Equity valuation process and price-volume relationship on emerging stock markets

This paper examines the stock price-volume relationship in emerging markets throughout the world. Using a vector auto-regression analysis on monthly index data, contrary to evidence reported by Saatcioglu and Starks (1998), we find strong evidence on stock price changes leading trading volume. This finding confirms the evidence reported by studies on many developed markets and the ones recently reported by Moosa et al. (2003) and Chen et al. (2004) on Commodity futures market. However, the lack of strong evidence on the well-documented positive absolute price-volume relation may imply that differences in institutions and information flows in emerging markets are important enough to affect the valuation process of equity securities.