Three empirical essays on financial markets

• Main Author: 李淯靖
• Other Authors: 郭維裕
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/47258706919306217845

博士 === 國立政治大學 === 國際經營與貿易研究所 === 99 === This thesis consists of three empirical essays about financial markets. The first essay analyzes the sensitivity of stock returns to changes in interest rates by estimating empirical equity duration of 18 industrial indices in the Taiwan Stock Exchange. In the regression models, we also control for the market excess return and the Fama-French mimicking returns for size and book-to-market factors. To avoid the effects of the multicolinearity between the market excess return and the interest rate changes, we replace the market excess return by the orthogonalized market factor. In addition, considering the time-varying pattern of empirical equity duration, we further adopt the reversed ordered Cusum test proposed by Pesaran and Timmermann (2002) to identify the most recent break of the regression relationship, and then extract the post-break data to re-estimate the up-to-date empirical equity duration. The result shows that except the Steel index, all industrial indices exhibit significantly negative equity durations, indicating a positive relationship between industrial index returns and interest rate changes in Taiwan. Among them, the Construction index has the largest interest rate sensitivity, while the lowest one is for the Automobile index. The second essay focuses on the nature of financial market interdependence, both in terms of returns and returns volatilities. Being capable of identifying the direction and magnitude of linkages among financial markets, the spillover index proposed by Diebold and Yilmaz (2009) is used to measure return and volatility spillovers between the top eight industrial indices based on market value in the Taiwan Stock Exchange. We find that for both returns and volatilities, the spillover effects among industrial indices in Taiwan are substantial. In particular, the Construction index is the major transmitter of shocks to other industries, and the Steel index, in contrast, suffers the most shocks from others. The spillover index fluctuates over time and indeed detects the severity of subprime mortgage crisis. The third essay adopts the multigroup factor analysis proposed by Goyal, Perignon and Villa (2008) to estimate the number of common pervasive factors for annual age-specific mortality for the entire U.S. populations. While the standard principal component analysis easily treats any group-specific factor as pervasive one due to its high contribution to total system variance, this methodology is able to estimate the space spanned by common and group-specific pervasive factors and recognize the true common factors. Empirical result shows that there are only two common pervasive factors governing the death rates in the United States; in particular, the importance of the second factor increases over time.