Regime Shifts and Volatility in BRIICKS Stock Markets: An Asset Allocation Perspective

Abstract

This paper examines the regime shifts and stock market volatility in the stock market returns of seven emerging economies popularly called as ‘BRIICKS’ which stands for Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China, South Korea and South Africa, over the period from February, 1996 to January, 2012 by applying Markov regime switching in mean-variance model. The employed model finds two regimes in each of these markets. The identified regimes are further utilized in formulating the asset allocation strategies based on market synchronization and Sharpe ratio. The results suggest that BRIICKS is not a homogeneous asset class and each market should be independently evaluated in terms of its regime switching behavior, volatility persistence and level of synchronization with other emerging markets. The study finally concludes that Russia, India and China as the best assets to invest within this emerging market basket which can be pooled with a mature market portfolio to achieve further benefits of risk diversification.