The CAPM, National Stock Market Betas, and Macroeconomic Covariates: a Global Analysis

Using global data on aggregate stock markets, this paper finds that the capital asset pricing model fares much better than suggested previously. At shorter time horizons, our results also show that the positive risk-reward relation can collapse during times of high volatility. Compared to other countries, we retrieve evidence of lower systematic risks across frontier equity portfolios. We find that countries characterized by higher levels of openness, exchange rate volatility, and larger economic size are exposed to higher systematic covariances with the world stock market. Conversely, we obtain an inverse link between international reserves and systematic risks in national equity.