International Stock Return Comovements

46 Pages Posted: 19 Mar 2008 Last revised: 17 Nov 2021

See all articles by Geert Bekaert

Geert Bekaert

Columbia University - Columbia Business School, Finance

Robert J. Hodrick

Columbia University - Columbia Business School, Finance; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Xiaoyan Zhang

Tsinghua University - PBC School of Finance

Multiple version iconThere are 3 versions of this paper

Date Written: June 2008

Abstract

We examine international stock return comovements using country-industry and country-style portfolios as the base portfolios. We first establish that parsimonious risk-based factor models capture the covariance structure of the data better than the popular Heston-Rouwenhorst (1994) model. We then establish the following stylized facts regarding stock return comovements. First, we do not find evidence for an upward trend in return correlations, except for the European stock markets. Second, the increasing importance of industry factors relative to country factors was a short-lived, temporary phenomenon.

Keywords: Comovements, APT model, international diversification, correlation dynamics, industry-country debate, factor models, global market integration

JEL Classification: C52, G11, G12

Suggested Citation

Bekaert, Geert and Hodrick, Robert J. and Zhang, Xiaoyan, International Stock Return Comovements (June 2008). ECB Working Paper No. 931, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1108222 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1108222

Geert Bekaert

Columbia University - Columbia Business School, Finance ( email )

NY
United States

Robert J. Hodrick

Columbia University - Columbia Business School, Finance ( email )

3022 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
United States

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

365 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10016-4309
United States

Xiaoyan Zhang (Contact Author)

Tsinghua University - PBC School of Finance ( email )

No. 43, Chengdu Road
Haidian District
Beijing 100083
China

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
1,576
Abstract Views
10,173
Rank
18,877
PlumX Metrics