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| The Effects of Market Frictions on Idiosyncratic Risk Premium: An Empirical Study of the Main Board of China's A Stocks |
| LI Shaoyu, ZHANG Teng, SHANG Yuhuang, ZHOU Yu
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International Business College, South China Normal University;
School of Securities and Futures/Institute of Chinese Financial Studies, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics |
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Abstract Due to asymmetric information, trading costs, buy and sell constraints, lack of short-sales mechanisms, and exogenous shocks, the effects of market frictions on stock returns are more serious in China's A-share stock market than in developed foreign stock markets. Therefore, it is reasonable to ask how market frictions affect the pricing effect of idiosyncratic risks in China. In practice, answering this question would support the improvement and development of the capital market in China and help investors construct reasonable investment strategies. The question also suggests a new theoretical perspective: using market frictions to explain market anomalies (e.g., the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle and idiosyncratic skewness premium).
Many studies of non-Chinese markets (e.g., Mitton and Vorkink, 2007; Barberis and Huang, 2008; Bali and Cakici, 2008) use risk preferences and liquidity to explain the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle. However, studies show that there is a negative relationship between idiosyncratic risk and stock return in the Chinese stock market. Heterogeneous belief (e.g., Zuo et al., 2011; Long et al., 2018), gambling preferences (Zheng et al., 2013), and limited arbitrage (Yu et al., 2017; Gu et al., 2018) contribute to this negative relationship (puzzle). However, studies of both foreign and domestic markets ignore the effects of market friction.
We attempt to investigate the pricing effects of various dimensions of market friction and explore the mechanism through which pricing factor affects idiosyncratic risk. Our samples are drawn from the main board of China's A-share stock market for the 2001 to 2015 period. We first introduce continuous and discrete market friction variables to represent the dimensions of information asymmetry, trading costs, price shocks, price limit constraints, short-selling constraints, future trading constraints, and exogenous shocks. Second, the idiosyncratic volatility and idiosyncratic skewness variables are derived from a three-factor regression and five-factor regression, respectively. Then, they are used in a Fama-MacBeth cross-sectional regression to test the pricing effects and how these effects influence idiosyncratic risk premiums. We try to discuss the effects of the market friction factors on idiosyncratic risk premiums via liquidity channels. Finally, we use a weighted market friction index in a robustness test of the empirical results and conduct a portfolio analysis to infer the characteristics of idiosyncratic risk premiums under different market frictions.
Empirical studies indicate that the idiosyncratic risk factors, including idiosyncratic volatility, idiosyncratic skewness, and market frictions, have significant premiums. Market frictions enhance idiosyncratic volatility via decreased liquidity in the form of trading time, trading frequency, trading number, trading demand, and trading speed. Market frictions weakly influence idiosyncratic skewness. We also find that the absolute returns of portfolio strategies based on idiosyncratic risk factors outweigh those of CAPM, the three-factor model, and the five-factor model. Furthermore, the returns of portfolio strategies based on idiosyncratic risk factors are impacted by market frictions, which confirms the findings of the regressions.
We make two contributions to the literature. First, we partially explain the effect of market frictions on idiosyncratic volatility and to identify the driving mechanisms as stock liquidity (trading time cost, trading frequency, trading hours, trading inclination, and trading speed), although the effect of the market frictions on idiosyncratic skewness is relatively weak. Second, we find that portfolios constructed using idiosyncratic risk variables have higher absolute returns than the CAPM, three-factor, and five-factor portfolios. As a result of market frictions, the absolute return of a portfolio based on idiosyncratic volatility shrinks. The findings indicate that market liquidity is indispensable to avoid market crashes when managing systematic and contagious risks from international markets. It is also necessary to control for the spread of liquidity, and we should be cautious in assessing the individual stock risks incurred by the overflow of liquidity. In particular, it is necessary to develop policies for directional liquidity injection and for differentiating capital costs. Additionally, our work can be extended to study abnormal types of market friction, such as global public health crises and climate-related shocks.
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Received: 19 July 2018
Published: 02 September 2021
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