[The emergence of new equity markets in Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Mideast and Africa provides a new menu of opportunities for investors. These markets exhibit high expected returns as well as high volatility. Importantly, the low correlations with developed countries' equity markets significantly reduces the unconditional portfolio risk of a world investor. However, standard global asset pricing models, which assume complete integration of capital markets, fail to explain the cross section of average returns in emerging countries. An analysis of the predictability of the returns reveals that emerging market returns are more likely than developed countries to be influenced by local information.]

In a financially integrated global market, the conditionally expected return on a portfolio of securities from a particular country is determined by the country's world risk exposure. This paper measures the conditional risk of seventeen countries. The reward per unit of risk is the world price of covariance risk. Although the tests provide evidence on the conditional mean variance efficiency of the benchmark portfolio, the results show that countries' risk exposures help explain differences in performance. Evidence is also presented which indicates that these risk exposures change through time and that the world price of covariance risk is not constant.

[We investigate predictability in national equity market returns, and its relation to global economic risks. We show how to consistently estimate the fraction of the predictable variation that is captured by an asset pricing model for the expected returns. We use a model in which conditional betas of the national equity markets depend on local information variables, while global risk premia depend on global variables. We examine single- and multiple-beta models, using monthly data for 1970 to 1989. The models capture much of the predictability for many countries. Most of this is related to time variation in the global risk premia.]

[We examine the volatility implications of around-the-clock foreign exchange trading with transaction data on futures contracts from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the London International Financial Futures Exchange. We find higher U.S.-European and U.S.-Japanese exchange-rate volatilities during U.S. trading hours and higher European cross-rate volatilities during European trading hours. While the disclosure of private information through trading may partly explain these volatility patterns, we conclude that the increased volatility is more likely driven by macroeconomic news announcements. An analysis of inter- and intraday data also reveals that volatility increases at times that coincide with the release of U.S. macroeconomic news.]

While Kosowski et al. (2006, Journal of Finance 61, 2551–2595) and Fama and French (2010, Journal of Finance 65, 1915–1947) both evaluate whether mutual funds outperform, their conclusions are very different. We reconcile their findings. We show that the Fama‐French method suffers from an undersampling problem that leads to a failure to reject the null hypothesis of zero alpha, even when some funds generate economically large risk‐adjusted returns. In contrast, Kosowski et al. substantially overreject the null hypothesis, even when all funds have a zero alpha. We present a novel bootstrapping approach that should be useful to future researchers choosing between the two approaches.

We propose a measure of capital market integration arising from a conditional regime-switching model. Our measure allows us to describe expected returns in countries that are segmented from world capital markets in one part of the sample and become integrated later in the sample. We find that a number of emerging markets exhibit time-varying integration. Some markets appear more integrated than one might expect based on prior knowledge of investment restrictions. Other markets appear segmented even though foreigners have relatively free access to their capital markets. While there is a perception that world capital markets have become more integrated, our country-specific investigation suggests that this is not always the case.

This paper proposes tests of asset pricing models that allow for time variation in conditional covariances. The evidence indicates that the conditional covariances do change through time. Estimates of the expected excess return on the market divided by the variance of the market (reward-to-risk ratio) are presented for the Sharpe-Lintner CAPM, as well as a number of tests of the model specification. The patterns of the pricing errors through time suggest the model's inability to capture the dynamic behavior of assets returns.

One version of the consumption-based asset pricing model implies a linear relation between expected returns and expected consumption growth. This paper provides evidence that the expected real term structure contains information that can be used to forecast consumption growth. The evidence is strongest for the 1970s and 1980s. The real term structure contains more information than two alternative measures: lagged consumption growth and lagged stock returns. Further, the real term structure appears to have slightly more forecasting power than the leading commercial econemetric models.

[Given the cross-sectional and temporal variation in their liquidity, emerging equity markets provide an ideal setting to examine the impact of liquidity on expected returns. Our main liquidity measure is a transformation of the proportion of zero daily firm returns, averaged over the month. We find that it significantly predicts future returns, whereas alternative measures such as turnover do not. Consistent with liquidity being a priced factor, unexpected liquidity shocks are positively correlated with contemporaneous return shocks and negatively correlated with shocks to the dividend yield. We consider a simple asset-pricing model with liquidity and the market portfolio as risk factors and transaction costs that are proportional to liquidity. The model differentiates between integrated and segmented countries and time periods. Our results suggest that local market liquidity is an important driver of expected returns in emerging markets, and that the liberalization process has not fully eliminated its impact.]

The emergence of new equity markets in Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Mideast and Africa provides a new menu of opportunities for investors.These markets exhibit high expected returns as well as high volatility.Importantly, the low correlations with developed countries' equity markets significantly reduces the unconditional portfolio risk of a world investor.However, standard global asset pricing models, which assume complete integration of capital markets, fail to explain the cross-section of average returns in emerging countries.An analysis of the predictability of the returns reveals that emerging market returns are more likely than developed countries to be influenced by local information.