Logo
Munich Personal RePEc Archive

Sectoral Equity Returns in the Euro Region: Is There any Room for Reducing the Portfolio Risk?

Balli, Faruk and Ozer-Balli, Hatice (2009): Sectoral Equity Returns in the Euro Region: Is There any Room for Reducing the Portfolio Risk?

This is the latest version of this item.

[thumbnail of MPRA_paper_17244.pdf]
Preview
PDF
MPRA_paper_17244.pdf

Download (259kB) | Preview

Abstract

The economic integration among Euro members has important consequences for the factors driving asset pricing and asset trading within the financial markets. In particular, since the start of the Euro, cross-country equity index correlations in the region have showed upward trends and domestic investors have allocated their portfolios mostly inside of the region. This paper studies the impact of these recent structural changes on the Euro-wide sectoral equity indices. We modeled the return and volatility of the Euro sector equity indices between years 1992 and 2007. We documented that aggregate world equity or global sector equity indices have not been affecting the sector equity indices since the beginning of the Euro. Aggregate Euro stock index, however, still has been affecting most of the sector equity indices, even though its effect has been declining remarkably for some sectors. In particular, we found that financial sector indices (financial services, insurance, and banking) are being affected increasingly by the aggregate Euro equity index fluctuations after the start of the Euro. However, some ``basic industry sector'' indices, including basic resources, food and beverage, health-care, retail services, and oil & gas had become less dependent to the aggregate Euro index within the same period, suggesting that diversification across these sectors within the region would be much more effective tool for reducing portfolio risk.

Available Versions of this Item

Atom RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0

Contact us: mpra@ub.uni-muenchen.de

This repository has been built using EPrints software.

MPRA is a RePEc service hosted by Logo of the University Library LMU Munich.