Relationship Between Stock Market Returns and Macroeconomic Variables: Evidence from Turkey

Abstract

Financial sector is considered to be important in signaling about economic development. It is a common belief that stock market returns contain significant information on economic well-being and act as a good source of market indicator in a country. This common belief is tested for a number of countries using various methods in literature. Whether stock market returns are affected by changes in primary macroeconomic variables have been tested for different time periods in many countries. The findings of the previous studies proved that the results may vary depending on country specific characteristics. The directions and magnitudes of the examined relationships seemed to be different for various economies. However, the mainstream of the findings is consistent with theoretical expectations. This study attempts to bring a light to the relationship between stock market returns and basic macroeconomic variables using monthly data between 2003 and 2015 and employing structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model for the Turkish economy. Turkey is considered as one of the most vulnerable five countries whose stock prices are most responsive to, exchange rate shocks. This study concludes that the stock prices in Turkey responsive to the shocks in exchange rate, interest rate, and inflation in order. The results of the analyses are in accordance with theoretical expectations as well as with the findings of the vast majority in the literature.