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This paper investigates whether comovements between euro area equity returns at national and industry level have changed after the introduction of the euro. By adopting a regression quantile-based methodology, we find that after 1999 the degree of comovements among euro area national equity markets has augmented. By explicitly controlling for the impact of global factors, we show that this result cannot be explained away by recent world-wide trends. A more refined analysis based on an industry breakdown suggests that the increase in national index comovements is mainly driven by financial, industrials and consumer services sectors.

This paper develops a rigorous econometric framework to investigate the structure of codependence between random variables and to test whether it changes over time. Our approach is based on the computation - over both a test and a benchmark period - of the conditional probability that a random variable yt is lower than a given quantile, when the other random variable xt is also lower than its corresponding quantile, for any set of prespecified quantiles. Time-varying conditional quantiles are modeled via regression quantiles. The conditional probability is estimated through a simple OLS regression. We illustrate the methodology by investigating the impact of the crises of the 1990s on the major Latin American equity markets returns. Our results document significant increases in equity return co-movements during crises consistent with the presence of financial contagion.

By employing Lucas’ (1982) model, this study proposes an arbitrage relationship – the Uncovered Equity Return Parity (URP) condition – to explain the dynamics of exchange rates. When expected equity returns in a country/region are lower than expected equity returns in another country/region, the currency associated with the market offering lower returns is expected to appreciate. First, we test the URP assuming that investors are risk neutral and next we relax this hypothesis. The resulting risk premia are proxied by economic variables, which are related to the business cycle. We employ differentials in corporate earnings’ growth rates, short-term interest rate changes, annual inflation rates, and net equity flows. The URP explains a large fraction of the variability of some European currencies vis-à-vis the US dollar. When confronted with the naïve random walk model, the URP for the EUR/USD performs better in terms of forecasts for a set of alternative statistics.

The goal of this study is to measure market prices of risk and the associated foreign exchange risk premia extending the approach proposed by Balduzzi and Robotti (2001) to an international framework. Estimations of minimum variance stochastic discount factors permits the determination of market prices of risk, which, in turn, in an international framework, allow to compute foreign exchange risk premia. Market prices of risk are time-varying and surge during financial turmoil. This may be interpreted as an increase of the investors' coefficient of risk aversion during turbulent financial markets. Foreign exchange risk premia are also time-varying and they exhibit most variation from the early '70s onwards, when the Bretton Wood exchange rate system collapsed.