Price Discovery and Information Transmission in Stock Index Futures and Spot Markets : Evidence from China based on a VAR-GARCH Model with SSAEPD Margins

Using daily data, this paper empirically investigates the price discovery and information transmission in China's stock index futures and spot markets based on a VAR-GARCH model with SSAEPD margins. By comparing our model with classic VAR-GARCH model, we discover that our model can better capture the skewness, fat-tailness and asymmetric kurtosis in our data and has better in-sample fit than the VAR-GARCH model. Then, we use our model to conduct structural analysis. Causality Analysis, Impulse Response Function and Volatility Impulse Response Function indicate that there exists a significant bidirectional price causal relationship between the index futures and spot returns. And China's index futures market function very well in its price discovery performance, since the index futures market is found to lead the underlying spot market and plays a more dominant role in the price discovery process. Besides, Volatility Impulse Response Function also shows a higher investment risk in index futures market compared with index spot markets