Analyzing Financial Integration in East Asia through Fractional Cointegration in Volatilities

Two integrated financial markets are generally subjected to common shocks revealing that commonalities in fundamentals drive the underlying return processes. In such a case, volatilities should share a long-run component although their transitory components might temporary diverge. Accordingly, we investigate financial integration in East Asian by analyzing the co-persistent nature of their integrated volatilities. Using recent fractional cointegration techniques, we find that volatilities of several markets converge in long-run to a common stochastic equilibrium. Our results reveal that a global integration process drives the most developed markets of the region, while no evidence of co-persistence appears between emerging markets.