Damascus Securities Exchange Weighted Index Volatilities and Terrorist Attacks

Abstract

This paper examines the interaction between terrorism events and finance, focusing for the first time on the Damascus Securities Exchange Weighted Index return volatility of Syria besieged by terrorist attacks. To do so, we employ three multivariate GARCH models (GARCH (1,1), EGARCH (1,1) and TGARCH (1,1)) to examine the presence of daily anomalies created by terrorist attacks over the period from March 01, 2011 to October 29, 2015. We find terrorism risk is a significant factor in explaining the volatility of stock returns in the case of DSE Weighted Index, which should be taken into account when modeling volatility. From the empirical results of GARCH (1,1), EGARCH (1,1) and TGARCH (1,1) models, we can show the existence of a significance and positive effect for the return at (t-1) on the return volatility of DSE Weighted Index in a threshold of 1%. Additionally, we found that terrorist attacks have a negative impact on the DSE returns. This impact is significant with a significance level of 1% in the mean and variance equations. Also, we can show the persistence of volatility in the case of Damascus Securities Exchange Weighted Index.