Persistence of calendar anomalies: insights and perspectives from literature

Purpose Market efficiency suggests that price of the security must reflect its intrinsic value by impounding all the available and accessible information. Asset pricing in capital markets has been an exceptionally dynamic area of scholarly research and is considered as a barometer for assessing market efficiency. This phenomenon was very well explained by several market pricing models and theories over the last few decades. However, several anomalies, which cannot be explained by the traditional asset pricing models due to seasonal and psychological factors, were observed historically. The same has been studied by several researchers over the years and is well captured in the literature pertaining to market asset pricing. The purpose of this paper is to revisit the research studies related to a few asset pricing anomalies, collectively referred to as “calendar anomalies”, such as – day-of-the-week, turn-of-the-month, turn-of-the-year and the holiday effects. In this pursuit, a thorough survey of literature in this area, published over the last 80 years (from 1934 to 2016) across 24 prominent journals, has been made and presented in a comprehensive, structured and chronologically arranged major findings and learnings. This literature survey reveals that the existing literature do provide a great depth of understanding around these calendar anomalies often with reference to specific markets, the size of the firm and investor type. The paper also highlights a few aspects where the existing literature is silent or provides little support leaving a gap that needs to be addressed with further research in this area. Design/methodology/approach The goal of the study requires a comprehensive review of the past literature related to calendar anomalies. As a consequence, to identify papers which sufficiently represent the area of study, the authors examined the full text of articles within EBSCOHost, Elsevier-Science direct, Emerald insight and JSTOR databases with calendar anomalies related keywords for articles published since inception. Further, each article was classified based on the anomaly discussed and the factors used to sub-categorize the anomaly. Once all the identified fields were populated, we passed through another article by constantly updating the master list till all the 99 articles were populated. Findings It is also important to understand at this juncture that most of the papers surveyed discuss the persistence of the asset pricing anomalies with reference to the developed markets with a very few offering evidences from emerging markets. Thus leaving a huge scope for further research to study the persistence of asset pricing anomalies, the degree and direction of the effect on asset pricing among emerging markets such as India, Russia, Brazil vis-a-vis the developed markets. Further, regardless of the markets with reference to which the study is conducted, the research so far appears to have laid focus only on the overall market returns derived from aggregate market indices to explain the asset pricing anomalies. Thus leaving enough scope for further research to study and understand the persistence of these anomalies with reference to various strategic, thematic and sectoral indices in various markets (developed, emerging and underdeveloped countries) across different time periods. It will be also interesting to understand how, some or all of, these established asset pricing anomalies behave over a certain time period when markets move across the efficiency maturity model (from weak form to semi-strong to strong form of efficiency). Originality/value The main purpose of the study entails a detailed review of all the past literature pertinent to the calendar anomalies. In order to explore the prior literature that sufficiently captures the research area, various renowned databases were examined with keywords related to the calendar anomalies under scope of current study. Furthermore, based on the finalized articles, a comprehensive summary table was populated and provided in the Appendix which gives a snapshot of all the articles under the current assessment. This helps the readers of the article to directly relate the findings of each article with its background information.