Investigating the nexus between green economy, sustainability, bitcoin and oil prices: Contextual evidence from the United States

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 crisis and global economic recession have shrunk the world's energy use, collapsed stock markets and crashed energy prices. Green economy projects are hence losing their focus and competitiveness, endangering the achievement of sustainable development goals and neutrality targets. The study aims to examine the dynamic linkages between the green economy, sustainability, Bitcoin, oil prices and stock markets. We do this by utilizing the daily data from August 2016 to August 2021 for the case of the United States. The recently developed quantile-on-quantile regression (QQR) and quantile Granger causality methods are employed for empirical analysis. Our empirical results indicate that a green economy or green financing from institutions is very sensitive to economic shocks, oil price changes and overall sustainability changes. Similarly, empirical results further reveal that there is a negative association between sustainability with oil prices and sustainability with stock markets;that oil prices and stock markets are also sensitive to sustainability-related shifts. Our study advises investors who want to support sustainable development to include green assets in their portfolios, such as green bonds, which are a good substitute for clean energy or renewable energy stocks. This study reports some fruitful implications apropos of sustainable development goals and a green economy.