This paper studies excess market returns in the relatively understudied financial markets of nine Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries within the context of three variants of the Capital Asset Pricing Model: the static international CAPM; the constant-parameter intertemporal CAPM; and a Markov-switching intertemporal CAPM which allows for the degree of integration with international equity markets to be time-varying. On the whole we find that: (1) Israel and Turkey are most strongly integrated with world financial markets; (2) in most other MENA markets examined there is primarily local pricing of risk and evidence of a positive risk-return trade-off; and (3) there is substantial time variation in the weights on local and global pricing of risk for all of these markets. Our results suggest that investment in many of these markets over the sample studied would have provided returns uncorrelated with global markets, and thus would have served as financial instruments with which portfolio diversification could have been improved.

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This paper presents new empirical evidence on the effectiveness of Bank of Japan's foreign exchange interventions on the daily realized volatility of USD/JPY exchange rates using high frequency data. Following Huang and Tauchen (2005) and Shephard (2004, 2006), we use bi-power variation to decompose daily realized volatility into two components: the smooth persistent and the discontinuous jump components. We model exchange rate returns, the different components of realized volatility and the central bank intervention using a system of simultaneous equations. We find strong support that interventions by Bank of Japan had increased both the continuous and the jump components of daily realized volatility. This suggests that the interventions by Bank of Japan had increased market volatility which not only caused short-lived positive jumps but were also persistent over time. We did not find any evidence that interventions were effective in influencing the exchange rate returns for the entire sample period. Keywords AbstractThis paper presents new empirical evidence on the effectiveness of Bank of Japan's foreign exchange interventions on the daily realized volatility of USD/JPY exchange rates using high frequency data. Following Huang and Tauchen (2005) and Shephard (2004, 2006), we use bi-power variation to decompose daily realized volatility into two components: the smooth persistent and the discontinuous jump components. We model exchange rate returns, the different components of realized volatility and the central bank intervention using a system of simultaneous equations. We find strong support that interventions by Bank of Japan had increased both the continuous and the jump components of daily realized volatility. This suggests that the interventions by Bank of Japan had increased market volatility which not only caused short-lived positive jumps but were also persistent over time. We did not find any evidence that interventions were effective in influencing the exchange rate returns for the entire sample period.

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