Sources of the Stock Price Fluctuations in Chinese Equity Market

This paper proposes a latent factor approach based on a state-space framework in order to identify which factor, if any, dominates price fluctuations in the Chinese stock markets. We also illustrate the connection of such stock price decomposition with several general equilibrium asset pricing models and show that the decomposition results can potentially offer useful insights with regard to the empirical relevance of asset pricing models. We use quarterly data of the Chinese A-Share equity market over the period 1995Q3-2011Q1 and find that the estimates of the state-space model suggest that the expected return is the primary driving force behind price fluctuations in the Chinese stock market. We show that the time-varying expected returns appear to be counter-cyclical and this result seems to be consistent with the habit formation model of Campbell and Cochrane (1999). However, we also note that there is a great deal of uncertainty with respect to this variance decomposition due to the resulting small signal-to-noise ratio in the estimated state-space model