Chapter 16 Symmetric and Asymmetric Influence of Macroeconomic Variables on Stock Prices Movement: Study of Indian Stock Market

The objective of this chapter is to study the symmetric and asymmetric impact of macroeconomic variables on the Indian stock prices (SPs) of the Bombay Stock Exchange index. This chapter further investigates whether the asymmetric impact of macroeconomic variables on SP is due to the impact of any tail events like the global financial recession. An autoregressive distribution lag and non-autoregressive distribution lag approach is used for the full sample covering the period from January 2000 to June 2019 and later this sample is further subdivided into before and after the crisis period to study the variations in result. The findings show that macroeconomic variables and SP have a symmetric relation in the long run whereas an asymmetric relationship in the short run when the whole sample is analyzed. However when data are segregated into “before and after” crisis period this relationship turns to be asymmetric in long run too, meaning that in the long run, the negative and positive changes in a macroeconomic variable do not affect SPs similarly.