Estimating stock market volatility using asymmetric GARCH models

A comprehensive empirical analysis of the mean return and conditional variance of Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) indices is performed using various GARCH models. The prediction performance of these conditional changing variance models is compared to newer asymmetric GJR and APARCH models. We also quantify the day-of-the-week effect and the leverage effect and test for asymmetric volatility. Our results show that the asymmetric GARCH model with fat-tailed densities improves overall estimation for measuring conditional variance. The EGARCH model using a skewed Student-t distribution is the most successful for forecasting TASE indices.