A further look at linkages between NAFTA equity markets. The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance

Recent research finds evidence for convergence among the North American equity markets and argues that this is generated by the North Atlantic Free Trade Accord (NAFTA). In this paper, we re-examine these conclusions and show that the documented cointegration property among the NAFTA equity markets...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Cetin Ciner
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: 2006
Subjects:
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.598.3837
http://www.csb.uncw.edu/people/cinerc/courses web page/research/further look at nafta equity market linkages.pdf
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Summary:Recent research finds evidence for convergence among the North American equity markets and argues that this is generated by the North Atlantic Free Trade Accord (NAFTA). In this paper, we re-examine these conclusions and show that the documented cointegration property among the NAFTA equity markets was in fact confined to a sub-period in the late 1990s. We argue that the comovement was caused by the global boom in information technology shares and the resulting change in the sector mix of the value-weighted benchmark indexes used in prior work. We present evidence supporting this alternative hypothesis using an updated data set that includes global industry indexes. Our results have implications for transmission of information across global equity markets and international portfolio diversification.