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Currency Crises and Structural Breaks in Autocorrelation on the Brics' Stock Markets
The phenomenon of positive autocorrelation in daily stock index returns is often viewed as a consequence of stable behavioral patterns of certain investor groups (e.g., [Sentana, Wadhwani, 1992; Koutmos, 1997]). However, such patterns may change due to extreme events, i.e. currency and financial crises, and affect the autocorrelation of returns. Emerging markets have experienced severe crises in a recent decade and are therefore a suitable object to study.
Thus the focus of the current paper is to identify substantial changes in autocorrelation of BRICs’ stock markets index returns after experiencing these failures of financial system (the Asian crisis of 1997–1998, the crises in Russia, Brazil in 1998–1999 and the revaluation of the Chinese yen in 2005). Since all countries considered belong to the group of emerging markets and crises might have contagious effects we expect to reveal the influence of events in one country from the group on the markets in other countries. Studying stock market crises in BRICs and Thailand as possible causes of structural changes on stock markets is contribution of this paper to the existing literature. For this purpose we test for structural breaks in an ARMA-GARCH-model on the commonly known crisis dates.