Modeling the Interactions of Stock Price and Exchange Rate in Malaysia

After the East Asian crisis in 1997, the issue of whether stock prices and exchange rates are related or not have received much attention. This is due to realization that during the crisis the countries affected saw turmoil in both their currencies and stock markets. This paper studies the non-linear interactions between stock price and exchange rate in Malaysia using a two regimes multivariate Markov switching vector autoregression (MS-VAR) model with regime shifts in both the mean and the variance. In the study, the Kuala Lumpur Composite Index (KLCI) and the exchange rates of Malaysia ringgit against four other countries namely the Singapore dollar, the Japanese yen, the British pound sterling and the Australian dollar between 1990 and 2005 are used. The empirical results show that all the series are not cointegrated but the MS-VAR model with two regimes manage to detect common regime shifts behavior in all the series. The estimated MS-VAR model reveals that as the stock price index falls the exchange rates depreciate and when the stock price index gains the exchange rates appreciate. In addition, the MS-VAR model fitted the data better than the linear vector autoregressive model (VAR)