An Inquiry into the Persistence of Holiday Effect on Stock Markets in India: Insights and Perspectives on a Seasonal Anomaly

Asset pricing is a key area of literature in analysing and evaluating the stock market efficiency. Though various pricing models made efforts to explain the behaviour of the stocks, the existence of seasonal anomalies in the stock markets creates an opportunity for the investors to generate abnormal returns. The present article emphasizes one of such market anomalies namely, the holiday effect using indices belonging to Indian stock exchanges. Thorough research is performed by including all the prime market-capital and sectoral indices of the National Stock Exchange and the Bombay Stock Exchange. The ARIMAX methodology is adopted to observe the anomaly by considering exogenous variables representing the trading days before the exchange-mandated holidays. Further, the strength of the anomaly is analysed with the incorporation of various stock market reforms and observed to be significantly persistent among most of the Indian market indices (including both the sectoral and the market-capital based indices).