Asset pricing in emerging markets : multifactor modelling approach

Abstract

Emerging markets are associated with developing economies and are structurally different from the developed markets. They offer higher expected returns as they are experiencing higher growth rates and potential for diversifying the risk in global portfolios as they are partially integrated with the developed markets. However, the structural differences coupled with partial integration limit the capability of the asset pricing models, originally designed for the developed markets, to capture risk and return dynamics of the assets in these markets and necessitate customization of the models to the local settings. Many asset pricing studies undertaken in this direction supplement the factors in developed market models with the factors that are unique to the emerging markets. However, the models have limited scope in explaining asset returns due to limited explanatory power of the factors included. This study proposes a multifactor asset pricing model with nine explanatory factors, which include returns on the local and global market portfolios, exchange rate, and returns on six mimicking portfolios that proxy for the common sources of risks associated with size, book to market value of equity, market liquidity, leverage, quality of earnings, and asset liquidity of firms. The last three factors in the model have not been tested in the emerging markets; among these, asset liquidity is introduced as an explanatory factor in asset pricing in this study. The model is tested in seven emerging markets, namely China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, South Africa, and Brazil using ten-year monthly data on non-financial firms over period of January 2004 to December 2013. Generalized method of moments (GMM) is applied for data analysis and model testing. The findings of the study reveal that the local market portfolio is the most dominant factor in all the markets. It subsumes the effects of the global market portfolio and the exchange rate in most of the markets. In addition, consistent cross-country behaviour of size related factor is observed in explaining returns on small and medium portfolios, and of book to market value of equity related factor in explaining returns on high book to market value portfolios. Other factors in the model exhibit different behaviours in different markets indicating presence of idiosyncrasies in the common sources of risks that drive returns in these markets. The newly introduced asset liquidity factor has strong impact on stock returns in four markets: India, Indonesia, Malaysia and South Africa. Furthermore, the new to emerging markets factors leverage and quality of earnings have noticeable influence on stock returns in two markets each; leverage in India and Malaysia, and quality of earnings in China and Brazil. The observed behaviour of the model in the markets studied mirrors the behaviour expected of asset pricing models in emerging markets, which are partially integrated with one another and are in different stages of economic lifecycle