A Market Crash or Tail Risk? Heavy Tails and Asymmetry of Returns in the Chinese Stock Market

Rapid stock market growth without real economic back-up has led to the 2015 Chinese Stock Market Crash with thousands of stocks hitting the down limit simultaneously multiple times. The authors provide a detailed analysis of structural breaks in heavy-tailedness and asymmetry properties of returns in Chinese A-share markets due to the crash using recently proposed robust approaches to tail index inference. The empirical analysis points out to heavy-tailedness properties often implying possibly infinite second moments and also focuses on gain/loss asymmetry in the tails of daily returns on individual stocks. The authors further present an analysis of the main determinants of heavy-tailedness in Chinese financial markets. It points out to liquidity and company size as being the most important factors affecting the returns’ heavy-tailedness properties. At the same time, the authors do not observe statistically significant differences in tail indices of the returns on A-shares and the coefficients on factors affecting them in the pre-crisis and post-crisis periods.