ABSTRACT
Covid-19 has led to major changes worldwide and has had a significant impact on market risk. We characterize this uncertainty as innovations extracted from the Covid Risk Index on the Wall Street Journal through a textual analysis of high-dimensional data. We hedge the risk with mimicking portfolios constructed using the ESG (environmental, social, and governance) disclosure score as a measure of firm-level exposure to Covid-19 risk. The hedge portfolios perform well both in and out of sample. We also test the role of ESG in hedging and discover that during the Covid-19 pandemic firms with greater ESG disclosure generate higher returns as well as experience lower downside risk. The further analysis suggests that the portfolio returns can be explained by Covid risk shock and investment inflow, and the hedge effect mainly comes from the social part of ESG.
ABSTRACT
US dairy futures markets of Class III milk, butter, cheese, and dry whey exhibit unique volatility patterns under the Federal Milk Marketing Order pricing system. We find that dairy volatilities have a relatively low connectedness among themselves and the overall commodity market. We develop a price information uncertainty measure to investigate dairy markets' response to government-released information. Dairy futures markets respond to government-released information with increased trading activity. The price information uncertainty measure has a strong positive impact on price volatility across all dairy commodities. We provide evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic increases volatility in dairy commodities. The pandemic also significantly reduces the impact of information uncertainty on volatility.