Spillover effects of the 2008 global financial crisis on the volatility of the Indian equity markets: Coupling or uncoupling? A study on sector-based data

•The financial crisis and the Indian equity markets•Stochastic volatility model with exogenous inputs•The financial stress: a source of volatile Indian markets•Lower liquidity and wake-up call effect

This paper focuses on the following question: has the global financial stress in the US markets during the subprime crisis induced a persistent volatility of Indian equity stocks? We answer this question using sector-based data and we propose a simple stochastic volatility model augmented with exogenous inputs (financial stress indicators in the US market). We derive analytically the autocorrelation of the squared returns using cross-moments and estimate the impact of several variables such as the CDS spreads, the ABCP spreads, market liquidity, the volatility of the S&P 500 using a Kalman filter approach with the impact captured through Almon polynomials. We find a strong evidence of persistent volatility irrespective of the sector and interpret this finding as the result of two factors: the lower liquidity of the Indian equity markets during the subprime crisis and a wake-up call effect.