The behavior of the major and sub-sector indices in Amman stock exchange during the global financial crisis

Abstract EN

This study aims to empirically examine the effect of global financial crisis (2008) on the behavior of Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) represented by the three general main indices viz., Free Float (FF), General Unweighted (UW), and Price Weighted (PW), and on the four sectoral indices, namely banking, insurance, services and industrial.

The hypotheses were tested by investigating the differences in the three general market indices and the sectoral indices before and after the global financial crisis by applying the parametric paired sample t-test and the non-parametric Wilcoxon Matched-Paired Signed Ranks test.

The time span was 116 trading days before June 19, 2008 (which was chosen as a trading peak day) and 116 trading days after June 22, 2008.

The study found that there were statistically significant differences between stock prices before and after the global financial crisis for most indices in (ASE).

This result indicates that these indices succeeded in capturing the negative signals of the financial crisis, except for the banking's sub-index.

On the other hand, the incompatibility of the (PW) index's result with the other indices may suggest the need to review the index sample or the weighting scheme.

The results also indicate that parametric or nonparametric tests can be used interchangeably in (ASE).