Information Transmission in the Shanghai Equity Market

We examine market efficiency and the price-volume relation in Class A and Class B shares on the Shanghai exchange relative to the U. S. equity market. Variance ratios and runs tests for market efficiency support the hypothesis that both Class A and Class B markets follow a random-walk. In addition, the augmented Dickey-Fuller test supports the null hypothesis that the Shanghai market follows a random-walk process with drift. We also find a significantly positive relation between changes in volume and absolute price returns in both Class A and Class B shares, which is consistent with studies on U.S. equity markets. However, when using signed returns our results are stronger than most U.S. studies on price-volume relations. We find no significant difference between the price-volume correlations in Class A and Class B shares. However, the price-volume correlations in both Class A and Class B shares are significantly stronger than the price-volume correlation in the U.S. market. This suggests that volume may be more important to information transmission in China than in the U. S. markets