Does oil impact gold during COVID-19 and three other recent crises?

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has inspired an examination of the oil-gold prices nexus during four recent crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, the gold market crash, the European sovereign debt crisis, and the global financial crisis. Using daily data from May 2007-August 2021, we employ the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag method to reveal five novel findings. First, this study contrasts with much of the literature, which infers that the relationship between oil and gold prices is strongly positive. Second, we find no oil and gold price relationship in the long term during all the crisis periods. Third, oil prices have substantially lost their power to predict gold prices in recent times and the oil-gold price linkage is not functional across all crisis periods. Fourth, in the short term, only negative Brent and negative West Texas Intermediate price changes cause positive gold price changes during the pandemic and gold market crash, respectively. Fifth, Brent prices have shown no link to gold prices before COVID-19. We argue that gold prices are less sensitive to oil prices than ever, and the uncertainty resulting from the COVID-19 crisis has attracted investors to gold. Our main findings hold under robustness analyses using fractional cointegration/integration models, lag length, and heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors.

Do volatility indices diminish gold's appeal as a safe haven to investors before and during the COVID-19 pandemic?

This study addresses the research question of whether volatility indices of different asset classes reduce gold's appeal as a safe-haven asset before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use daily data for seven volatility indices and gold prices and apply the suitable nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag method to analyze the data. Our results indicate that during COVID-19, only the negative Eurocurrency volatility has diminished gold prices in the long term, whereas in the short term, the positive gold, silver, emerging market, and (lagged) financial market volatilities have diminished gold prices. During the pre-COVID-19 normal period, volatilities in the financial, energy, gold, silver, and eurocurrency markets improved gold prices, whereas in the short term, only lagged negative oil volatility diminished gold prices. A robustness test for the 2011-2015 pre-COVID-19 period reveals that this period is to an extent comparable to that of COVID-19. This study reveals no direct effects from emerging markets volatility on gold prices. Notwithstanding, a long memory in gold prices persists and uneven spillover effects exist. Finally, those volatilities predominantly increase gold prices under the normal economic conditions but decrease gold's appeal as a safe haven during crises in the comparable periods. We delineate the implications for investors.

Do currency exchange rates impact gold prices? New evidence from the ongoing COVID-19 period.

We apply the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag method to examine the relationships between seven leading currency exchange rates and gold prices using daily data from January 2017 to April 2021. The results reveal that in the short term, while negative United States dollar (USD) to United Kingdom pound, negative USD to Canadian dollar, negative USD to Japanese yen, negative USD to Danish krone, and positive USD to euro exchange rates increase gold prices, a lagged positive USD to euro and lagged positive USD to Danish krone exchange rates decrease gold prices. A test of the pre-pandemic normal period reveals that the uneven and unpredictable impacts of six exchange rates on gold prices are particularly due to COVID-19. We find efficiency in the gold market, in line with the market efficiency hypothesis and random walk theory. Our findings indicate that gold acts as a safe-haven asset for investors during COVID-19.