Stock Market Interdependence and Trade Relations: A Correlation Test for the U.S. and Its Trading Partners

Based on the well-established trade relations between the U.S. and its major trading partners, this paper examines the robustness of the trade relation hypothesis which, in some recent studies, argues that difference in trade relations among countries can significantly explain difference in the stock market interdependence. The generalized VDC analysis is employed to measure the stock market interdependence, and the correlation test with bootstrap procedure is applied to test the hypothesis. The results indicate that the hypothesis is hardly as a general rule.