Relationship Between Financial Deepening Indicators and Stock Market Performance in Kenya

The purpose of this study was to find out the relationship between financial deepening indicators and the stock market performance in Kenya. The selected financial deepening indicators were; financial savings, private sector credit, broad money supply and intermediation ratio on the stock market performance. Johansen cointegration test was done indicating that the variables co-move towards a long-run equilibrium, a multivariate vector error correction model was run and the estimates obtained. The error correction term was also computed. Empirical results showed that all variables are adequately explained by their own lags and the lags of the other variables, the coefficients are also significant. The error correction model indicated that an increase in private sector credit by one unit in the previous quarter causes the stock market performance to increase by 48% in the current quarter. Variance decomposition tests and impulse response functions indicated how other variables respond to shocks in the other variables and the forecast errors for each of the predicted quarters. The implication of this study is that the policy makers who are; the Government, the Central bank of Kenya and the Capital Markets Authority ought to make policy decisions while considering the effect of the full market. This study concluded that private sector credit is the financial indicator variable that affects the stock market performance the most with a bidirectional relationship.