Regime switching vine copula models for global equity and volatility indices

Abstract: For nearly every major stock market there exist equity and implied volatility indices. These play important roles within finance: be it as a benchmark, a measure of general uncertainty or a way of investing or hedging. It is well known in the academic literature, that correlations and higher moments between different indices tend to vary in time. However, to the best of our knowledge, no one has yet considered a global setup including both, equity and implied volatility indices of various continents, and allowing for a changing dependence structure. We aim to close this gap by applying Markov-switching $R$-vine models to investigate the existence of different, global dependence regimes. In particular, we identify times of "normal" and "abnormal" states within a data set consisting of North-American, European and Asian indices. Our results confirm the existence of joint points in time at which global regime switching takes place.