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The purpose of this paper is to revisit the dynamic linkages between the US and the national securitized real estate markets of each of the nine Asian-Pacific (APAC) economies in time-frequency domain.

Wavelet decomposition via multi-resolution analysis is employed as an empirical methodology to consider time-scale issue in studying the dynamic changes of the US–APAC cross-real estate interdependence.

The strength and direction of return correlation, return exogeneity, shock impulse response, market connectivity and causality interactions change when specific time-scales are involved. The US market correlates with the APAC markets weakly or moderately in the three investment horizons with increasing strength of lead-lag interdependence in the long-run. Moreover, there are shifts in the net total directional volatility connectivity effects at the five scales among the markets.

Given the focus of the five approaches and associated indicators, the picture that emerges from the empirical results may not completely uniform. However, long-term investors and financial institutions should evaluate the time-scale based dynamics to derive a well-informed portfolio decision.

Future research is needed to ascertain whether the time-frequency findings can be generalizable to the regional and global context. Additional studies are required to identify the factors that contribute to the changes in the global and regional connectivity across the markets over the three investment horizons.

This study has successfully decomposed the various market linkage indicators into scale-dependent sub-components. As such, market integration in the Asia-Pacific real estate markets is a “multi-scale” phenomenon.

This paper aims to investigate volatility causality and return contagion on nine international securitized real estate markets by appealing to Markov-switching (MS) regime approach, from July 1992 to June 2014.

An MS causality interaction model (Psaradakis et al., 2005), an MS vector auto-regression mode (Krolzig, 1997) and a multivariate return contagion model (Dungey et al., 2005) were used to implement the empirical investigations.

There exist regime shifts in the volatility causality pattern, with the volatility causality effects more pronounced during high volatility periods. During high volatility period, real estate markets’ causality interactions and inter-linkages contribute to strong spillover effect that leads to extreme volatility. However, there is relatively limited return contagion evidence in the securitized real estate markets examined. As such, the US financial crisis might probably be due to cross-market interdependence rather than contagion.

Because international investors incorporate into their portfolio allocation not only the long-run price relationship but also the short-run market volatility connectedness and return correlation structure, the results of this MS causality and contagion study have provided valuable information on the evaluation of regime-dependent securitized real estate market risk, as well as useful guidance on asset allocation and portfolio management decisions for institutional investors.

Financial crisis is one of the key determinants of cross-market volatility interactions. Portfolio managers should be alerted of the observation that the US and the other developed securitized real estate markets are increasingly sharing “common market cycles” in recent years, thereby diminishing the diversification benefits. For policymakers, this research indicates that the volatilities of the US securitized real estate market could be helpful to predict those of other developed markets. It is also important for them to pay attention to those potential risk factors behind the amplified causality, contagion and volatility spillover at times of crisis. Finally, a wider implication for policymakers is to manage the transmission channels through which global stock market return and volatility shocks can affect the local economies and domestic financial markets, including securitized real estate markets.

Real estate investments have emerged to show low correlation with stocks and bonds and contributed to portfolio optimization. With real estate that can serve as a type of consumption commodity and an investment tool, the risk-return profile of real estate is different from that of the underlying stock markets. Therefore, the performance and investment dynamics and real estate-stock link are not theoretically expected to be similar, that requires separate empirical investigations. This paper aims to stand out from the many papers on the same or similar topics in the application of the three MS methodologies to regime-dependent real estate market integration.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the cross-spectra of stock, real estate and bond of ten selected Asian economies in the pre- and post-global financial crisis periods to detect whether there is greater cyclical co-movement post-financial crisis, and whether any observed increased co-movement measures the outcomes of contagion or integration.

Co-spectral approach is the proper econometric tool to deliver economic insight for this research.

Results indicate that Asian stock markets, and to a lesser degree, bond and real estate markets are more correlated post-financial crisis. Similarly, Asian financial markets have experienced increased co-movements with the US financial markets post-financial crisis. Moreover, these observed increased co-movements measure the outcomes of contagion in some cases of within-asset and cross-asset classes, as well as for some cross-US-Asian asset factor relationships along the high-frequency components of between two and four weeks. The stock markets are the most contagious, followed by the real estate markets and bond markets.

The results provide short-term investors with additional co-movement information at higher frequencies in order to identify short-term fluctuations of different asset classes. The empirical study also underscores the role of Asian real estate in investment portfolios in a mixed real estate, stock and bond context from a frequency domain perspective.

The practical implication of this research is that benefits to investors from international diversification may not be as great during the present time compared to previous periods because financial/asset market movements have become more correlated. However, it does not imply the complete absence of diversification benefits. This is because although cyclical correlations increase in the short run, many of the values are still between low and moderate range, indicating that some diversification benefits may still be realized.

In advancing the body of knowledge in international financial markets, this research is probably the first study to consider a multi-asset class portfolio context that includes stock, real estate and bond across the ten Asian economies and the USA in a single study. The frequency domain analysis conducted in this paper adds to the understanding of real estate, stock and bond market co-movement, integration and contagion dynamics, as well as the Asian cross-asset factor and US-Asian asset factor relationships in global mixed-investing environment.