MACROECONOMIC FACTORS AND STOCK MARKET BEHAVIOUR: AN ANALYSIS OF THE 2008 CRISIS

This study investigates the long term relationship between the behaviour of stock markets during the 2008 crisis and some selected international macroeconomic variables using information from January 2005 to December 2015. The procedures of the Autoregressive Distributed Lag modeling techniques (ARDL) are employed for the analysis. The bounds testing procedure in the ARDL framework is used to test for the existence of long term relationships between stock market behaviour and global economic factors (interest rate, exchange rate, index of industrial production and oil price) as well as the direction of effects, while estimated coefficients are used to test the pattern of long term relationships among the variables. The study revealed that a significant long term relationship exists between stock price movements and these global economic trends while the stock market crash significantly impacted the efficiency of the markets under review. Thus, it is recommended that market fundamentals should remain the capstone of stock market analysis, and policies should encourage the delinking of stock markets from the international commodity market factors.