An Exploration of Realized Volatility and Returns in the Chinese Stock Market

Abstract

This paper uses high-frequency stock index data to construct realized volatilities for the Chinese stock market and applies in-sample and out-of-sample  to test the predictive power of realized volatility on Chinese stock market returns. The empirical results show that realized volatility can significantly predict the excess return of the Chinese stock market in the next month, and the in-sample and out-of-sample regression models  are positive, and the out-of-sample  The p-value of the regression model is significant. And after controlling for a range of other stock predictor variables, we find that the regression coefficient of realized volatility is still significant, and we find that after adding realized volatility, the in-sample adj-  increases with the inclusion of realized volatility, suggesting that realized volatility does have components that are not explained by other economic variables. Also based on a different construction method, the realized variance still has significant predictive power after averaging the realized variance. After combining two different realized variance indicators, the predictive power is still better. In terms of economic interpretation, this paper finds that the predictive power of realized variance on stock returns is through influencing the turnover rate (market trading activity), which in turn influences stock market returns. We find that realized volatility has a significant effect on the turnover rate, and when we use realized volatility to predict the turnover rate, which in turn predicts the excess return, we find that the coefficient is highly significant, indicating that realized volatility can indeed cause changes in excess return by affecting the turnover rate.