Testing for Structural Breaks and Dynamic Changes in Emerging Market Volatility

The main objective of this paper is to test for structural breaks and dynamic changes in emerging market volatility from January 1985 to January 2003. We typically relate these issues to stock market reforms since the latter is often considered as one of the most important forces that promote economic growth and rapid maturation of the emerging markets of the world. We first estimate a bivariate GARCH-M model to obtain conditional volatility series for each market. Second, we test for significant structural breaks in the conditional volatility series to determine whether the observed break dates coincide with any of the stock market reforms. Third, the effect of liberalization policy on market volatility is formally tested using a pooled time-series cross-section estimation that includes a host of explanatory variables in addition to market reform variables. Overall, the results indicate that structural breaks in the dynamic patterns of the sample emerging market volatility do not happen together with official liberalization dates, but they coincide with ADR/Country Fund dates and with dates of large increases in the US capital flows. The pooled estimation generally supports the findings from structural break analysis. Hence, it is possible to claim that liberalization methods other than liberalization via a formal policy decree are the ones that significantly affect volatility