In this article I present a new approach to model more realistically the variability of financial time series. I develop a Niarkov-ARCH model that incorporates the features of both Hamilton's switching-regime model and Engie's autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH) model to examine the issue of volatility persistence in the monthly excess returns of the three-month treasury bill. The issue can be resolved by taking into account occasional shifts in the asymptotic variance of the Markov-ARCH process that cause the spurious persistence of the volatility process. I identiiy two periods during which there is a regime shift, the 1974:2-1974:8 period associated with the oil shock and the 1979:9-1982:E period associated with the Federal Rese~e's policy change. The variance approached asymptotically in these two episodes is more than 10 times as high as the asymptotic variance for the remainder of the sample. I conclude that regime shifts have a greater impact on the properties of the data, and I cannot reject the null hypothesis of no ARCH effects within the regimes. As a consequence of the striking findings in this article, previous empirical results that adopt an ARCH approach in modeling monthly or lower frequency interest-rate dynamics are rendered questionable.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This paper analyzes the components of the bid-ask spread in the limit-order book of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE). While the behavior of spread components in U.S. markets has been extensively studied, little is known about the spread components in a pure limit-order market. We find that both the adverse selection and order handling cost components of the TSE exhibit U-shape patterns independently, in contrast to the findings of Madhavan, Richardson, and Roomans (1997) for U.S. stocks. On the TSE, there does not exist an upstairs market that allows large trades to be prenegotiated or certified as on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). This feature of the TSE provides a valuable opportunity to examine the relationship between trade size and spread components. Our results show that the adverse selection cost increases with trade size while order handling cost decreases with it.

In this article, we provide a detailed characterization of the intraday return volatility in gold futures contracts traded on the COMEX division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. The approach allows the study of intraday patterns, interday ARCH effects, and announcement effects in a coherent framework. We show that the intraday patterns exert a profound impact on the dynamics of return volatility. Among the 23 U.S. macroeconomic announcements, we identify employment reports, gross domestic product, consumer price index, and personal income as having the greatest impact. Finally, by appropriately filtering out the intraday patterns, we find that the high‐frequency returns reveal long‐memory volatility dependencies in the gold market, which have important implications on the pricing of long‐term gold options and the determination of optimal hedge ratios. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 21:257–278, 2001

No abstract

(MTB Investment Technology) and Koichi Watanabe (Daiwa Investment Trust) for valuable comments, and the Investment Trust Association for providing us with valuable information. The usual disclaimer applies.