The causal relationship between government opinions and chinese stock market in social media era

Abstract

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. China’s capital market is still an emerging market. The weaknesses of a transition market are speculative behaviors of investors and heavy government intervention. The recent observed Chinese stock market has experienced an extraordinary rise while the real economics is going down. Behavioral economics tells us that public comments can profoundly affect individual behavior and decision-making. In this information era, the public can be the “collective intelligence” in social media. This study investigates what is the role of Chinese government play in Sina weibo, which is the biggest microblog in China. Are the public posts, which also contain government messages, correlated or a causal relationship of economic indicators? Here we figure out whether measurements of collective public comments derived from large-scale Sina weibo posts are correlated to the value of the Shanghai Composite over time. A Granger causality analysis was finally used to detect the causal relationship between government role in social media and recent Chinese stock market price. The results show that the positive government opinion is the Granger cause of the Chinese stock market.