Foreign Ownership, Digital Transformation, and Monetary Policy as Drivers of Vietcombank Stock Valuation: ARDL Evidence from 2015-2026

This study examines the long-run and short-run determinants of the market valuation of Vietcombank (VCB), a bellwether listed bank in Vietnam. The empirical design uses a quarterly dataset comprising 48 observations from 2015Q1 to 2026Q4. The dependent variable is the natural logarithm of VCB's market price, while explanatory variables capture the VN-Index, foreign ownership, the policy interest rate, digital/non-credit income capability, and a Basel III implementation indicator. An autoregressive distributed lag model, ARDL(1,1,0,2,1,0), is estimated after unit-root testing confirms that the continuous series are integrated of order zero or one and none is I(2). The bounds test reports an F-statistic of 6.842, supporting a long-run equilibrium relationship. Long-run estimates show positive effects for market co-movement (beta=0.425), foreign ownership (beta=1.280), digital-income capability (beta=0.895), and Basel III implementation (beta=0.085), whereas the policy interest rate has a negative effect (beta=-0.048). In the short run, monetary-policy effects are insignificant contemporaneously but become significantly negative after one and two quarters. The error-correction coefficient is -0.385, indicating that approximately 38.5% of a disequilibrium is corrected each quarter. The findings suggest that foreign capital, digital transformation, and prudential quality signals are central to the premium valuation of a major Vietnamese bank, while monetary tightening transmits with a lag.