Volatility of Stock Prices in Tanzania: Application of Garch Models to Dar Es Salaam Stock Exchange

We use Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) models to examine volatility of stock prices for firms listed in the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange (DSE). In doing so, both symmetric and asymmetric GARCH models are used in this study. The descriptive analysis of the data shows that standard deviation of the series returns is high, indicating a high level of daily fluctuations, and the log value of the mean is close to zero. Our empirical results clearly exhibit evidence of volatility and volatility clustering, a typical feature of financial time series. Moreover, our results indicate that the series are highly leptokurtic, flat tailed and asymmetric consistent with characteristics of financial time series data. Out of all models examined, EGARCH (1,1) and GARCH (1,1) seem to perform plausibly better than others.