Comovement across BRICS and the US Stock Markets: A Multitime Scale Wavelet Analysis

During the past two decades, financial markets across the globe have experienced sporadic waves of crashes. Such waves raise concerns about the vulnerability of global financial markets and the transmission mechanisms of shocks beyond borders. The current study examines the comovement of stock markets in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries and the United States of America (US). It unfolds their exposure to contagion effects during the major financial crises, which have flared up since 2000. Daily close price indices of selected stock markets were used in this endeavour. These data spanned from 5 January 2000 to 10 March 2021. A wavelet decomposition on stock return series was performed on these data to determine the multihorizon nature of comovement (pure contagion or interdependence) and the dynamics of market integration. It emerges that before the 2006-US-housing-bubble and after the 2011/13-EU-sovereign-debt crises, some shocks caused pure contagion. Such transmission generated short-term shocks. Most of the earlier shocks, particularly the US subprime and the EU Sovereign Debt crises, were spread via interdependence. Trade linkages and economic integration improvements enhanced such interdependence. In addition, when analysing the episodes of market integration, it arises that, in general, the short- and long-term integration strengthened and deepened comovement among equity markets. From the portfolio diversification and risk management perspectives, these results indicate that the market in China provided lucrative grounds for short-run investors from the other countries covered in the current study. These results can be helpful for investors interested in portfolio diversification in the BRICS region. They might also help policymakers in the region mitigate the exposure to external shocks of markets.