The asymmetric effects of investor sentiment and monetary policy on stock prices

We examine the impact of investor sentiment and monetary policy on the stock prices under different market states based on the Markov-switching vector autoregression (MS-VAR) model. The results show that the sentiment shocks, more than monetary policy shocks, lead to not only much larger fluctuations of stock prices but also much longer duration in the stock market downturn than in the stock market expansion, which shows obvious asymmetric effect. Moreover, the responses of stock prices to the sentiment shocks present an immediate effect, while the responses of stock prices to the monetary policy shocks show one-period lag effect.