Shocks and Volatility Spillover Between Stock Markets of Developed Countries and GCC Stock Markets

The purpose of this paper is to examine the spillover of returns, information and volatility of returns, and conditional variance-covariance between the stock markets of developed countries namely the United States of America, the United Kingdom and China (US, UK and CH) and the stock markets of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Bahrain) using daily returns spanned from 2 March 2003 to 9 December 2010. We consider shocks and volatility spillover model by applying a multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (MGARCH) model using; MGARCH-BEKK to identify the source and magnitude of volatility and shock spillover. We get the correlation between GCC markets is positive, indicating that there is a common factor which is driving the markets towards the same direction. Evidence shows that the own-shocks and volatility in GCC markets are highly significant. Cross-information spillover effects, as another observable trend, are found between Qatar and Oman. Furthermore, the results show that UA is significantly affected by spillover (return, shocks and volatility) from developed markets, while there have been no significant effects seen from Kuwait markets. This study takes a new empirical look in the sense that the models incorporating all the countries under investigation are estimated jointly utilizing multivariate GARCH-BEKK formulation. In addition, this paper should be interesting for academicians as well as practitioners. Including those interested in modelling multivariate volatility for financial market risk management.