THREE ESSAYS ON INTERNATIONAL ASSET PRICING

The common thread running through my research is to explore the asset price dynamics across countries and across asset classes. In the first chapter of this thesis, I apply Newton's law of universal gravitation to investigate the determinants of the bilateral relationships in returns. Examining the gravity effect in a large set of countries, I find that the size of economies and geographical distance are significant determinants of the contemporaneous as well as the lead-lag correlation patterns observed in stock returns across countries. In addition, decomposing stock market returns into cash-flow and discount-rate news shows that the international transmission of country specific news is more pronounced through discount-rate news, and that the size of economies and geographical distance are significant determinants for both components of returns. In the second chapter, based on a joint work with Redouane Elkamhi and Mikhail Simutin, we propose a diversification approach that exploits the global connectedness of developed countries to gain exposure to emerging countries' overall economies rather than their shallow equity markets. In doing so, we demonstrate that developed markets still offer substantial diversification benefits beyond those available through equity indices, contrary to a large body of literature claiming that the benefits of international diversification via developed markets have dramatically declined. Our results also suggest that relying on equity indices to assess diversification benefits understates diversification gains. The third chapter explores the potential risk of investing in global markets. Specifically, my co-author Redouane Elkamhi and I study the two widely-known speculation strategies in the FX market, carry and momentum trades, and provide a risk-based explanation for the excess returns. We construct a common factor that drives correlation across international equity markets and show that the cross-sectional variations in the average excess returns across carry and momentum portfolios can be explained by different sensitivities to our correlation factor. By using a factor constructed from the equity market to explain abnormal return in the FX market, these findings shed light on the important linkage across the two markets through equity correlations as a main instrument of the aggregate risk.Ph.D