Global equity market volatility spillovers: A broader role for the United States

Rapach et al. (2013) recently showed that U.S. equity market returns contain valuable information for improving return forecasts in global equity markets. In this study, we extend the work of Rapach et al. (2013) and examine whether U.S.-based equity market information can be used to improve realized volatility forecasts in a large cross-section of international equity markets. We use volatility data for the U.S. and 17 foreign equity markets from the Oxford Man Institute’s realized library, and augment our benchmark HAR model with U.S. equity market volatility information for each foreign equity market. We show that U.S. equity market volatility information improves the out-of-sample forecasts of realized volatility substantially in all 17 foreign equity markets that we consider. Not only are these forecast gains highly significant, they also produce out-of-sample R2 values of between 4.56% and 14.48%, with 9 being greater than 10%. The improvements in out-of-sample forecasts remain statistically significant for horizons up to one month ahead. A substantial part of these predictive gains is driven by forward-looking volatility, as captured by the VIX.