Evidence of oil market price clustering during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We use hourly data on opening price, closing price, opening ask price, opening bid price, closing ask price and closing bid price to show that while oil prices are characterized by price clustering behavior, prices tend to cluster on numbers closer to zero than to one. Comparing the pre-COVID-19 sample with the COVID-19 sample, we find that evidence of price clustering is 8% more in the COVID-19 sample. We test the determinants of price clustering and find that as much as 30% of the price clustering behavior can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, using a simple technical trading strategy, we do not find any evidence that the oil market is profitable in the COVID-19 period.

Did green debt instruments aid diversification during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Faced with a persistent pandemic, investors are concerned about portfolio diversification. While the literature on COVID-19 has evolved impressively, limited work remains on diversification opportunities. We contribute to the literature by exploring the volatility and co-movement of different sovereign debt instruments, including green sukuk, sukuk, bond and Islamic and conventional equity indices for Indonesia. Our results consistently point towards increased asset co-movement and weak profitability during the pandemic. Interestingly, sukuk and green sukuk have a 14% correlation with stocks, suggesting potential diversification prospects in times of extreme shocks.

How stock markets reacted to COVID-19? Evidence from 25 countries.

The objective of this paper is to analyse how COVID-19 related government policies influenced stock markets. Of the 25 countries we consider, stock returns did not react to any of the three policies - the stimulus package, lockdown, and travel ban in 20% of countries. For around 48% of countries, the effect on returns was negative, due largely to the stimulus package and lockdown policies. Of the 13 countries that experienced a change in the cash rate, returns were negative for 46% of the markets. The travel ban had the least effect on stock returns.

Understanding exchange rate shocks during COVID-19.

Using a dynamic VAR model fitted to hourly data, we evaluate the evolution of spillover shocks from exchange rates returns of EURO, Yen, CAD and GBP. We find that over the COVID-19 sample: (a) total exchange rate shock spillovers explain around 37.7% of the forecast error variance in the exchange rate market compared to only 26.1% in the pre-COVID-19 period; and (b) exchange rate own shocks explain between 56% to 75% of own exchange rate movements. These results hold in multiple robustness tests. The implication is that exchange rates predict most of their own changes. We confirm this through an economic significance test where we show that the shock spillovers predict exchange rate returns and these predicted exchange rates can be useful in extracting buy and sell trading signals.

The role of R&D and economic policy uncertainty in Sri Lanka's economic growth.

In this paper, we assess the role of investment in research and development (R&D) and economic policy uncertainty (EPU) in Sri Lanka's economic growth experience. We do this by first determining which endogenous growth theories best explain the evolution of total factor productivity (TFP) in the country. Using historical time series data (1980-2018), we find that semi-endogenous growth theories best explain the evolution of TFP in Sri Lanka. This evidence suggests that R&D is critical to the country's TFP expansion. We find that, through R&D, EPU has a crucial detrimental impact on TFP growth, although it is short-lived. Our findings are robust and have important implications for R&D investment and for moderating EPU.

Commentary on a method for testing resistance to shocks.

This note tours the Narayan (2020a: Has COVID-19 Changed Exchange Rate Resistance to Shocks?) approach to testing for resistance of a time-series variable to shocks. We take a step-by-step account of this approach and demonstrate its applicability with respect to the crude oil price.•The approach entails steps (1) to (8), as outline in the paper.•Future researchers will find this method useful in evaluating the resistance of variables to not only COVID-19 shocks but to any shock which has had a sufficiently long life.

Has COVID-19 changed the stock return-oil price predictability pattern?

In this paper, we examine if COVID-19 has impacted the relationship between oil prices and stock returns predictions using daily Japanese stock market data from 01/04/2020 to 03/17/2021. We make a novel contribution to the literature by testing whether the COVID-19 pandemic has changed this predictability relationship. Employing an empirical model that controls for seasonal effects, return-related control variables, heteroskedasticity, persistency, and endogeneity, we demonstrate that the influence of oil prices on stock returns declined by around 89.5% due to COVID-19. This implies that when COVID-19 reduced economic activity and destabilized financial markets, the influence of oil prices on stock returns declined. This finding could have implications for trading strategies that rely on oil prices.

COVID-19 lockdowns, stimulus packages, travel bans, and stock returns.

This paper examines the effect of government responses of G7 countries to the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) on stock market returns. Using time-series data, we show that lockdowns, travel bans, and economic stimulus packages all had a positive effect on the G7 stock markets. However, lockdowns were most effective in cushioning the effects of COVID-19. Our results are robust to different measures of returns and controls for other factors of returns.

Japanese currency and stock market-What happened during the COVID-19 pandemic?

This paper examines the relationship between the Japanese Yen and the country's stock returns. Using several variants of econometric models and empirical specifications, we unravel that the depreciation of the Yen vis-à-vis the US dollar led to gains in Japanese stock returns. A one standard deviation depreciation of the Yen during the COVID-19 period (equivalent to 0.588%) improved stock market returns by 71% of average returns We see that this relationship was stronger over the COVID-19 period (January 2020 to August 2020) compared to the pre-crisis period.

Understanding corporate debt from the oil market perspective.

We design and test the hypothesis that for energy firms' oil market activities impact capital structure. Using a unique sample of 726 energy firms from 56 countries, we find that oil market activities do influence capital structure. The speed of adjustment (SOA) to leverage when not exposed to oil market activities is between 27.5 and 66.4%. When exposed to oil price growth (market liquidity) the corresponding SOA is between 51.1 and 72.4% (40.9-76.1%). We conclude that oil price growth slows down while market liquidity improves SOA to leverage for energy firms. By comparison, using a sample of over 32,000 non-energy firms from 108 countries, we find no evidence that oil market activities dictate capital structure.

Modelling health and output at business cycle horizons for the USA.

In this paper we employ a theoretical framework - a simple macro model augmented with health - that draws guidance from the Keynesian view of business cycles to examine the relative importance of permanent and transitory shocks in explaining variations in health expenditure and output at business cycle horizons for the USA. The variance decomposition analysis of shocks reveals that at business cycle horizons permanent shocks explain the bulk of the variations in output, while transitory shocks explain the bulk of the variations in health expenditures. We undertake a shock decomposition analysis for private health expenditures versus public health expenditures and interestingly find that while transitory shocks are more important for private sector expenditures, permanent shocks dominate public health expenditures.

The role of permanent and transitory shocks in explaining international health expenditures.

While there is a growing literature that examines the issue of cointegration (co-movement over the long run) among health expenditures, there are no studies that examine the issue of common cycles (co-movement over the short run) among health expenditures. We undertake a multivariate variance decomposition analysis of per capita health expenditures of the USA, the UK, Japan, Canada, and Switzerland based on a common-trend-common-cycle restriction framework, to examine the relative importance of permanent and transitory innovations in explaining variations in per capita health expenditures in each of the five countries. Our main finding is that transitory shocks are more important in explaining per capita health expenditures in the UK, Japan, and Switzerland, while permanent shocks dominate variations in per capita health expenditures in the USA and Canada over short horizons.

Do health expenditures 'catch-up'? Evidence from OECD countries.

In this paper, we examine the 'catch-up' hypothesis, that is, whether or not per capita health expenditures of the UK, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, and Spain converge to the per capita health expenditures of the USA over the period 1960-2000. We propose a framework to examine convergence of health expenditures and use recent developments in unit root testing, namely the Lagrange multiplier univariate and panel approaches that allow for at most two structural breaks. Our main finding is that while univariate and panel tests that do not incorporate structural breaks fail to find evidence of convergence, univariate and panel LM tests that allow for structural breaks find strong evidence of convergence of per capita health expenditures of the UK, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, and Spain to that of the USA.

Examining structural breaks and growth rates in international health expenditures.

Over the last decade, there has been a growing interest in examining health expenditures. In this paper, we study the behaviour of health expenditures in the G3 countries (USA, the UK, and Japan) and three European countries (the UK, Switzerland and Spain) over the period 1960-2000 from a different perspective, in that we examine: (1) whether there is a common structural break in health expenditures across the G3 and European countries; (2) whether structural breaks have slowed down health expenditure growth rates in these countries or vice versa. Our main findings are that: (1) health expenditures share a common break in both bivariate and trivariate cases, and structural breaks and break intervals suggest that either one or a combination of events (second oil price shock, the 1987 stock market crash and/or recessions) have contributed to the commonality of break in health expenditures in the G3, while the oil price shocks have been instrumental in the commonality of breaks for the European countries; (2) except for the UK, structural breaks have slowed down growth rates in health expenditures for the USA, Japan, Switzerland and Spain.