Abstract:This study provides evidence of common bivariate jumps (i.e., systematic cojumps) between the market index and style-sorted portfolios. Systematic cojumps are prevalent in book-tomarket portfolios and hence, their risk cannot easily be diversified away by investing in growth or value stocks. Nonetheless, large-cap firms have less exposure to systematic cojumps than small-cap firms. Probit regression reveals that systematic cojump occurrences are significantly associated with worse-than-expected scheduled macroeconomic announcements, especially those pertaining to the Federal Funds target rate. Tobit regression shows that Federal Funds news surprises are also significantly related to the magnitude of systematic cojumps.
IntroductionEmpirical asset pricing literature typically characterizes the log price process as a combination of continuous and discontinuous sample paths; see, for example, Andersen et al. (2007), Beber and Brandt (2010) and Rangel (2011). Related to these studies, Das and Uppal (2004) define cojumps as infrequent discontinuous sample paths that occur simultaneously across multiple assets (see also Dungey et al., 2009;Lahaye et al., 2011;Dungey and Hvozdyk, 2012). It is important to consider cojumps -in addition to individual jumps -in order to properly diversify portfolios. Das and Uppal (2004) find that cojumps reduce the benefits of portfolio diversification and can expose highly levered portfolios to large losses. Similarly, Cont and Kan (2011) show that cojump is a key determinant in modelling default contagion. In contrast, Pukthuanthong and Roll (2015) find that individual jumps identified across various countries are only weakly correlated, which the authors interpret as suggesting that cross-border diversification could provide reasonable protection against idiosyncratic jumps.The present study characterizes systematic cojumps, which we define as common bivariate jumps in prices between the market index and its component portfolios sorted based on market capitalization (size) and book-to-market (B/M) price ratio. Similarly, Gilder et al. (2014) define simultaneous jumps in the market index and cojumps among the underlying stocks as systematic cojumps. Fundamental portfolio theory suggests that systematic cojumps are non-diversifiable, because common jumps observed across the market portfolio's underlying components are likely due to market-wide news and this news produces jumps in the market portfolio (Bollerslev et al., 2008, p.234; Gilder et al., 2014, p.443). The present study examines whether this really happens by scrutinizing the effect of regularly scheduled macroeconomic announcements on systematic cojumps. In linking cojumps to macroeconomic announcements, this study extends the research by Gilder et al. (2014), who show that systematic cojumps are related to the timing of macroeconomic 2 announcements and Dungey et al. (2009), Evans (2011), Lahaye et al. (2011 and Dungey and Hvozdyk (2012), who provide similar findings for cojumps identified separately across indiv...