The relationship between financial liberalization and stock market volatility: the mediating role of financial crises

This paper aims at comparing the effects of financial liberalization on emerging stock markets’ volatility at normal times to the ones in periods of financial crises. To this purpose, a treatment effects model for 13 emerging economies is estimated over January 1986 to December 2008. Three types of financial crises are considered, i.e. banking, currency and twin crises. It has been found that financial liberalization does not lead to excessive volatility in emerging markets and that volatility decreases gradually along with financial liberalization effect on the probability of crises. Moreover, volatility reduction has been found to depend necessarily on several internal characteristics.