Effect of Distributional Assumption on GARCH Model into Shenzhen Stock Market： a Forecasting Evaluation

This paper examines the forecasting performance of different kinds of GARCH model （GRACH, EGARCH, TARCH and APARCH） under the Normal, Student-t and Generalized error distributional assumption. We compare the effect of different distributional assumption on the GARCH models. The data we analyze are the daily stocks indexes for Shenzhen Stock Exchange （SSE） in China from April 3^rd, 1991 to April 14^th, 2005. We find that improvements of the overall estimation are achieved when asymmetric GARCH models are used with student-t distribution and generalized error distribution. Moreover, it is found that TARCH and GARCH models give better forecasting performance than EGARCH and APARCH models. In forecasting performance, the model under normal distribution gives more accurate forecasting performance than non-normal densities and generalized error distributions clearly outperform the student-t densities in case of SSE.