On the Comovement of the Chinese A and H Shares

This thesis gives a brief account on the segmented Chinese stock markets. The indexes of A shares, i.e. shares on the domestic market sold only to domestic investors and the H share index, i.e. foreign shares sold on a foreign stock market, Hong Kong, and sold only to foreigners are compared. With time, the Chinese government is opening up its stock market more and more and allowing more interaction between local and domestic stock markets, but one step at a time. Three major attempts to open up the markets are described and investigated on their effect on the integration of the H share market and the A share market. We checked for the introduction of CEPA, QDII and “through train”. The tests applied were ADF test, Engle-Granger cointegration test and Granger causality test. We found no cointegration for the entire sample and in none of the subsamples we used. The findings on the causality relations among the different stock markets don’t confirm any of the four causality relations defined before. We don’t see any unidirectional causality and it changes over time. We cannot confirm the global center hypothesis or the home bias hypothesis, but we can also not claim that the markets are completely segmented and show no correlation among prices. There is a correlation and there are causality links but they change every time the government changes its regulations. However, it is not clear what kind of regulations will make the causality change in which direction