Calendar anomaly in the Greek stock market: Stochastic dominance analysis☆

Using stochastic dominance (SD) analysis, this paper examines calendar anomalies in the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE), an emerging market thrust into a path of rapid transition by the economic integration of Greece with the European Union. SD offers two essential analytical attributes: It requires no assumptions regarding the normality of return distributions, and it imposes few restrictions on investors' risk-return tradeoff preference. Between 1985 and 2004, we find temporal predictability of returns in the ASE -- a strong "day" effect and rather weak "week" and "January" effects. Our findings on the week and January effects are far less robust as compared to those reported in earlier studies based on parametric tests.