This study investigates the effects of macroeconomic variables on stock prices in emerging Sri Lankan stock market using monthly data for the period from September 1991 to December 2002. The multivariate regression was run using eight macroeconomic variables for each individual stock. The null hypothesis which states that money supply, exchange rate, inflation rate and interest rate variables collectively do not accord any impact on equity prices is rejected at 0.05 level of significance in all stocks. The results indicate that most of the companies report a higher R 2 which justifies higher explanatory power of macroeconomic variables in explaining stock prices. Consistent with similar results of the developed as well as emerging market studies, inflation rate and exchange rate react mainly negatively to stock prices in the Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE). The negative effect of Treasury bill rate implies that whenever the interest rate on Treasury securities rise, investors tend to switch out of stocks causing stock prices to fall. However, lagged money supply variables do not appear to have a strong prediction of movements of stock prices while stocks do not provide effective hedge against inflation specially in Manufacturing, Trading and Diversified sectors in the CSE. These findings hold practical implications for policy makers, stock market regulators, investors and stock market analysts.

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This paper examines the relationship between macroeconomic and firm-specific determinants of stock returns of Sri Lanka and United Kingdom (UK). Our results are based on the fixed effects regression models since those perform statistically better than the random effects and pooled OLS models for Sri Lankan data and the fitted one-way fixed effects firm factor regression indicates that Return on Assets (ROA) and sales growth rate play a significant role in explaining variation in stock returns in Sri Lankan companies while one-way random effect firm factor model in UK shows that E/P ratio, B/M ratio, fixed assets growth rate, size and ROA are the most dominants priced factors in London Stock Exchange (LSE). The explanatory power of regressions increases considerably when we incorporate macroeconomic indicators controlling for firm effects and results show that inflation, GDP and exchange rate remain leading predictors of stock returns variation in both Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE) and LSE whereas unemployment and Foreign Portfolio Investments (FPI) become statistically significant only in CSE. Thus, it is noted that stock prices of Sri Lankan and UK companies are sensitive to both company and macroeconomic fundamental changes hence, the stock market analysts and investors find that they can make fundamental base trading strategies as publicly available information play a key role in predicting future returns bringing the conclusions of the Sri Lankan stock market is in semi-strong form efficient in doubt.