Stock Return and Trading Volume - An Application of the Markov Switching Model

Abstract

The relationship between stock return and trading volume has been extensively documented by earlier studies. Financial academics unveiled some potential reasons of this phenomenon, but it still left for several inconclusive evidences. This paper employs the Markov switching model (MSM) to investigate the relationship. The results identify that second regime exist and persist, which is consistent with earlier study indicating that there are complex influences in stock return and trading volume. One possible explanation would be that people are not always rational; their financial decisions are influenced by behavioral biases. If people change their beliefs or preferences, then the regime switches. This leads to the conclusion that, the results are strongly in favor of a non-linear relation between stock return and trading volume. Also, it is interesting to find that industry play an important role. The deviations of the regime parameters are different across industries, which stands for risk-varying and is fit to the conventional wisdoms. This paper further tests the glamour (value) stock effect by the MSM; the result shows that the factor does affect the probabilities of the expected regime duration periods.