G10 - General Financial Markets: General (includes Measurement and Data)Return

The aim of this paper is to analyse and evaluate the directions of changes in the development of entrepreneurship in the regions of the Visegrad Group countries, i.e., the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, in the period 2004-2018. We carried out research using an entrepreneurship model based on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) methodology. The literature analysis made it possible to formulate the main research hypothesis, which states that the factors of entrepreneurship development in this period had a different impact on the establishment of enterprises at the level of regions in the Visegrad Group countries. Assigning individual regions of these countries to entrepreneurship classes in the investigated years showed significant differences, which means that the NUTS 2 regions of the Visegrad Group countries differ significantly in terms of entrepreneurship development conditions.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether financial markets contribute to the eco-nomy when needed. The quantile regression model and causality in variance tests are applied to monthly data from December 1989 to July 2016 for 19 OECD economies. The results confirm that the response of capital markets to economic growth depends more on the state of the economy than the state of the country's development. Generally, interaction between financial markets and the economy is weak in OECD countries except Japan and Estonia.

Global economic policy uncertainty (GEPU) is one of important phenomena in the global economy; it can impact on the overall economic performance and stock market per-formance, regardless of the status of the world economy. Thus, this paper empirically investigates the impact of global economic policy uncertainty on the Malaysian stock market over the period from 10:2003 to 2017:03. Using the GARCH model, the study demonstrates that global policy uncertainty affects the Malaysian stock market negatively. Similarly, the SVAR model also shows results consistent with the GARCH estimation. Nevertheless, the Markov switching estimation uncovers that global policy uncertainty has negative impacts on stock market performance in both low and high volatile market states. The impact is, however, greater during the high volatile state. Hence, the relationship between global economic policy uncertainty and stock market returns tends to be asymmetric. The overall empirical results infer that global economic policy uncertainty has some implications for asset pricing.

This paper explores the dependence of emerging European stock markets (Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine) on global risk factors (changes in gold prices, US implied volatility index and oil prices) based on daily data from 6 January 2004 to 31 December 2013. We employ a quantile regression model to analyse how the global factors affect stock returns under different market circumstances, such as bearish (lower quantiles), normal (intermediate quantile) and bullish (higher quantiles) times. Empirical results reveal that the response of stock markets is heterogeneous; larger equity markets, such as Poland, Russia and Turkey, are highly sensitive to the global factors while Bulgaria is the least sensitive. Overall, the dependence on gold and oil prices is positive while the dependence on US stock market uncertainty is negative. Additionally, in most of the cases, the dependence intensifies during bear market conditions, in which stock prices fall.

This paper seeks to investigate the effect of financial development on growth in OECD countries during 1999–2014. The aim of the analysis is to study the dependence of growth on given financial development indicators along quantiles of the conditional growth distribution, taking into account the effect played by each country over time. For the purpose of the empirical analysis, it performed the instrumental variable quantile regression panel data (IV-QRPD) model suggested by Powell (2016). The findings of IV-QRPD model indicated that the effect of finance on growth is changing along quantiles of the conditional growth distribution. That is to say, we provide some evidence that high-growth OECD countries react to the changes in financial development less than low-growth countries.

The article shows properties of risk-based portfolios in the German stock market. Those systematic strategies use different approaches to weight stocks in portfolios. We present theoretical and empirical characteristics of five risk-based equity investments: the equal-weighted, minimum variance, maximum diversification and risk parity (equal risk budgeting and equal risk contribution) portfolios. Risk-based portfolios outperformed the market-cap weighted CDAX index with a lower level of risk in the period 2002–2015. Their excess returns relative to the CDAX index can be explained with Scherer’s five-factor model; with Fama-French and low-risk anomaly factors. R2s of different strategies range from 77% to 92%.

The aim of this article is to complement the existing economic and financial strand of the literature by defining three alternative regimes of the clean price volatility of a bond with respect to the level of interest rates in the economy. The suggested method takes into account responses to the changing nature of financial markets and allows for the possibility of observing negative interest rates. Our approach enables to find particular values of switching points between alternative regimes. After showing main theoretical steps, an investigation of the dependence of such points on key parameters of bonds is provided. An empirical illustration follows, accompanied by a discussion of theoretical and practical effects of this bond property. This approach offers both theorists and interested practitioners a way of overcoming difficulties associated with computations because of the complicated theoretical background. The results can be generalised, so that they apply both to the life of a bond and to the behaviour of a portfolio of bonds at a point of time.

This paper examines if the volatility exhibits a symmetric or an asymmetric response to past shocks, particularly the relevance of structural breaks for Central European (hereinafter referred to as "CEE") stock markets. In addition, it is of great interest to see if the CEE emerging markets are correlated with other emerging ones, as well as to analyse the correlation with the developed markets, for optimizing investment portfolios. Using a CEE group approach (regional index) and daily data from 2002 to 2015, the results suggest that markets react differently to similar negative and positive returns, except for the rapid growth period, when the greed sentiment dominates the markets. Furthermore, the structural break dates affect volatility, the highest asymmetric coefficient being recorded for the pre-crisis period. For the bivariate approach, the emerging markets and developed markets indexes provided by the Morgan Stanley Capital International (hereinafter referred to as "MSCI") have been considered and the results suggest that CEE stock markets are correlated with emerging stock markets rather than developed ones. For both pairs, the correlation is consistently higher for the break dates characterized by an increase in volatility, which is in line with the literature that claims that the co-movements increase when international factors dominate the national ones, and influence stock markets.

The text demonstrates out-of-sample performances of minimum variance portfolios in the German stock market in the period 2002-2015. Because of two huge drawdowns on equity markets in the period 2000-2010, scholars and professionals have tried to find an alternative to the market-cap weighted investing; potentially the minimum variance investing approach. The paper presents the construction of minimum variance portfolios, the description of their compositions and empirical risk-return characteristics under various holding periods. As anticipated, minimum variance portfolios have lower risk vis-à-vis the CDAX index, but they have also higher returns. Finally, minimum variance portfolios have better risk-adjusted performance figures in comparison with equal-weighted alternatives.

This paper examines the role of financial development in promoting innovation-related activity using panel data for seven East Asian countries for the period from 1998-2009. On overall financial development, we find that, financial sector size and the overall activity of banks and stock market exert positive influences on patent applications. In particular, our results show that all measures of banking development are positively and significantly related to the number of patent applications after controlling for variables known to affect innovative activities. Interestingly, we find no evidence that variation in patent applications is affected by a country's stock market development. The findings suggest that banking sector plays important roles in supporting innovation activity in East Asian countries.

In this paper, the informative value of firm capital structure is analyzed. In the first part, a theoretical background regarding capital structure theories is presented. In the second (empirical) part, the Ohlson (1995) valuation framework is used in order to analyze the informative value of firm capital structure on a sample of data for the Czech (non-financial) companies. A contextual approach is adopted and the value relevance of debt is analyzed considering the signalling and the optimal capital structure theories. According to the results and in accordance with the optimal capital structure theory, debt is more penalized in case of the companies that deviate from the target debt level. Moreover, debt proves to be a positive signal for the firms with a higher earnings growth potential. This, in turn, is consistent with the signalling theory.