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Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to assess the role of collateralizable wealth and systemic risk in explaining future asset returns.

Methodology/approach – To test this hypothesis, the chapter uses the residuals of the trend relationship among housing wealth and labor income to predict both stock returns and government bond yields. Specifically, it shows that nonlinear deviations of housing wealth from its cointegrating relationship with labor income, hwy, forecast expected future returns.

Findings – Using data for a set of industrialized countries, the chapter finds that when the housing wealth-to-income ratio falls, investors demand a higher risk premium for stocks. As for government bond returns: (i) when they are seen as a component of asset wealth, investors react in the same manner and (ii) if, however, investors perceive the increase in government bond returns as signaling a future rise in taxes or a deterioration of public finances, then they interpret the fall in the housing wealth-to-income ratio as a fall in future bond premia. Finally, this work shows that the occurrence of crisis episodes amplifies the transmission of housing market shocks to financial markets.

Originality/value of chapter – These findings are novel. They also open new and challenging avenues for understanding the dynamics of the relationship between the housing sector, stock market and government bond developments, and the banking system.

Over the last few years, Central and East European economies have become more integrated with the West European economy. In general, these economies have become more market-oriented and restrictions on foreign investment have been relaxed. An important step in this development was the admission of eight East European countries to the European Union (EU) in 2004. As the economic ties between Western, Central and Eastern Europe strengthen, one would naturally expect the financial markets to follow suit and become more integrated as well. A good example is the historical case of the Italian and German government bond markets: Before 1999 these two markets differed markedly in terms of credit quality and price volatility, but since the creation of the Euro zone in 1999 they have become highly similar.

We evaluate the performance of fixed income mutual funds using stochastic discount factors motivated by continuous-time term structure models. Time-aggregation of these models for discrete returns generates new empirical “factors,” and these factors contribute significant explanatory power to the models. We provide a conditional performance evaluation for US fixed income mutual funds, conditioning on a variety of discrete ex-ante characterizations of the states of the economy. During 1985–1999 we find that fixed income funds return less on average than passive benchmarks that do not pay expenses, but not in all economic states. Fixed income funds typically do poorly when short-term interest rates or industrial capacity utilization rates are high, and offer higher returns when quality-related credit spreads are high. We find more heterogeneity across fund styles than across characteristics-based fund groups. Mortgage funds underperform a GNMA index in all economic states. These excess returns are reduced, and typically become insignificant, when we adjust for risk using the models.

Real estate investment has been generally accepted as a value-adding proposition for a portfolio investor. Such an impression is not only shared by investment professionals and financial advisors but also appears to be supported by an overwhelming amount of research in the academic literature. The benefits of adding real estate as an asset class to a well-diversified portfolio are usually attributed to the respectable risk-return profile of real estate investment together with the relatively low correlation between its returns and the returns of other financial assets. By using the regime-switching technique on an extensive historical dataset, we attempt to look for the statistical evidence for such a claim. Unfortunately, the empirical support for the claim is neither strong nor universal. We find that any statistically significant improvement in risk-adjusted return is very much limited to the bullish environment of the real estate market. In general, the diversification benefit is not found to be statistically significant unless investors are relatively risk averse. We also document a regime-switching behavior of real estate returns similar to those found in other financial assets. There are two distinct states of the real estate market. The low-return (high-return) state is characterized by its high (low) volatility and its high (low) correlations with the stock market returns. We find this kind of dynamic risk characteristics to play a crucial role in dictating the diversification benefit from real estate investment.

In this chapter we investigate the response of bond markets to macroeconomic news announcements in the euro area. Specifically, we analyze the impact of (un)expected changes in the interest rate, unemployment rate, consumer confidence index and industrial production index on the returns, volatility and correlations of European government bond markets. Overall, our results suggest that, bond return volatility strongly reacts to news announcements and that the response is asymmetric. However, the influence of macroeconomic news announcements appears insignificant for bond returns. Finally, our results paint a complex picture of the effect of macroeconomic news releases on correlations.

Inefficiencies in the fiscal and monetary systems of the Ottoman Empire led to a higher debt burden over time and the bankruptcy for the Ottoman state in 1875. To deal with these inefficiencies, reforms were implemented: supervisory organizations were established and the gold standard was adopted. How did investors at the Istanbul Bourse view these reforms? We manually collected data on the price of Ottoman government bonds on the Bourse from 1873 to 1883. Using the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) methodology, we identify short-run and permanent changes in volatility of bond returns subsequent to the reforms. Our results suggest investors responded positively, by accepting lower yield premia, to adoption of the gold standard, and foundation of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration which had European sponsors, but did not respond positively to reforms that relied on purely local institutions.

This paper studies whether individual stocks provide higher returns than government bond in the Chinese market.

The authors compare individual stock returns and government bond returns in the Chinese market.

The authors find that more than half of individual stocks underperform government bonds over the same period in China, which highlights the important role of positive skewness in the distribution of individual stock returns. The high return of a few stocks is the reason why the stock market return is higher than that of government bond in China.

The results of this paper emphasize that portfolio diversification plays an important role in the Chinese market.

This paper aims to test the predictability of the three asset classes, namely direct property, bond and property stocks in Singapore.

Using the generalized method of moment (GMM) estimation methodology, the authors first estimate the excess returns of assets on five instrumental variables and a constant term. Next the common risk factors are tested in three parts involving different portfolio of sample assets.

The empirical results shows that there are at most three common risk factors that can be used to predict the excess returns of six asset classes, that include four direct property assets, bonds and property stocks. The results also indicate that there are separate common risk premia that are priced in property stock and direct property markets, which indirectly reject the hypothesis that the two property markets are integrated.

The empirical results that reject the market integration between property and property stock markets imply that there are significant diversification benefits for holding both assets in investors' portfolios. The two property assets capture different risk premia in the markets.

The GMM specifications that include five instrumental variables may not fully capture all risk information. Omission of other variables is, however, traded‐off against the parsimony of the model specification. More independent variables could be included in the future studies, and more asset classes could also be added to the tests.

The study provides alternative evidence to the test of market integration between property and property stocks in Singapore. It also verifies the earlier study in the USA that property and stock market effects could be separately priced by the market.

This chapter focuses on examining how changes in the liquidity differential between nominal and TIPS yields influence optimal portfolio allocations in U.S. Treasury securities. Based on a nonparametric estimation technique and comparing the optimal allocation decisions of mean-variance and CRRA investor, when investment opportunities are time varying, I present evidence that liquidity risk premium is a significant risk-factor in a portfolio allocation context. In fact, I find that a conditional allocation strategy translates into improved in-sample and out-of-sample asset allocation and performance. The analysis of the portfolio allocation to U.S. government bonds is particularly important for central banks, specially in developing countries, given the fact that, collectively they have accumulate a large holdings of U.S. securities over the last 15 years.

This paper examines the implications of standard barter models of market equilibrium for financial security returns in New Zealand. The key question addressed is: does the ‘equity premium puzzle’ of Mehra and Prescott (1985) found in the U.S. also hold in ?ew Zealand? To examine the existence of the equity premium puzzle, quarterly financial security returns and consumption data are examined from 1965 to 1997 to calibrate parameters in the Consumption Based Asset Pricing Model. Unlike much of the existing international evidence, this paper corrects for durable goods consumption following the assumptions of the model that all consumption be consumed in a given period. Numerical analyses indicate that the class of models examined are unable to generate equity premia consistent with historical estimates of the equity premium in New Zealand. Due to small sample variability however, while this discrepancy is material in size, the result is not statistically significant.