Return and Volatility Spillovers from Developed to Emerging Capital Markets: The Case of South Asia

This study examines return and volatility spillovers from the US and Japanese stock markets to three South Asian capital markets – (i) the Bombay Stock Exchange, (ii) the Karachi Stock Exchange and (iii) the Colombo Stock Exchange. We construct a univariate EGARCH spillover model that allows the unexpected return of any particular South Asian market to be driven by a local shock, a regional shock from Japan and a global shock from the USA. The study discovers return spillovers in all three markets, and volatility spillovers from the US to the Indian and Sri Lankan markets, and from the Japanese to the Pakistani market. Regional factors seem to exert an influence on these three markets before the Asian financial crisis but the global factor becomes more important in the post-crisis period.