Social support and perceived uncertainties during COVID-19: Consequences for employees' wellbeing.

The COVID-19 crisis has drastically affected organizations worldwide, thereby influencing the employees' psychological wellbeing. Since it is a new pandemic, research is sparse in the domain of employees' psychological wellbeing in relation to the phenomenon. Drawing on social support and job demand-resource perspectives, this research adds to the factors affecting employees' wellbeing due to the coronavirus outbreak. Specifically, this study is an investigation of co-workers' instrumental support in predicting employees' emotional exhaustion via employees' perceived uncertainties experienced due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, we tested for the contextual specificity of family support on uncertainties and its link with employees' emotional exhaustion. With data drawn from two universities (n = 275), the findings reveal a negative association between co-worker task support and an employee's emotional exhaustion, and an employee's perceived uncertainties mediate this relationship. Moreover, the moderating analysis exhibits that family support mitigates the negative effect of uncertainty perception on emotional exhaustion. Our study reveals that coworker and family support are extremely important during the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings are equally valuable for organizations and society to mitigate the detrimental effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on employees' wellbeing.

Fresh evidence on connectedness between prominent markets during COVID-19 pandemic.

Various empirical studies have examined the nexus between financial markets, but this study focused on the comovement among prominent markets. Our study examines the interrelationship among main financial markets, i.e., stock, oil, and commodity during the recent pandemic. The interconnections among the selected markets are investigated using a battery of wavelet coherence tools and the Granger causality test. From the wavelet coherence analysis, our findings indicate strong co-movements among the VIX, oil volatility, and commodity prices during pandemic and localized in all scales and over the sample period. The dependency strength among the considered economies is noted to increase in pandemic, which implies increased short- and long-term benefits for the investors. Moreover, Our result exhibits a feedback causality between OVIX and crude oil, VIX and S&P 500, and gasoline and VIX. Interestingly, a unidirectional causality exists between VIX and crude oil, S&P 500 and crude oil, Brent and crude oil, gasoline, crude oil, and VIX and OVIX. We advocate that the findings will be helpful for portfolio managers, investors, and officials around the world.

Static and dynamic linkages between oil, gold and global equity markets in various crisis episodes: Evidence from the Wavelet TVP-VAR

Using the wavelet TVP-VAR approach, this study looks at the static and dynamic connectedness between oil, gold, and global equity markets during several crises episodes, i.e., US subprime crisis of 2007, the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, European debt crisis of 2009–2012, oil crisis of 2014, China stock market crash 2015–16, and the Covid-19. The findings reveal that the connectedness among these markets varies across short vs. long run horizons and across various financial crisis episodes. The connectedness is observed to be high during the crisis's periods. We also perform the portfolio analysis for the pairs of oil, gold, and equity markets and find that gold and/or oil are useful for various equity markets for portfolio diversification and hedging in various market conditions and time horizons. We contend that the results will be valuable to investors, portfolio managers, and policy makers globally.