Influence of the Macro-Economy on the Chinese Stock Market
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Yun Xiao , Choi Ki-Hong , Yoon Seong-Min 
Published: June 2018

The analysis on the returns and volatility of stock price in stock market is one of the important research field in economics, and the issue such as the influence of macroeconomic variables on stock price has been examined over time. Since the fluctuation of a country’s stock market is always closely associated with the changes of macro-economy, it is highly possible that the variation of macroeconomic variables exert significant influences on the stock price and many literatures consider this relationship. However, the study on the Chinese stock market has it own especially important meanings. Firstly, due to the relatively short of the establishment period of Chinese stock market, the stock market in China is still not developed enough and has many inefficiency problems. The individual investment also takes up comparatively large proportions in market. These features thereby cause the instability of Chinese stock market. Therefore, different characteristics might be found on the relationship between macroeconomic variables and stock price in China. Secondly, compared with developed capitalist countries, the interference of Chinese government on the economic development is relatively severe, and the stock market is also often intervened under national regulations and controls. Thus, the relationship between the volatility of macroeconomic variables and stock price may present different features from those developed countries. Thirdly, unlike export-oriented emerging stock market such as Korea, Chinese stock market might be more affected by its national economic policies and the change of macroeconomic variables. Altogether, it is hard to determine, how can the variation of macro-economy will affect the fluctuation of stock price in China based on theoretical works. The empirical analysis should be conducted to judge the relationship between them. In addition, due to the existence of two stock exchanges in China, Shanghai stock exchange and Shenzhen stock exchange, the comparisons also should be analyzed to investigate how these two stock market react differently to the change of macroeconomic variables.
This paper makes comparisons between macroeconomic variables and two stock markets. The paper adopts the macro-economic climate index, money supply, consumer price index, exchange rate, interest rate, total import and export volume as macroeconomic variables, two composite indexes of Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange as the stock market variables to investigate the relationship between the macro economy and stock market by employing VAR-GARCH-BEKK model. The mean equation is set to be vector autoregressive (VAR) model for measuring the return spillover effect between macroeconomic variables and stock market index. Variance equation utilizes the bivariate GARCH-BEKK model for observing the volatility spillover effect between them. The analysis tries to figure out whether the stock market of Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange has the different return and volatility spillover effect or not.
The main findings of this study are summarized as follows: The return of macroeconomic variables has no significant impact on the returns of Chinese stock markets, implying there is no return spillover effect. However, the volatility of consumer price index exert significant influence on the volatility of Shanghai composite index. The volatility of the macroeconomic variables including money supply, consumer price index, and exchange rate significantly affect the volatility of Shenzhen composite index, and the influence of the volatility of exchange rate on the volatility of Shenzhen composite index is the strongest among them. The volatility spillover effect between macroeconomic variables and Shenzhen composite index is stronger than that between macroeconomic variables and Shanghai composite index.