International Evidence on Currency Adjusted Stock Indexes

Abstract

Recent literature examines currency value adjusted indexes. The extant research examines U.S. stock indexes as adjusted for the value of the U.S. dollar and the value of gold. The literature examines only U.S. stock indexes. This paper extends the existing literature by examining currency adjusted stock indexes from eight countries. The analysis includes daily closing data from 1993-2016. The results show that currency adjusted indexes produce significantly different return distributions than original indexes. Further, currency value changes explain as much as 31 percent of total wealth changes, a result substantially higher than previously reported for U.S. currency adjusted indexes. The combined evidence indicates that currency value changes impact total wealth changes more for international indexes than for U.S. indexes.