Risk factors explaining returns anomaly in emerging market banks – study on Indian banking system

The article provides evidence about the risk factors influence the pricing of banking stocks in the context of emerging economies like India. We use 10 years of data comprising of public and private banks for empirical evidence of abnormal returns. We deploy Fama-French 3-Factor and Carhart 4 Factor model, with and without innovations, to explain the presence of abnormal returns. Comprehending the limitation of the firm specific factors (size and value) accounting for the risk-based returns, we develop a parallel model based on conditioning information like the banks’ profitability, asset quality, capacity to leverage, operating margin and loss assets provisioning. We find that on inclusion of the bank-led performance parameters the explanatory power of the alternate model has significantly improved to 52.21 as compared against a value of 44.28 reported in case of Indian Banks using the Carhart 4-Factor Model (1997). We observe that our findings add-up to indicate significant propositions in estimating the bank specific risk factors that influence the prices and in-turn the returns of banking stocks in emerging markets.