The argument with regards to whether macro-economic fundamentals determine stock market behaviour is very important because of the roles it plays in an economy. Such roles include: pooling and trading of risks, mobilization of savings, provision of liquidity and allocation of capital. However, the stock market will only perform such roles effectively if the macro-economic environment is conducive. This study examined the behaviour of the All Share Index (ALSI) and market capitalization on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in response to changes in the domestic and international macro-economic fundamentals such as the consumer price index, rand-dollar real exchange rates, domestic GDP, yield on South African government bonds, yield on United States government bonds and United States GDP. The study used cointegration and error correction techniques proposed by Johansen and Juselius (1990) to test for long run relationship. Two separate models were estimated and results obtained show that the two proxies for the stock market behaviour (All share Index and market capitalization) are true endogenous variables, but react differently to economic fundamentals. The consumer price index has a significant negative impact on the JSE share price index while market capitalization is determined predominantly by the yield on South African government bonds. The exchange rate seems to have had little or no influence on the share price index, but becomes negative and significant in the case of market capitalization. The yield on United States government bonds also produced a strong influence on both the share price index and market capitalization. While it has a negative significant impact on share prices, it produced a positive significant impact on market capitalization. In order to ascertain whether the South African interest rate or the United States interest rate is more important in explaining the share price and market capitalization, each of the variables were estimated in the model separately, the result obtained reveals that the United States interest rate is more important than the domestic interest rate in explaining the share price and market capitalization on the JSE. This implies that investors need to observe the USA interest rate before investing in South African equities. A comparison of the responses of share price index and market capitalization to impulses from the macro-economic variables tested reveals that both proxies elicit a positive response from aggregate output. The share price index responds more significantly to impulses from output growth than the market capitalization, meaning that, as aggregate production increases, the share price index tends to respond positively and quickly. The exchange rate produced mixed result from the two proxies, while it produced a positive response from the market capitalization; an initial positive response was noted in the share price index that immediately turned negative. Another glaring contrast was identified in the response of both proxies to impulses from the United States interest rate. The share price index responded positively while the market capitalization produced a negative response. This finding reveals that the two proxies actually respond differently to macro-economic variables. The variance decomposition of both stock prices and market capitalization reveals that the yield on United States government bonds has a more significant absorption potential than the South African government bonds. However, the absorption process is slower in the case of the market capitalization. The exchange rate has a greater impact on the market capitalization than stock prices. The overall assessment shows that share prices respond faster than market capitalization to macro-economic fundamentals. The study also shows that the increased openness of the South African economy by way of relaxation of the exchange control on capital account transaction has allowed the USA market to play a crucial role in equity prices in South Africa. Three main policy recommendations results from the study. Firstly, if inflation is well monitored, then the local equity market is bound to perform strongly resulting in strong shares earning growth. Secondly, the exchange rate should be made to be less volatile so that long term investment plans across borders can be further enhanced. Thirdly, financial analyst and investors in South Africa need to analyse macro-economic developments in the United States before investing in equities in South Africa.

This study examines the impact of exchange rate volatility and misalignment on economic growth in South Africa. It applies the Johansen co integration test and the vector error correction model on quarterly data for the period 1990:01-2010:04. Exchange rate volatility is measured as the standard deviation of both the nominal and nominal effective exchange rate. The study constructs three measures of exchange rate misalignment, with two of the measures constructed using the Producer Price Index and Consumer Price index based Purchasing Power Parity. The third measure was based on the difference between the nominal and effective exchange rate. Contrary to pre-dominant findings in the exchange rate literature, the study finds a positive and significant relationship between exchange rate volatility and economic growth and attributes it to composition of the country’s exports that are largely made up of commodities that act as essential inputs in many production processes. As a result, the variability of prices caused by exchange rate volatility is not expected to deter demand for these commodities. A negative and significant relationship between exchange rate misalignment and economic growth was found. The findings of the study show that it is important for monetary authorities to ensure that the exchange rate is always at an appropriate level in order to avoid the negative implications of exchange rate misalignment on economic growth.

M.Com. (Financial Economics) / The main objective of this mini dissertation is to examine the effect of exchange rate volatility on international trade. The finding of this mini dissertation is however that the impact of exchange rate volatility on international trade could be either positive or negative depending on various reasons that will be discussed when the arguments of the theorists that have either found a positive, negative and sometimes indeterminate effect of exchange rate volatility on international trade are discussed. The focus of this mini dissertation will be on the manufacturing trade between the Republic of South Africa with the United States and China. The need for an analysis of exchange rate volatility on international trade arises from the fact that firstly no consensus has been reached on the true effect of exchange rate volatility on international trade and secondly knowledge of what the true effect of exchange rate volatility is on international trade could assist in drafting the appropriate policies at government level. The finding of this mini dissertation represents a challenge for policy recommendations as it reflects the fact that various industries, sectors and subsectors of the economy of the Republic of South Africa are impacted differently by the volatility of the Rand/Yuan and Rand/Dollar exchange rates, respectively, therefore any policy that is drawn up to improve international trade needs to be done on an individual basis for each industry, sector and subsector respectively taking into account the various dynamics and characteristics of each. Firstly in the literature review a detailed discussion of both sides of the exchange rate volatility debate will be outlined. It would be shown why there is a lack of consensus when it comes to the issue of what effect exchange rate volatility has on international trade. On the one hand the argument of those suggest that exchange rate volatility hampers international trade or has a negative effect on international trade, such as Sekantsi, (2008); Onafowora and Owoye, (2008); Chit, (2010); Vergil, (2008); Arize et al, (2000); Arize and Malindretos, (2002); Klaasen, (2004) and Doganlar, (2002), will be reviewed. The argument of those that say that in fact exchange rate volatility has no impact on international trade, such as Raddatz, (2008); Frankel, (2007); Arize and Malindretos, (2002); Arize et al, (2000); Klaasen, (2004); Chowdhury, (1993) and Hassan and Sukar, (1999), will also be reviewed. This discussion and the results that arise from exploring this debate have very important implications on the recommendations that are passed on to government to be considered when drafting policies, such as the New Growth Path (NGP). Secondly when the background of the manufacturing industry in South Africa is discussed, all the initiatives and policies such as the NGP that government has planned and put in place in order to rejuvenate the manufacturing industry will be outlined. The impact of exchange rate volatility on international trade has a direct impact on these policies. Recommendations regarding how best enhance the policies to rejuvenate the manufacturing industry cannot be possibly made when consensus about the impact of exchange rate volatility has not be reached. For this reason it was it imperative that the true impact of exchange rate volatility on international trade be made clear.

This dissertation deals with the links between stock market returns and foreign exchange rates, industrial production and exports to Germany in three Central and East European countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland). The main questions addressed are: "Do macroeconomic factors related to foreign exchange rates and industrial production affect stock market returns in the Visegrad-3? And what is the impact of exports to Germany on those stock returns?" This analysis makes use of panel-data and the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) to produce results. Firstly, foreign exchange rates are found to have a negative effect on stock returns. However the divergence in currency returns between the three countries means that the overall effect may be due to some factors that are not accounted for in this analysis. Secondly, there is a positive, but lagged, association between industrial production and stock returns. Thirdly, exports to Germany from the region are also found to have a positive impact on the stock returns of the Visegrad-3. Finally, there is divergence among the three countries with respect to the relationship between the macroeconomic factors and stock returns. Poland and Hungary are seen to exert a significant amount of influence over the region's stock markets.

The topic researched for this project will be foreigh exchange hedging; the available forms, the uses, the procedures, and the value. This project will expand beyond the typical research and examine the value of hedging through the use of different foreign exchang currency trading strategies to small multinationational corporations.

Thesis (M.A. Commerce (Economics)) -- University of Limpopo, 2019 / South Africa had targeted the oil and gas sector for investment through the industrial action plan as a special economic zone. However, certain economic fundamentals might negate the anticipated sector financial development. This study investigate how economic risk exposure influence oil & gas sector stock market returns from 2007 to 2015 on a monthly basis. The four macroeconomic variables used to measure economic risk exposure are Brent crude oil prices, the USD/ZAR exchange rate, broad money supply and gold prices. The adopted techniques include the GARCH model to incorporate volatility, the Johansen cointegration and Granger causality techniques. The results of the study found that change in Brent crude oil prices and broad money supply had a positive and significant impact on changes in oil & gas sector stock returns. Changes in exchange rate and gold prices had a negative and significant impact on the sector returns. The long-run relationship established one cointegrating equation in the series. Only Brent crude oil prices indicated a bi-directional Granger causality on the sector returns. Based on the findings, it is recommended that government may use exchange rate as a policy tool to attract interest in the sector. Regarding money supply, the reserve bank should further preserve its effective regulatory infrastructure including the laws, regulations and standards towards the achievement and maintenance of a stable financial system. Portfolio managers, risk managers and investors should monitor the gold price to mitigate losses due to its strength as a safe haven asset.

To extract usable information from financial data the prices of financial instruments must be summarized in an efficient manner. Typically price quotes are sampled at discrete and equidistant points in time to create a time series of prices at fixed times. However, alternative methods that instead utilize certain changes in the price data, such as price changes or drawdowns, could potentially create time series with more relevant information. This thesis builds upon previous research on so called ”directional changes” to establish scaling laws using such alternative sampling methods. This has been studied extensively for foreign exchange rates, and some of those results are replicated in this thesis. But here we also extend the results to a new domain of instruments, namely futures. In addition, data sampled with different methods is investigated for predictability using a simple classifier for forecasting trend direction. The main findings are that the aforementioned scaling laws hold for the time period investigated (2016-2020), and that using other methods than the typical discrete time method yields a more predictable time series when it comes to price trend. / För att utvinna användbar information ur finansiell data måste priser för finansiella instrument sammanställas på ett effektivt sätt. För kvoteringsdata görs detta vanligtvis genom att sampla priser vid diskreta tidsintervall för att får en serie av priser vid fixa tidsintervall. Alternativa metoder som använder händelser i prisdatan, som ändringar eller nedgångar, kan dock potentiellt skapa tidserier med mer relevant information. Den här uppsatsen bygger på tidigare forskning om s.k. ”directional changes” för att fastställa skalagar med sådana alternativa samplingmetoder. Det här görs inte bara för valutapar utan även för ett fåtal terminskontrakt. Utöver det undersöks prediktabiliteten hos data samplad med olika metoder med en enkel klassificerare för framtida trendriktning. De huvudsakliga resultaten är att de nämnda skallagarna håller för den undersökta tidsperioden (2016-2020) och att användandet av andra samplingsmetoder än diskret tidssampling resulterar i mer förutsägbara tidsserier när det kommer till pristrender.

This thesis establishes methods to quantify and explain uncertainty through high-order moments in time series data, along with first principal-based improvements on the standard autoencoder and variational autoencoder. While the first-principal improvements on the standard variational autoencoder provide additional means of explainability, we ultimately look to non-variational methods for quantifying uncertainty under the autoencoder framework. We utilize Shannon's differential entropy to accomplish the task of uncertainty quantification in a general nonlinear and non-Gaussian setting. Together with previously established connections between autoencoders and principal component analysis, we motivate the focus on differential entropy as a proper abstraction of principal component analysis to this more general framework, where nonlinear and non-Gaussian characteristics in the data are permitted. Furthermore, we are able to establish explicit connections between high-order moments in the data to those in the latent space, which induce a natural latent space decomposition, and by extension, an explanation of the estimated uncertainty. The proposed methods are intended to be utilized in economic and financial factor models in state space form, building on recent developments in the application of neural networks to factor models with applications to financial and economic time series analysis. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methods on high frequency hourly foreign exchange rates, macroeconomic signals, and synthetically generated autoregressive data sets. / Master of Science / This thesis establishes methods to quantify and explain uncertainty in time series data, along with improvements on some latent variable neural networks called autoencoders and variational autoencoders. Autoencoders and varitational autoencodes are called latent variable neural networks since they can estimate a representation of the data that has less dimension than the original data. These neural network architectures have a fundamental connection to a classical latent variable method called principal component analysis, which performs a similar task of dimension reduction but under more restrictive assumptions than autoencoders and variational autoencoders. In contrast to principal component analysis, a common ailment of neural networks is the lack of explainability, which accounts for the colloquial term black-box models. While the improvements on the standard autoencoders and variational autoencoders help with the problem of explainability, we ultimately look to alternative probabilistic methods for quantifying uncertainty. To accomplish this task, we focus on Shannon's differential entropy, which is entropy applied to continuous domains such as time series data. Entropy is intricately connected to the notion of uncertainty, since it depends on the amount of randomness in the data. Together with previously established connections between autoencoders and principal component analysis, we motivate the focus on differential entropy as a proper abstraction of principal component analysis to a general framework that does not require the restrictive assumptions of principal component analysis. Furthermore, we are able to establish explicit connections between high-order moments in the data to the estimated latent variables (i.e., the reduced dimension representation of the data). Estimating high-order moments allows for a more accurate estimation of the true distribution of the data. By connecting the estimated high-order moments in the data to the latent variables, we obtain a natural decomposition of the uncertainty surrounding the latent variables, which allows for increased explainability of the proposed autoencoder. The methods introduced in this thesis are intended to be utilized in a class of economic and financial models called factor models, which are frequently used in policy and investment analysis. A factor model is another type of latent variable model, which in addition to estimating a reduced dimension representation of the data, provides a means to forecast future observations. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methods on high frequency hourly foreign exchange rates, macroeconomic signals, and synthetically generated autoregressive data sets. The results support the superiority of the entropy-based autoencoder to the standard variational autoencoder both in capability and computational expense.

by Liu Shiang Ling. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 48). / ABSTRACT --- p.ii / TABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.iii / LIST OF TABLES --- p.v / CHAPTER / Chapter I. --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / Chapter II. --- CHINA'S RENMINBI SYSTEM --- p.3 / Overview and Historical Development --- p.3 / 1953-1972 --- p.3 / 1973-1978 --- p.4 / 1979-1993 --- p.4 / 1994-1996 --- p.6 / The Exchange Rate Determination --- p.7 / Demand & Supply --- p.7 / The Balance of Payments --- p.8 / Inflation --- p.10 / Interest Rate --- p.10 / The Condition of Economic Development --- p.11 / Expectation --- p.11 / The Fiscal Policy --- p.12 / Forecasting Exchange Rate --- p.12 / Fundamental Analysis --- p.14 / Chapter III. --- CHINA'S PROPERTY MARKET --- p.15 / The History of China's Property Market --- p.15 / Pre-1949 --- p.15 / 1949-1979 --- p.15 / 1979-1991 --- p.16 / 1992-1996 --- p.18 / China's Real Estate Market Overview --- p.20 / Shanghai's Property Market --- p.21 / Risk Analysis --- p.22 / Return --- p.22 / Risks --- p.23 / Chapter IV. --- THEORETICAL ANALYSIS --- p.25 / Currency Conversion and Exchange Rate Risks --- p.25 / Hypothesis --- p.26 / The Short Run --- p.26 / The Long Run --- p.27 / Chapter V. --- RESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND FINDINGS --- p.29 / Targets of Study --- p.29 / Questionnaire --- p.29 / Chapter VI. --- ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSIONS --- p.30 / Primary Source Data --- p.30 / Secondary Source Data --- p.32 / Analysis --- p.34 / The Short Run --- p.34 / The Long Run --- p.35 / Political Conditions --- p.35 / Economic Conditions --- p.36 / Social Conditions --- p.37 / Market Conditions --- p.37 / Land Investment --- p.38 / Conclusion --- p.39 / Chapter VII. --- RECOMMENDATIONS AND ADVICE TO DEVELOPERS --- p.40 / The Depreciation of Renminbi --- p.40 / The Appreciation of Renminbi --- p.41 / The Chinese Government Policy --- p.42 / Long-Term Consideration --- p.43 / APPENDIX --- p.45

Chen Chen. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 122-129). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / ABSTRACT --- p.ii / ACKNOWLEDGEMENT --- p.iv / TABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.v / LIST OF FIGURES --- p.vii / LIST OF TABLES --- p.viii / Chapter / Chapter I. --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Objectives and Motivation --- p.5 / Chapter 1.3 --- The Asian Crisis --- p.9 / Chapter 1.4 --- Procedures and Findings --- p.18 / Chapter 1.5 --- Summary --- p.20 / Chapter II. --- LITERATURE REVIEW --- p.21 / Chapter 2.1 --- Definition and Determinants --- p.21 / Chapter 2.2 --- Measurement Model --- p.25 / Chapter 2.3 --- Exchange Rate Fluctuation and Market Value of the Firm --- p.28 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Exchange Rate Fluctuation and Stock Return --- p.28 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- Some Problems of the Measurement Model --- p.31 / Chapter 2.4 --- Exchange Rate Fluctuation and Market Risk of the Firm --- p.42 / Chapter 2.5 --- Summary --- p.45 / Chapter III. --- HYPOTHESES，METHODOLOGY & DATA --- p.47 / Chapter 3.1 --- Hypotheses --- p.47 / Chapter 3.2 --- Research Design --- p.50 / Chapter 3.3 --- Sample Selection --- p.56 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Selection of Sample Group --- p.56 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- Selection of Control Group --- p.61 / Chapter 3.3.3 --- Comparison of Two Groups --- p.62 / Chapter 3.4 --- Data and the Measurement of the Variables --- p.64 / Chapter 3.5 --- Summary --- p.67 / Chapter IV. --- EMPIRICAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSION --- p.68 / Chapter 4.1 --- Exchange Rate Variability and Stock Return Volatility --- p.68 / Chapter 4.2 --- Exchange Rate Variability and Market Risk --- p.81 / Chapter 4.3 --- Interpretations --- p.87 / Chapter 4.3.1 --- Phenomenon 1: Cost of Equity and Net Cash Flows --- p.89 / Chapter 4.3.2 --- Phenomenon 2: Increased Return Variability and the US Stock Market Return --- p.92 / Chapter 4.4 --- Alternative Explanation --- p.96 / Chapter 4.5 --- Summary --- p.99 / Chapter V. --- CONCLUDING REMARKS --- p.100 / APPENDICES / APPENDIX 1. Firm Lists --- p.105 / APPENDIX 2. Estimates of CAPM Betas --- p.115 / BIBLIOGRAPHY --- p.122