A MEM-Based Analysis of Volatility Spillovers in East Asian Financial Markets

Abstract

Transmission mechanisms in financial markets reflect the degree of integration of capital markets and of real economies. As a matter of fact, volatility has components which may behave differently across quiet and turbulent periods, but appear to behave in similar ways from market to market. In this paper we suggest a Multiplicative Error Model (MEM) approach which is suitable for modeling directly the conditional expectation of the market daily range which is a good proxy for volatility. In the present context, the dynamics of the expected volatility of one market is extended to include interactions with the past daily ranges of other markets, thus building a potentially fully interdependent model. We analyze eight East Asian markets in the period 1995-2006, devoting particular attention to the treatment of the 1997-1998 turbulence period. We show that for some of the markets there is no evidence of changes in the dynamic impacts within the crisis and without and for other markets such a change is limited to a level shift: this suggests that the links may have been stable across sub-periods.

Keywords: Volatility, Multiplicative Error Models, Asian Crisis, Market integration

JEL Classification: C32, G15, N25