Risk, Jumps, and Diversification

We test for price discontinuities, or jumps, in a panel of high-frequency intraday returns for forty large-cap stocks and an equiweighted index from these same stocks. Jumps are naturally classified into two types: common and idiosyncratic. Common jumps affect all stocks, albeit to varying degrees, while idiosyncratic jumps are stock-specific. Despite the fact that each of the stocks has a of about unity with respect to the index, common jumps are virtually never detected in the individual stocks. This is truly puzzling, as an index can jump only if one or more of its components jump. To resolve this puzzle, we propose a new test for cojumps. Using this new test we find strong evidence for many modest-sized common jumps that simply pass through the standard jump detection statistic, while they appear highly significant in the cross section based on the new cojump identification scheme. Our results are further corroborated by a striking within-day pattern in the non-diversifiable cojumps.