The price-volume relationship in Gulf Cooperation Council stock markets

Abstract

This paper examines the empirical relationship among stock return, trading volume and volatility for the seven stock markets that comprise the Gulf Cooperation Council. The dataset includes seven national stock markets for the period spanning from 1 July 2004 to 3 September 2008. Granger causality test was used to explore whether return causes volume or volume causes return. The empirical results of Granger causality tests reveal that returns lead volume in five markets out of the seven markets. The results of the exponential generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model provide evidence that shocks persist in the conditional variance, good news have different impact on market volatility than bad news and that the large shocks have large impact on the market volatility for all markets. In addition, the lag volume shows a significant and positive impact on volatility in four markets and no impact in three markets, namely Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Doha.