Global Stock Markets: Expected Returns, Consumption, and the Business Cycle

ISBN-13: 9783824472727 / Angielski / Miękka / 2000 / 332 str.

Wolfgang Drobetz

Opis

"While the state-preference approach is perhaps more general than the mean variance approach and provides an elegant framework for investigating theo retical issues, it is unfortunately difficult to give it empirical content. " I The state of the art in asset pricing has substantially changed over the past years. While the seminal CAPM represents an equilibrium model derived under rather restrictive assumptions on preferences or return distributions and places a lot of emphasis on the efficiency of a somehow arbitrary market portfolio, subsequent models were much less restrictive with respect to the underlying economic struc ture. For example, the arbitrage pricing theory maintains the linear relationship between risk and return simply by assuming the absence of arbitrage profits. While empirically more tractable than the CAPM, the main drawback of arbitrage pricing models is that they do not provide much insight into the economic and dynamic nature of risk premia. The "conditional" CAPM provides an elegant econometric framework to characterize how changing economic conditions de termine the variability of multiple risk premia. However, this framework still re quires some rather ad-hoc assumptions about the economic nature of the pricing kernel. An ingenious next step in asset pricing modeling was therefore to revert the question to be addressed. Instead of placing strong restrictions on distribu tions and preferences, observed returns are used to derive restrictions which must be imposed on the stochastic properties of the pricing kernel. A simple Euler-type equation is typically used to characterize that approach."

Spis treści

Time varying expected returns and the business cycle on international financial markets - Testing a conditional version of the consumption-based asset pricing model - Volatility bounds for stochastic discount factors on global financial markets - Mean reversion and rational pricing on global stock markets

O autorze

Dr. Wolfgang Drobetz ist Assistent am Schweizerischen Institut für Banken und Finanzen der Universität St. Gallen, wo er bei Prof. Dr. Heinz Zimmermann promovierte.

Blurb

Stock investments have become increasingly international, but only recently a deeper theoretical understanding of the forces influencing global stock market returns has been gained from empirical studies. This is a crucial issue for asset managers in order to control the risks and exposures of global stock portfolios successfully.

Wolfgang Drobetz provides empirical evidence on the time variation of expected stock returns over the stages of the business cycle: If the time variation in expected returns is rational, driven by shocks to taste or technology, the variation in expected returns should be related to variation in consumption, investment, and savings. Testing both stochastic discount factor models and beta pricing models, the author finds that predictability of stock returns is perfectly consistent with the concept of market efficiency, and stock prices need not follow a random walk.