Financial liberalization, exchange rates and stock prices: Exogenous shocks in four Latin America countries

This paper provides an analysis of the long-run relationships and short-run dynamics between stock prices and exchange rates as well as the channels through which exogenous shocks influence these markets. We use monthly data for the period January 1980 to February 2009 for four Latin America, namely, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico. We conduct our analysis by means of cointegration analysis and multivariate Granger causality tests. The main finding of our analysis suggests that stock and foreign exchange markets in these economies are positively related and that the U.S. stock market acts as a channel for these links. Moreover, it is shown that these links are independent of foreign exchange restrictions. Finally, stability tests proposed by Hansen and Johansen (1993) are applied and it is shown that the dimension of the cointegration space is sample independent while the estimated coefficients exhibit instability in recursive estimations. Instability in these long-run relationships is evident during the Mexican currency crisis of 1994-1995, the Asian crisis of 1997 and the 2007-2009 credit and financial crisis.