Volatility Model Choice for Sub-Saharan Frontier Equity Markets - A Markov Regime Switching Bayesian Approach

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.