The Arbitrage Pricing Theory in South Africa: An empirical study of the effect of pre-specified risk factors on share prices on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

This study tests the Arbitrage Pricing Theory on the Johannesburg stock Exchange (JSE). Following the McElroy and Burmeister (1988) approach of pre-specifying a factor structure to be tested, a possible set of factors was selected on the basis of a priori theoretical and empirical evidence that they could affect share prices. All combinations of these factors were separately tested against mining and industrial shares listed on the JSE. Two sets of tests were performed, firstly, a mUltivariate nonlinear regression with cross-equation restrictions as a test of the APT model and secondly, a seemingly unrelated regression model. The APT test results for mining shares show that the model with gold price risk and residual market risk and the model with growth rate risk and residual market risk had the highest adjusted-R2 values. However these factors were not priced APT factors sinc