Macro-financial linkages in the high-frequency domain: Economic fundamentals and the Covid-induced uncertainty channel in US and UK financial markets

This article contributes to our understanding of the macro-financial linkages in the high-frequency domain during the recent health crisis. Building on the extant literature that mainly uses monthly or quarterly macro proxies, we examine the daily economic impact on intra-daily financial volatility by applying the macro-augmented HEAVY model with asymmetries and power transformations. Our study associates US and UK financial with macroeconomic uncertainties in addition to further macro drivers that exacerbate equity market volatility. Daily local economic policy uncertainty is one of the main drivers of financial volatility, alongside global credit and commodity factors. Higher macro uncertainty is found to increase the leverage and macro effects from credit and commodity markets on US and UK stock market realized volatility. Most interestingly, the Covid-19 outbreak is found to exert a considerable impact on financial volatilities through the uncertainty channel, given the prevalent worry about controversial policy interventions to support societies and markets, particularly in the case of the severely censured US and UK governments' reluctant and limited response in the very beginning of the pandemic.

Emerging stock market volatility and economic fundamentals: the importance of US uncertainty spillovers, financial and health crises.

This paper studies the US and global economic fundamentals that exacerbate emerging stock markets volatility and can be considered as systemic risk factors increasing financial stability vulnerabilities. We apply the bivariate HEAVY system of daily and intra-daily volatility equations enriched with powers, leverage, and macro-effects that improve its forecasting accuracy significantly. Our macro-augmented asymmetric power HEAVY model estimates the inflammatory effect of US uncertainty and infectious disease news impact on equities alongside global credit and commodity factors on emerging stock index realized volatility. Our study further demonstrates the power of the economic uncertainty channel, showing that higher US policy uncertainty levels increase the leverage effects and the impact from the common macro-financial proxies on emerging markets' financial volatility. Lastly, we provide evidence on the crucial role of both financial and health crisis events (the 2008 global financial turmoil and the recent Covid-19 pandemic) in raising markets' turbulence and amplifying the volatility macro-drivers impact, as well. Supplementary Information: The online version supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10479-021-04042-y.