Stock Market Measures and Market Performance

Abstract
Sri Lanka is considered a highly fluctuating economy in the South Asian region. It is vital to understand the behavior of economy in order to obtain the maximum benefit. Stock market can be considered as one of the key influencers to the economy whereas the behavior of the stock market would highly define the behaviors of the overall economic system. It is required to identify the stock market measures and their contribution for the market development in order to identify the influence of stock market.The immense importance of its actions on the market performance leads to find more about the stock market’s measures. This research contains the evidence of the study conducted to identify the development of the stock market along with the behavior of the stock market measures such as all share price index, market capitalization, dividend yield, price to earnings ratio and shares traded equity. All of these variables were used to obtain a model to describe and predict performance of stock market over the time.This study is based on the secondary data obtained from the CSE (Colombo Stock Exchange). A trend analysis was conducted for each series of data and results were used for the analysis carried on from there. Unit root test was performed to ensure the stationarity of the data. Then, a time series regression model and Granger causality tests were used to identify the relationship between the measures of stock market. Major finding of the study depicts that all the measures of the stock market have influences on the stock market development except for the dividend yield. These findings are useful in the process of decision making in many aspects.