Volatilities in Emerging MENA Stock Markets

This article examines the interrelationships among the emerging stock markets of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, as well as the relationship between each MENA stock market and the larger and more developed markets of Europe and the United States. It explores whether MENA stock markets can offer international investors unique risk/return characteristics to diversify international and regional portfolios. This study adds to the existing literature by focusing-for the first time-on the dynamic relationships in the volatilities of the returns in MENA stock markets. The econometric part of the article uses the causality-in-variances GARCH model, the TARCH and ARCH-M models, and VAR analysis to model conditional volatilities in stock market returns and the dynamic responses of volatilities to innovations in conditional variances. (C) 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.