| In the first essay, in contrast to some earlier studies, I document statistically significant within-country style effects in several emerging Asian equity market portfolios. Small capitalization and value stocks tend to outperform their style counterparts. However, there are considerable periods of time when large capitalization and growth stocks outperform. Overall, single style strategies are risky when applied to each individual market.;In the second essay, I report that average return correlations among the zero-cost style portfolios are low---emphasizing the value of an intra-regional diversification strategy. These correlations exhibit significant variation over time. Measures of integration for the style portfolios are also low on average but tend to vary over time. Style returns in the original ASEAN-5 markets exhibit much higher correlations following the Asian financial crisis, and, these correlations remain elevated for several years. These results suggest that while diversification is helpful on average, there are some periods of time when a regional style rotation strategy is warranted and other times when country-specific rotation strategies are reasonable.;In the third essay, I conduct bootstrap experiments on significant winner and loser continuations for each style and the style triplets in Asian emerging equity markets. I provide only modest evidence of style continuation in Asian emerging markets. I also test for style-level momentum in emerging Asia and condition style momentum returns on January, market state, monetary policy and cross-sectional dispersion. I find significant conditional style-level momentum in some Asian emerging markets but not others. I attribute the weaker style momentum results in emerging Asia to a lack of country-level style-specific derivatives in these markets. |
