The Relationship between Stock Returns and Volatility in International Stock Markets

This study examines the relationship between expected stock returns and volatility in the twelve largest international stock markets during January 1980 - December 2001. Consistent with most previous studies, we find a positive but insignificant relationship during the sample period for the majority of the markets based on parametric EGARCH-M models. However, using a flexible semiparametric specification of conditional variance, we find evidence of a significant negative relationship between expected returns and volatility in six out of the twelve markets under study. The results lend support to the recent claim (Bekaert and Wu, 2000; Whitelaw, 2000) that stock market returns are negatively correlated with stock market volatility