Investor Sentiment and Bond Risk Premia: Evidence from China

Abstract

This article shows the statistical significance of a set of variables related to market sentiment and uses them to predict the risk premium embedded in China’s sovereign bonds. We construct a composite index of market-wide investor sentiment as a linear combination of proxies for a degree of market participation and risk appetite of investors. Further, we show that these sentiment-related factors can be summarized in a single-return forecasting factor, similar in a spirit of Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005). Our empirical results show that this sentiment factor has predictive power beyond that contained in the yield curve and macroeconomic variables, and this predictability is robust for out-of-sample testing. In addition, the predictive power of the sentiment factor shows relevance during the 2008 global financial crisis, indicating that the forecasting ability of investor sentiment is mainly derived by a sentiment-induced “flight-to-quality.”