Pandemics and Cryptocoins

This study examines the effect of pandemic-induced uncertainty on cryptocoins (Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple). It employs Westerlund and Narayan (2012, 2015) predictive model to examine the predictability of pandemic-induced uncertainty and our model's forecast performance. We examine the role of asymmetry in uncertainty and the sensitivity of our results to Salisu and Akanni (2020) recently developed Global Fear Index. Cryptocoins acts as hedge against uncertainty due to pandemics, albeit with reduced hedging effectiveness in the COVID-19 period. Accounting for asymmetry improves predictability and model forecast performance. Our results may be sensitive to the choice of measure of pandemic-induced uncertainty.

An information‐based index of uncertainty and the predictability of energy prices

We develop an index of uncertainty, the COVID‐19 induced uncertainty (CIU) index, and employ it to empirically examine the vulnerability of energy prices amidst the COVID‐19 pandemic using a distributed lag model that jointly accounts for conditional heteroscedasticity, autocorrelation, persistence, and structural breaks, as well as day‐of‐the‐week effect. The nexus between energy returns and uncertainty index is analyzed, using daily price returns of eight energy sources (Brent oil, diesel, gasoline, heating oil, kerosene, natural gas, propane, and WTI oil) and four news/information‐based uncertainty proxies [CIU, EPU, Global Fear Index (GFI) and VIX]. The CIU and alternative indexes are used, respectively for the main estimation and sensitivity analysis. We show the outperformance of CIU over alternative news uncertainty proxies in the prediction of energy prices. News (aggregate) and bad news are found to negatively and significantly impact energy returns, while good news has a significantly positive impact. Imperatively, energy variables lack hedging potentials against the uncertainty occasioned by the COVID‐19 pandemic, while we find no strong evidence of asymmetry. Our results are robust to the choice of news variables, forecast horizons employed, with likely sensitivity to energy prices.

The return volatility of crypto currencies during the COVID-19 pandemic: Assessing the news effect

In this paper, we test the role of news in the predictability of return volatility of digital currency market during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use hourly data for crypto currencies and daily data for the news indicator, thus, the GARCH MIDAS framework which allows for mixed data frequencies is adopted. We validate the presupposition that fear-induced news triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic increases the return volatilities of the crypto currencies compared with the period before the pandemic. We also establish that the predictive model that incorporates the news effects forecasts the return volatility better than the benchmark model, historical average.

A New Index for Measuring Uncertainty Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study contributes to the emerging literature offering alternative measures of uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We combine both news-and macro-based trends to construct an index. The former involves the use of Google trends with plausible variants of words used to capture the pandemic, which are combined using principal components analysis to develop a news-based index. For the macro-based index, we identify global factors such as oil price, stock price, Dollar index, commodity index and gold price, and thereafter we obtain the macro-based uncertainty using variants of stochastic volatility models estimated with Bayesian techniques and using a dynamic factor model. Consequently, the new (composite) index is constructed by combining the news- and macro-based indexes using principal components analysis. Our empirical applications of the index to the stock return predictability of the countries hit worst by the pandemic confirm the superiority of the composite index over the existing news-based index in both the in-sample and out-of-sample forecast horizons. Our results are also robust to forecast horizons and competing model choices.