Regime-Switching in Emerging Stock Market Returns

Many emerging markets have experienced significant changes in government policies and capital market reforms. These changes may lead to changes in their return-generating processes. Based on Markov-switching models, this paper investigates whether there is more than one regime in the return-generating processes of nine emerging markets and the specific characteristics of each regime. The results show very strong evidence of regime-switching behavior in emerging stock market returns. The two regimes through which emerging markets evolve are different whether one takes the domestic investors' perspective or that of foreign investors. For foreign investors, changes in volatility seem to be the main characteristic of emerging market regimes. The implications of these findings for the stability of emerging stock markets are discussed