:unav

:unav

This paper analyses the relationship between stock market capitalization and real GDP in ten Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) that joined the European Union in 2004 and 2007, with the objective of determining if the financial markets have played a role as a driver of the economic development in these countries or vice versa. The methodology is based on the application of three different measures of causality between the relevant variables, in order to determine the existence and the direction of causality. Using a cointegrated Vector Autoregressive model (VAR), the authors study the relationship between the relevant variables through the following tests: Granger causality test, Toda-Yamamoto approach and Frequency Domain approach. The results obtained suggest evidence of the existence of this relationship, in both directions, in a significant number of this group of countries, and especially in those there is a long-term relationship.

According to several empirical studies, the Present Value model fails to explain the behaviour of stock prices in the long-run. In this paper, the authors consider the possibility that a linear cointegrated regression model with multiple structural changes would provide a better empirical description of the Present Value model of U.S. stock prices. The methodology is based on instability tests recently proposed in Kejriwal and Perron (The limit distribution of the estimates in cointegrated regression models with multiple structural changes, 2008, and Testing for multiple structural changes in cointegrated regression models, 2010) as well as the cointegration tests developed in Arai and Kurozumi (Testing for the null hypothesis of cointegration with a structural break, 2007) and Kejriwal (Cointegration with structural breaks: an application to the Feldstein-Horioka Puzzle, 2008). The results obtained are consistent with the existence of linear cointegration between the log stock prices and the log dividends. However, the empirical results also show that the cointegrating relationship has changed over time. In particular, the Kejriwal-Perron tests for testing multiple structural breaks in cointegrated regression models suggest a model of three or two regimes.