Return Comovement

We examine intra-market return comovement within each of 33 economies' stock exchanges from 1995 through 2013 using a model-free comovement gauge. We find that the stability of international macroeconomic trilemma policies, the number of crises, and the extent of turnover overshadow the empirical relevance of many variables previously thought to be important for intra-market comovement, including country risk, corruption, and investor protections.We also use a much longer historical sample of US firms to examine compositional explanations of the well-known US comovement decline and to decompose the comovement into trend and cycle. Our findings challenge the compositional explanations of the decline and suggest that the most recent uptick reflects short-term conditions, rather than a trend reversal