Identifying regime shifts in Indian stock market: A Markov switching approach

Seeking for the existence of bull and bear regimes in the Indian stock market, a two state Markov switching autoregressive model (MS (2)-AR (2)) is used to identify bull and bear market regimes. The model predicts that Indian stock market will remain under bull regime with very high probability compared to bear regime. The results also identify the bear phases during all major global economic crises including recent US sub-prime (2008) and European debt crisis (2010). The paper concludes that the Indian stock market is more sensitive to external shocks implying that there is ample scope of policy interventions.