A GARCH Modelling of Volatility and M-GARCH Approach of Stock Market Linkages of North America

The present study attempts to capture the return volatility and the extent of dynamic conditional correlation between the stock markets of North America region. The data contain weekly stock market returns spanning from the second week of 1995 to the fourth week of June 2016. Using univariate ARCH and GARCH approaches, the study finds evidence of return volatility and its persistence within the region. Mexican stock market neither reacts intensely to immediate market fluctuations nor the part of the realized past volatility spill over to the current period, whereas the stock markets of Canada and USA experience high persistence of return volatility and Bermuda stock market returns are highly sensitive to the immediate market fluctuations. Using MGARCH-DCC, this article finds that emerging markets are less linked to the developed market in terms of return and that there also exists a weak co-movement between the stock markets. There is no evidence of market integration throughout the sample period. Correlations tend to spread out equally throughout the sample period, but the co-variances were found to be more volatile during 2008–2010. This article reveals that changes in co-movement are not due to a change in the correlations between markets but is simply due to volatility.