The main aim of this paper is to investigate volatility spillover effects, the impact of past volatility on present market movements, the reaction to positive and negative news, among selected financial markets. The sample stock markets are geographically dispersed on different continents, respectively North America, Europe and Asia. We also investigate whether selected emerging stock markets capture the volatility patterns of developed stock markets located in the same region. The empirical analysis is focused on seven developed stock market indices, i.e. IBEX35 (Spain), DJIA (USA), FTSE100 (UK), TSX Composite (Canada), NIKKEI225 (Japan), DAX (Germany), CAC40 (France) and five emerging stock market indices, i.e. BET (Romania), WIG20 (Poland), BSE (India), SSE Composite (China) and BUX (Hungary) from January 2000 to June 2018. The econometric framework includes symmetric and asymmetric GARCH models i.e. EGARCH and GJR which are performed in order to capture asymmetric volatility clustering, interdependence, correlations, financial integration and leptokurtosis. Symmetric and asymmetric GARCH models revealed that all selected financial markets are highly volatile, including the presence of leverage effect. The stock markets in Hungary, USA, Germany, India and Canada exhibit high positive volatility after global financial crisis.