The Linkages Between National Stock Markets PDF Download

We decompose domestic and foreign equity return innovations into components associated with news about dividend growth, interest rates, exchange rates, and future equity risk premiums. This decomposition enables us to determine the extent to which common real and financial shocks contribute to covariation between the returns on different national stock markets. An application to U.S. and U.K. data from 1957 to 1989 reveals substantial degrees of both real and financial integration between the two economies. Although common news about future risk premiums accounts for the bulk of the covariance between the two country's stock markets, the dividend growth components of the two returns are also highly correlated. Both real and financial linkages are found to be greater after the Bretton Woods currency arrangement was abandoned in the early 1970's. In a further application of our methodology to data from 15 countries from 1974 to 1990, we find that both real and financial integration typically contribute to the (consistently positive) correlations between the returns on national stock markets. In most cases, news about future dividend growth in two countries is more highly correlated than contemporaneous output measures. This suggests that there are lags in the international transmission of real economic shocks.