Forecasting stock market realized volatility: the role of global terrorist attacks

In this study, we provide the predictive linkage between global terrorist attacks and stock market volatility. We propose the predictive model by extending the prevailing heterogeneous autoregressive model for realized volatility (HAR-RV) with global terrorism and denote it as HAR-RV-GT. According to the Diebold – Mariano test and the model confidence set, we consistently find the superior forecasting performance delivered by the HAR-RV-GT model. For comprehensive empirical results, we extend the key finding to various settings including the consideration of popular jump and leverage effects, the use of more types of forecasting models, and the inclusion of long-horizon global terrorist attacks as well as the domestic terrorist attacks in the US. Additionally, the substantial economic gains based on a mean-variance investor confirm the valuable forecasting role of terrorist attacks. Our results are robust to a wide range of checks.