How influential the market confidence in determining the global stock returns
Abstract
Market confidence and investment behavior and decision are closely related. This study conducts
an empirical analysis to examine how influential the market confidence (consumer and business
levels) in determining the performance of global stock returns. Specifically, the study seeks to
reveal if market confidence has asymmetric influences on stock return and how the effect
changes across sectors. For the purpose of analysis, we utilize the nonlinear autoregressive
distributed lags (NARDL) model by examining the ten sectoral global Morgan Stanley Capital
International (MSCI) monthly data ranging from the year 1995 to 2016. Our results showed that
both consumer and business confidences have asymmetric effects and their impacts are captured
in both short-term and long-term. In particular, the impact of consumer confidence is relatively
larger than that of business confidence and varied across sectors. The increase of business
confidence leads to higher stock returns in the sector of energy, financials, health care, and
utilities while the increase in consumer confidence improves the return of health care and real
estate. On the other hand, the decrease of consumer confidence imposes a negative impact on the
return of energy, financials, industry, and utilities. In general, the energy and industry sectors
are more affected by market confidence while no long-run impact is found in communication
services and information technology sectors.