Author Archives: Fulvio Corsi

L.M. Calcagnile, F. Corsi, S. Marmi, Entropy and efficiency of the ETF market

We investigate the relative information efficiency of financial markets by measuring the entropy of the time series of high frequency data. Our tool to measure efficiency is the Shannon entropy, applied to 2-symbol and 3-symbol discretisations of the data. Analysing 1-minute and 5-minute price time series of 55 Exchange Traded Funds traded at the New York Stock Exchange, we develop a methodology to isolate true inefficiencies from other sources of regularities, such as the intraday pattern, the volatility clustering and the microstructure effects. The first two are modelled as multiplicative factors, while the microstructure is modelled as an ARMA noise process. Following an analytical and empirical combined approach, we find a strong relationship between low entropy and high relative tick size and that volatility is responsible for the largest amount of regularity, averaging 62% of the total regularity against 18% of the intraday pattern regularity and 20% of the microstructure.

arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.04199

F. Corsi, S. Marmi, F. Lillo, When micro prudence increases macro risk: The destabilizing effects of financial innovation, leverage, and diversification, Operations Research 64 (5), 1073-1088

By exploiting basic common practice accounting and risk-management rules, we propose a simple analytical dynamical model to investigate the effects of microprudential changes on macroprudential outcomes. Specifically, we study the consequence of the introduction of a financial innovation that allows reducing the cost of portfolio diversification in a financial system populated by financial institutions having capital requirements in the form of Value at Risk (VaR) constraint and following standard mark-to-market and risk-management rules. We provide a full analytical quantification of the multivariate feedback effects between investment prices and bank behavior induced by portfolio rebalancing in presence of asset illiquidity and show how changes in the constraints of the bank portfolio optimization endogenously drive the dynamics of the balance sheet aggregate of financial institutions and, thereby, the availability of bank liquidity to the economic system and systemic risk. The model shows that when financial innovation reduces the cost of diversification below a given threshold, the strength (because of higher leverage) and coordination (because of similarity of bank portfolios) of feedback effects increase, triggering a transition from a stationary dynamics of price returns to a nonstationary one characterized by steep growths (bubbles) and plunges (bursts) of market prices.

G. Bormetti, L. M. Calcagnile, M. Treccani, F. Corsi, S. Marmi, F. Lillo, Modelling systemic price cojumps with Hawkes factor models , Quantitative Finance 15 (7), 1137-1156

Instabilities in the price dynamics of a large number of financial assets are a clear sign of
systemic events. By investigating portfolios of highly liquid stocks, we find that there are a
large number of high-frequency cojumps. We show that the dynamics of these jumps is
described neither by a multivariate Poisson nor by a multivariate Hawkes model. We
introduce a Hawkes one-factor model which is able to capture simultaneously the time
clustering of jumps and the high synchronization of jumps across assets.

Corsi, F., Pirino, D., and RenĂ², R. (2010). Threshold bipower variation and the impact of jumps on volatility forecasting. Journal of Econometrics, 159(2), 276-288

Abstract
This study reconsiders the role of jumps for volatility forecasting by showing that jumps have a positive and mostly significant impact on future volatility. This result becomes apparent once volatility is separated into its continuous and discontinuous components using estimators which are not only consistent, but also scarcely plagued by small sample bias. With the aim of achieving this, we introduce the concept of threshold bipower variation, which is based on the joint use of bipower variation and threshold estimation. We show that its generalization (threshold multipower variation) admits a feasible central limit theorem in the presence of jumps and provides less biased estimates, with respect to the standard multipower variation, of the continuous quadratic variation in finite samples. We further provide a new test for jump detection which has substantially more power than tests based on multipower variation. Empirical analysis (on the S&P500 index, individual stocks and US bond yields) shows that the proposed techniques improve significantly the accuracy of volatility forecasts especially in periods following the occurrence of a jump.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304407610001600