indian stock market, particularly shown in the NIFTY index of the NSE were the highest in the year 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Past NIFTY returns demonstrate a GARCH effect on today’s NIFTY returns. The results of the research suggest that the impact of negative and positive shocks on the stock returns series varies. Volatility is largely caused by negative news compared to positive news. It is suggested that the model exhibits a leverage effect and that different types of information produce various types of shock to the volatility of the Nifty index return. The findings show that investors of NSE, particularly those involved with the NIFTY50, face heightened volatility and increased risk, especially during periods of significant events.

High-frequency realized stochastic volatility model

A new high-frequency realized stochastic volatility model is proposed. Apart from the standard daily-frequency stochastic volatility model, the high-frequency stochastic volatility model is fit to intraday returns by extensively incorporating intraday volatility patterns. The daily realized volatility calculated using intraday returns is incorporated into the high-frequency stochastic volatility model by considering the bias in the daily realized volatility caused by microstructure noise. The volatility of intraday returns is assumed to consist of the autoregressive process, the seasonal component of the intraday volatility pattern, and the announcement component responding to macroeconomic announcements. A Bayesian method via Markov chain Monte Carlo is developed for the analysis of the proposed model. The empirical analysis using the 5-minute returns of E-mini S&P 500 futures provides evidence that our high-frequency realized stochastic volatility model improves in-sample model fit and volatility forecasting over the high-frequency stochastic volatility model.

An ETF-based measure of stock price fragility

Equity mutual fund flows are commonly employed to measure stock price fragility - a stock’s exposure to non-fundamental demand risk. However, this approach may be biased by confounding fundamental information, potentially underestimating risk exposure. We propose an alternative method that uses the primary market data of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This approach overcomes many limitations of mutual fund data, incorporates the influence of a broader set of investor demand, and strongly predicts stock return volatility and return comovement. Our study highlights the significant role that the arbitrage trading activity of ETFs play in signaling non-fundamental demand shocks.

Monetary Policy Instruments and Stock Market Returns Volatility in Nigeria

The study examines monetary policies instruments impact on stock market volatility in Nigeria for the period of 1993-2022. The study identified the independent variables, namely; reserve requirement (RR), cash reserve ratio (CRR), discount rate (DR) and money supply (MS) which were analyzed in relation to stock market volatility proxied with all share index volatility (ASIV). The data was analyzed with descriptive statistics, correlation matrix several diagnostics tests (VIF, validity test, ADF and Johansen tests) and the multiple regression analysis. The findings revealed that RR, CRR and MS have significant effect on ASIV while DR has insignificant effect on ASIV in Nigeria. It was concluded that reserve requirement, discount rate and money supply exert significant effect on Nigerian economy. Thus, it thereby recommended that management of CBN should put modalities in place to aggressively control ASIV in Nigeria. CBN should put measures in place to increase CRR. This will provide banks opportunity to fund economic transaction in the Nigerian economy, thereby reducing ASIV.

Industry return volatility and spillover effects in stock market under climate risk perception

ABSTRACT Utilizing alternative dimension reduction methods, this study constructs three Climate Risk Perception Indices (CRPIs) to quantify the impact of investor climate change sentiment on industry return volatility in the Chinese stock market. There are several findings in this study including (1) the CRPIs effectively capture the trend of climate change in China over the past decade. (2) The investor’s attention to climate change positively influences short-term stock market returns, exhibiting seasonal characteristics and industry heterogeneity. (3) The attention serves as an information sender for stocks in Telecommunication, Oil & Petrochemicals, and Environmental Protection. (4) The total spillover effect among climate-sensitive industries is significantly higher during extreme climate events. These conclusions provide empirical evidence for the stock market to respond effectively to climate risks.

Technological shocks and stock market volatility over a century

This paper provides a novel perspective on the innovation-stock market nexus by examining the predictive relationship between technological shocks and stock market volatility using data over a period of more than 140 years. Utilizing annual patent data for the U.S. and a large set of economies to create proxies for local and global technological shocks and a mixed-sampling data (MIDAS) framework, we present robust evidence that technological shocks capture significant predictive information regarding future realizations of stock market volatility, both in- and out-of-sample and at both the short and long forecast horizons. Further economic analysis shows that investment portfolios created by the volatility forecasts obtained from the forecasting models that incorporate technological shocks as predictors in volatility models experience significantly lower return volatility in the out-of-sample horizons, which in turn helps to improve the risk-return profile of those portfolios. Our findings present a novel take on the nexus between technological innovations and stock market dynamics and pave the way for several interesting avenues for future research regarding the role of technological innovations on asset pricing tests and portfolio models.

Modelling Multivariate Return Volatilities by Independent Components Using Johnson SU Likelihood

Time-varying volatility modelling is crucial in financial econometrics. For multivariate data, time-varying correlations across securities are important to explain the co-movement of the data. Therefore, we need to estimate the covariance matrix. Estimating a large conditional covariance matrix requires the estimation of a large number of parameters, which is a hard task and often leads to convergence difficulties in the estimation algorithm. We introduce a framework for forecasting the conditional covariance matrix of a large data set by employing a factor model to reduce dimensionality, with the factors estimated using independent components. The main contribution of our article is the estimation of the unobserved independent components using Johnson SU likelihood, which captures the skewness and excess kurtosis—stylized facts in stock returns. First, we extract the independent components using the Johnson SU distribution, maximizing their non-Gaussianity. Second, we sorted the independent components in terms of their explained variability and fit a univariate GARCH process on a few common independent components. Next, we approximate the conditional covariance matrix of the data through a linear combination of the conditional variances of those select few independent components. We apply this procedure to 50 stock returns data (listed in Nifty 50) that exhibit excess kurtosis and skewness, and the findings show that our methodology dominates other algorithms in extracting the independent components. This method enables fund managers to accurately forecast a large conditional covariance matrix, facilitating effective risk management and portfolio construction.

Can the sentiment of the official media predict the return volatility of the Chinese crude oil futures?

This study investigates whether the sentiment of Chinese official media towards crude oil influences price volatility of the Chinese crude oil futures (SC). By leveraging textual analysis through Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), we quantify the sentiment of oil-related articles published by the primary official media in China. Our main finding, building on both in-sample and out-of-sample analyses, robustly reveals that this sentiment significantly forecasts the one-day-ahead intraday return volatility of SC. Moreover, we extend the analysis to different time horizons (i.e., one-week and one-month-ahead) and find the prominent forecasting power of the official media sentiment as well. We also find that the official media sentiment fails to forecast the price volatility of WTI oil futures, implying that the official media sentiment contains some unique Chinese information. Overall, our study contributes to the existing literature on predicting the return volatility of the Chinese crude oil futures, and offers fresh insights into an essential yet underexplored sentiment, i.e., official media sentiment.

Economic policy uncertainty and narrative R&D disclosures

This study examines the impact of economic policy uncertainty on narrative R&D disclosure. Analyzing 10-K reports from 1997 to 2020, we find that the quantity of R&D disclosure increases with economic policy uncertainty. We also document that firms provide more forward-looking R&D disclosure during uncertain periods. Finally, we find that such impact is more pronounced for the firms with high return volatility and firms in the early-stage of business cycle. We contribute to the literature by showing how managers adjust R&D disclosures in response to economic policy uncertainty.

The Memory in Return Volatility: An Analysis of Mutual Fund Returns

ABSTRACTThis paper examines long memory in the return volatility in the cross‐section of U.S. mutual funds. Our results provide evidence of this phenomenon. Through univariate analysis, we find that the long memory in mutual fund return volatility is more pronounced than in stock return volatility. Additionally, the long memory estimate is negatively related to expected fund returns. Holding a long position in shorter‐term memory funds and a short position in longer‐term memory funds generates significant excess returns of 0.26% per month for value‐weighted portfolios.

Option Pricing Based on Neural Stochastic Differential Equations

Firstly, based on the Black-Scholes stock price model, the neural stochastic differential equation (NSDE) model was established by parameterizing the asset return rate and volatility as a drift network and a diffusion network, respectively. Secondly, in the empirical analysis, the underlying asset as a single stock option was used as the research object, and real stock data was used for the network training and testing. The experimental results show that the NSDE model can overcome the defects of the constant assumption of the Black-Scholes model. Finally, for the case where the price of the underlying asset of the option was unobservable, we proposed that the price of any target option and the price of a known option could be constrained within the Wasserstein distance of their risk-neutral equivalent martingale measure, and theoretically proved the method.

Drilling Deeper: Non-Linear, Non-Parametric Natural Gas Price and Volatility Forecasting

This paper studies the forecast accuracy and explainability of a battery of dayahead (Henry Hub and Title Transfer Facility (TTF)) natural gas price and volatility models. The results demonstrate the dominance of non-linear, non-parametric models with deep structure relative to various competing model specifications. By employing the explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) approach, we document that the price of natural gas is formed strategically based on crude oil and electricity prices. While the conditional volatility of natural gas returns is driven by long-memory dynamics and crude oil volatility, the informativeness of the electricity predictor has improved over the most recent volatile time period. Although we reveal that predictive non-linear relationships are inherently complex and time-varying, our findings in general support the notion that natural gas, crude oil and electricity are interconnected. Focusing on the periods when markets experienced sharp structural breaks and extreme volatility (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict), we show that deep learning models provide better adaptability and lead to significantly more accurate forecast performance.

Short selling and firms’ long-term stock return volatility: Evidence from Chinese concept stocks in Hong Kong

This paper examines the impact of short selling on the long-term volatility of firms' stock returns, highlighting the moderating effect of corporate governance quality. We analyze a sample of Chinese concept stocks listed in Hong Kong from 2015 to 2023, separating stock volatility into short- and long-term components with a GARCH-MIDAS model and differentiating between noisy and informed short selling. We provide evidence through portfolio and regression analyses that short selling increases stock return volatility, with the most significant impact observed in the long-term component, fueled in part by noisy short selling. However, this effect can be mitigated by managers who invest in improving their firms’ corporate governance quality. Implications of our findings for both research and practical applications are discussed.

Nexus Between Stock Return and Market Volatility in Indian Perspective

This research seeks to explore the volatility patterns for the SENSEX index to figure out the characteristics of volatility in Indian stock trading and to investigate the relationship between returns and volatility of the Indian market for the last ten years. The research adds to the existing knowledge about stock market fluctuations, their implications for investors, and their impact on developing the country's economy. The study involves using daily returns data from BSE SENSEX from 01 Jan 2014 to 31 Dec 2023. Daily closing prices are obtained from the official website of BSE, and returns are calculated based on these prices. The Dickey-Fuller and Phillips-perron are taken to make the time series static. ARCH, GARCH, and GARCH-M tests are utilized to capture volatility clustering, return and volatility relationship. The results reveal that Fluctuations in the Indian stock market, particularly shown in the SENSEX index of the BSE, were highest in the year 2020. Findings suggest that GARCH-M does not show any relation between expected returns and market volatility. The risk-premium parameter is positive but statistically insignificant. If you want to hedge against risk, the risk premium is not very high. It means that taking risks does not give you more returns. Durbin Watson's value of 1.981401 further supports the model's suitability.Copyright© 2024 The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the license CC-BY 4.0., which permits any further distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Valuation and Returns on Stock Return Volatility

ABSTRACT This paper provides an accounting-based valuation model that predicts that cross-sectional variation in firm-level returns to investments in both stock and stock return volatility are related to cross-sectional variation in firm-level fundamentals. The model predicts that expected stock returns have a positive quadratic relation with stock return variance and a negative quadratic relation with gains to trading in stock return variance. Consistent with these predictions, firms with high model-implied expected stock returns have high future stock return variance, and the relation is roughly quadratic. In contrast, firms with high expected stock returns have low future returns to trading in stock return variance through option contracts because these firms have high option-implied variance relative to future realized variance, i.e., low variance risk premia (VRP). The study provides a framework for using fundamentals for trading in individual stocks and options. JEL Classifications: G12; G14; G17.

Mapping Risk–Return Linkages and Volatility Spillover in BRICS Stock Markets through the Lens of Linear and Non-Linear GARCH Models

This paper explores the influence of the risk–return relationship and volatility spillover on stock market returns of emerging economies, with a particular focus on the BRICS countries. This research is undertaken in a context where discussions on de-dollarization and the expansion of BRICS membership are gaining momentum, making it a novel and distinct exercise compared to prior studies. Utilizing econometric techniques to investigate daily market returns from 1 April 2008 to 31 March 2023, a period that witnessed major events like the global financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Russia–Ukraine conflict, linear and non-linear models like ARCH, GARCH, GARCH-M, EGARCH, and TGARCH, are employed to assess stock return volatility behaviour, assuming a Gaussian distribution of error terms. The diagnostic test confirms that the distribution is non-normal, stationary, and heteroscedastic. The key findings indicate a lack of the risk–return relationship across all BRICS stock markets, except for South Africa; a more pronounced effect of unpleasant news over pleasant news; a slow mean-reverting process in volatility; the EGARCH model is the best fit model as evidenced by a higher log likelihood and lower Akaike information criterion and Schwardz information criterion parameters; and finally, the presence of significant bidirectional and unidirectional spillover effects in the majority of instances. These findings are valuable for investors, regulators, and policymakers in enhancing returns and mitigating risk through portfolio diversification and informed decision making.

Bayesian Lower and Upper Estimates for Ether Option Prices with Conditional Heteroscedasticity and Model Uncertainty

This paper aims to leverage Bayesian nonlinear expectations to construct Bayesian lower and upper estimates for prices of Ether options, that is, options written on Ethereum, with conditional heteroscedasticity and model uncertainty. Specifically, a discrete-time generalized conditional autoregressive heteroscedastic (GARCH) model is used to incorporate conditional heteroscedasticity in the logarithmic returns of Ethereum, and Bayesian nonlinear expectations are adopted to introduce model uncertainty, or ambiguity, about the conditional mean and volatility of the logarithmic returns of Ethereum. Extended Girsanov’s principle is employed to change probability measures for introducing a family of alternative GARCH models and their risk-neutral counterparts. The Bayesian credible intervals for “uncertain” drift and volatility parameters obtained from conjugate priors and residuals obtained from the estimated GARCH model are used to construct Bayesian superlinear and sublinear expectations giving the Bayesian lower and upper estimates for the price of an Ether option, respectively. Empirical and simulation studies are provided using real data on Ethereum in AUD. Comparisons with a model incorporating conditional heteroscedasticity only and a model capturing ambiguity only are presented.

Realized Stock Market Volatility of the United States: The Role of Employee Sentiment

Using data for the United States (US) stock market covering the sample period from 2008:06 to 2020:12, we study the incremental predictive value of employee sentiment for the realized volatility of stock returns. In doing so, we control four different measures of investor sentiment and various macroeconomic and financial factors and uncertainties. We report results for several combinations of forecast horizons and estimation windows and find that employee sentiment contributes to forecast accuracy for several combinations.