The Effect of Trust and Trade on Stock Markets Comovement

Trust is a basic component of social trust that has been neglected in existing empirical literature regarding stock markets comovements. It is an important factor due to its implications for portfolio management and financial system stability. This study investigates how trust distance affects the way stock markets co-move together in ASEAN, BRICS, and G12 countries. Further, we investigate the moderating effect of trust distance on trade between different nations and the comovement of their stock markets. This is because trade is an important factor when it comes to stock market integration. Our findings based on the OLS and quantile regression demonstrate that similarity in trust positively affects the way stock markets move together, however, this is not always the case during market turmoils because of increased volatility. For the quantile regression we discovered that trust distance has an asymmetric effect to stock markets co-movement as it is only significant below the 60th percentile only. Moreover, we find that trust positively moderates the effect of trade on stock markets' co-movement between BRICS and G12 nations as it increases openness to trade which in turn leads to synchronizing business cycles and equity markets. This however is not the case with ASEAN nations as they are still nascent markets and not yet mature. The policy implications for stakeholders imply that invetors need to diversify their portfolios to markets which are furthest in trust distance above 1 and that policymakers like central banks need to put in place regulations which consider trust distance in order to avoid financial contagion during market turmoils.