Market segmentation and foreign price premium in The Stock Exchange of Thailand

Abstract

Foreign share premium in Thai stock market has exhibited the downward trend during 2002 to 2014. This study attempts to explain this phenomenon by three hypotheses which are demand differential, information availability, and diversification benefit. The panel regression and cross-sectional regression are employed to account for variation of foreign share premium over time and across firms. The results of the study show that demand differential between foreign and domestic investors plays important role to explain foreign share premium. As foreign investors' demand for Thai stock is downward sloping, lower foreign room left relative to foreign ownership limit indicates higher foreign demand and higher foreign share premium for that stock. Moreover, foreign investors are likely to shift their investment from traditional foreign share on the Foreign Board to Non-Votiing Depository Receipt (NVDR) over time as it is a close substitute investment of domestic share for foreign investors. The existence of NVDR cause foreign investors' demand to become more elastic resulting in lower foreign share premium. Together with information availability hypothesis, foreign investors are interested to invest in larger firms and firms with more analyst coverages, via NVDR rather than foreign share on the Foreign Board, since they need not to concern about foreign ownership limit. Nevertheless, diversification benefit is the motive driven foreign investors to invest in domestic share on the Foreign Board. For any stock, if its return yields lower correlation with market portfolio return, it shows the higher diversification benefit and results in higher foreign share premium.