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The behaviour of the distributions of stock returns: an analysis of the European market using the Pearson system of continuous probability distributions

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  • F. Pizzutilo

Abstract

We employ the Pearson system of frequency curves to analyse the behaviour of unconditional daily return distributions for all the shares that constitute the STOXX Europe 600 index. Our results show that over finite time periods of analysis the distributions are adequately described as type IV. The occasional exceptions are linked strictly to extraordinary events that result in abnormal returns. They are more frequent if short time intervals are examined. When an infinite time of analysis is assumed, the results do not reject the hypothesis that the behaviour of stock returns is symmetrical and that it is of type VII, which is a special case of type IV that subsumes the Student's t and the Cauchy distributions and is easier to deal with in practice.

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  • F. Pizzutilo, 2012. "The behaviour of the distributions of stock returns: an analysis of the European market using the Pearson system of continuous probability distributions," Applied Financial Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(20), pages 1743-1752, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:apfiec:v:22:y:2012:i:20:p:1743-1752
    DOI: 10.1080/09603107.2012.678979
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    1. Fabio Pizzutilo, 2013. "The Distribution of the Returns of Japanese Stocks and Portfolios," Asian Economic and Financial Review, Asian Economic and Social Society, vol. 3(9), pages 1249-1259, September.
    2. Stavros Stavroyiannis & Leonidas Zarangas, 2013. "Out of Sample Value-at-Risk and Backtesting with the Standardized Pearson Type-IV Skewed Distribution," Panoeconomicus, Savez ekonomista Vojvodine, Novi Sad, Serbia, vol. 60(2), pages 231-247, April.
    3. M. Naresh Kumar & V. Sree Hari Rao, 2015. "A New Methodology for Estimating Internal Credit Risk and Bankruptcy Prediction under Basel II Regime," Papers 1502.00882, arXiv.org.
    4. M. Naresh Kumar & V. Sree Hari Rao, 2015. "A New Methodology for Estimating Internal Credit Risk and Bankruptcy Prediction under Basel II Regime," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 46(1), pages 83-102, June.
    5. Stavros Stavroyiannis, 2016. "Value-at-Risk and backtesting with the APARCH model and the standardized Pearson type IV distribution," Papers 1602.05749, arXiv.org.

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