The Monday effect revisited: An alternative testing approach

This paper questions traditional approaches for testing the Monday effect of stock returns. We propose an alternative, multiple hypothesis testing approach based on the closure test principle which controls the multiple type I error. We consider the US, the UK and the German stock markets and test Monday related pairwise comparisons of daily expected stock returns, while the probability of committing any type I error is always kept smaller than a prespecified level a, for each combination of true null hypotheses. Overall, the new testing approach supports previous findings of a Monday effect for the 1970s and 1980s, in particular for the US and Germany, while it suggests that the Monday effect has vanished in the 1990s and 2000s in all three markets. The comparison of the closure test procedure, the traditional multiple t-test and the Bonferroni test, a classical multiple test procedure, shows that traditional testing may result in spurious significance while the Bonferroni test may sometimes be too conservative. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.