The Impact of Exchange Rate and Interest Rate Volatility on Stock Market Returns

Abstract

This paper sought to examine the impacts of the exchange rate and interest rate volatility on stock market returns within the economies of three major African countries namely, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa using Exponential General Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (EGARCH) and Threshold GARCH (TGARCH) also known as GJR-GARCH estimation methods. We find a positive shock to interest rate and exchange rate lead to persistence rise in the price levels over the 60-month horizon. We find the majority of coefficients are positive compared to negative coefficients. Our results indicate that response asymmetries of positive and negative impact interest rate and exchange rate changes on all stock market returns. Overall, country-analysis suggests that coefficients of interest rate and exchange rate for Ghana are typically negative. Both GJR-GARCH and EGARCH methods show that good news has an impact on volatility more than bad news under different assumptions.