Canadian and U.S. Financial Markets: Testing the International Integration Hypothesis Under Time-Varying Conditional Volatility

This paper gauges the international integration hypothesis, i.e. risk-adjusted anticipated returns are identical, even when financial instruments are traded in different countries. Under time-varying conditional volatility, this hypothesis can be tested by verifying the equality between domestic and foreign risk prices associated with a multi-factor analytic specification. The maximum-likelihood and Kalman-filter estimates are used to assess the national risk prices and interpret the factors. Empirically, the integration of Canadian and U.S. financial markets depends crucially on the risk prices of two factors, which seem intimately related to certain nonmonetary events and to the conduct of monetary policies.