Analysing global research on stock market anomalies: a behavioural finance perspective

Abstract

Investors’ psychology and behaviours have been known to influence the emergence of capital market imperfections. The corpus of studies on this matter is copious but conflicting as researchers approach the subject from two major perspectives. Against this background, this study aims to review and establish the global research trend in behavioural finance examining stock market anomalies vis-à-vis its opposing paradigm (i.e., the efficient market hypothesis). Based on an extensive review of the types of anomalies published by scholars over 53 years (1968 – 2021), this study generated search strings targeting the appropriate investor behaviours as responses to stock market anomalies. The study applied bibliometric analysis and drew 1,767 documents from the Scopus database, which were later reduced to 1,436 after applying the exclusion criteria. The analyses revealed that authors prefer to disseminate their research on stock market anomalies in refereed journals and also attempt to unravel the contrast between rational and behavioural dynamics of investor decision-making based on short-term observations. Also, most of the studies fall under the general economics and business subject groups, indicating authors' preoccupation with general rather than specific matters on stock market anomalies. Further, the study highlighted the global distribution of studies on stock market anomalies, the top prolific authors in the field, the top journal sources, and the Scopus profiles of selected top authors. Based on these results, recommendations for future studies were given.