How Do the Global Stock Markets Influence One Another? Evidence from Finance Big Data and Granger Causality Directed Network

The recent financial network analysis approach reveals that the topologies of financial markets have an important influence on market dynamics. However, the majority of existing Finance Big Data networks are built as undirected networks without information on the influence directions among prices. Rather than understanding the correlations, this research applies the Granger causality test to build the Granger Causality Directed Network for 33 global major stock market indices. The paper further analyzes how the markets influence one another by investigating the directed edges in the different filtered networks. The network topology that evolves in different market periods is analyzed via a sliding window approach and Finance Big Data visualization. By quantifying the influences of market indices, 33 global major stock markets from the Granger causality network are ranked in comparison with the result based on PageRank centrality algorithm. Results reveal that the ranking lists are similar in both approaches where the U.S. indices dominate the top position followed by other American, European, and Asian indices. The lead-lag analysis reveals that there is lag effects among the global indices. The result sheds new insights on the influences among global stock markets with implications for trading strategy design, global portfolio management, risk management, and markets regulation.