Effects of the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic on implied stock market volatility: International evidence using a google trend measure.

This paper investigates the relationship between investors' attention, as measured by Google search queries, and equity implied volatility during the COVID-19 outbreak. Recent studies show that search investors' behavior data is an extremely abundant repository of predictive data, and investor-limited attention increases when the uncertainty level is high. Our study using data from thirteen countries across the globe during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (January-April 2020) examines whether the search "topic and terms" for the pandemic affect market participants' expectations about future realized volatility. With the panic and uncertainty about COVID-19, our empirical findings show that increased internet searches during the pandemic caused the information to flow into the financial markets at a faster rate and thus resulting in higher implied volatility directly and via the stock return-risk relation. More specifically for the latter, the leverage effect in the VIX becomes stronger as Google search queries intensify. Both the direct and indirect effects on implied volatility, highlight a risk-aversion channel that operates during the pandemic. We also find that these effects are stronger in Europe than in the rest of the world. Moreover, in a panel vector autoregression framework, we show that a positive shock on stock returns may soothe COVID-related Google searches in Europe. Our findings suggest that Google-based attention to COVID-19 leads to elevated risk aversion in stock markets.

Flight-to-quality between global stock and bond markets in the COVID era.

We investigate the impact of the recent COVID-19 pandemic on the time-varying correlation between stock and bond returns. Using daily data on bond and stock returns for ten countries, covering Europe, Asia, US and Australia regions, we identify flight-to-quality episodes during the COVID-19 global pandemic crisis employing both a panel data specification and a wavelet analysis. Our empirical results demonstrate that flights occur simultaneously across countries and are not country-specific events. This finding suggests that the two largest asset classes offered diversification to investors during the recent crisis, when they actually needed it the most.

The static and dynamic connectedness of environmental, social, and governance investments: International evidence.

We investigate the connectedness of the most significant global equity indices that comprise companies with the highest environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. Motivated by the rapid growth of socially responsible investing during the last two decades, we examine whether these investments are prone to similar exogenous economic and financial shocks as their conventional counterparts. Employing a variety of influential macroeconomic and financial variables over the period 10/1/2007-4/15/2020, we document statistically significant and consistent transmissions between the employed equity indices throughout the sample period. In particular, the connectedness exhibits dynamic patterns during three periods: the European sovereign debt crisis, the systemic Greek problems, and the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. We also find that developed equity markets are the shock transmitters to Asian and other emerging markets. Our results highlight the risk of contagion and the diminishing portfolio diversification benefits of these equity indices during turbulent periods.