We adopt a granular approach to estimating the risk of equity returns in sub-Saharan African frontier equity markets under the assumption that, returns are influenced by developments in the underlying economy. Four countries were studied – Botswana, Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria. We found heterogeneity in the evolution of volatility across these markets and also that two-regime switching volatility models describe better the heteroscedastic returns generating processes in these markets using the deviance information criteria. We backtest the results to assess whether the models are a good fit for the data. We concluded that, the selected models are the most suitable for predicting the volatility of future returns in the markets studied.
Selection Criteria in Regime Switching Conditional Volatility Models
