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Is this time really different? Flight-to-safety and the COVID-19 crisis
During periods of market stress, risk-averse investors reallocate their investments from stocks to gold in a bid to hedge risks. Market participants interpret the induced gold price increase as an indication of safe-haven purchases and a signal of increased uncertainty in the general economic and fi...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8153428/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34038444 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251752 |
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author | Löwen, Celina Kchouri, Bilal Lehnert, Thorsten |
author_facet | Löwen, Celina Kchouri, Bilal Lehnert, Thorsten |
author_sort | Löwen, Celina |
collection | PubMed |
description | During periods of market stress, risk-averse investors reallocate their investments from stocks to gold in a bid to hedge risks. Market participants interpret the induced gold price increase as an indication of safe-haven purchases and a signal of increased uncertainty in the general economic and financial conditions, thereby causing higher gold price volatility. The aim of this paper is to analyze whether this flight to safety effect can be observed during the COVID-19 crisis, which is considered to be a one-of-a-kind crisis and obviously of different origin compared to previous (financial) crises. By examining the interactions between the (option-implied) volatilities of the stock market (VIX) and of the gold (GVZ) and oil (OVX) markets, the main findings indicate that there is a granger causality in general between the equity market and the gold as well as the oil market. During the COVID-19 crisis, a stronger influence of the equity market on the oil market can be observed. Based on symmetric causality tests that are typically employed in the literature, this cannot be observed for the gold market. However, once we control for asymmetric causal interactions, we find that positive shocks in VIX cause positive shocks in GVZ. Hence, the typical flight to safety effect, similar to the one observed during other (financial) crises can also be identified for the COVID-19 crisis. The causality between the equity and oil market is triggered by political factors as well as the economic impact of the crisis which induces a sharp drop in demand for oil. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8153428 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-81534282021-06-07 Is this time really different? Flight-to-safety and the COVID-19 crisis Löwen, Celina Kchouri, Bilal Lehnert, Thorsten PLoS One Research Article During periods of market stress, risk-averse investors reallocate their investments from stocks to gold in a bid to hedge risks. Market participants interpret the induced gold price increase as an indication of safe-haven purchases and a signal of increased uncertainty in the general economic and financial conditions, thereby causing higher gold price volatility. The aim of this paper is to analyze whether this flight to safety effect can be observed during the COVID-19 crisis, which is considered to be a one-of-a-kind crisis and obviously of different origin compared to previous (financial) crises. By examining the interactions between the (option-implied) volatilities of the stock market (VIX) and of the gold (GVZ) and oil (OVX) markets, the main findings indicate that there is a granger causality in general between the equity market and the gold as well as the oil market. During the COVID-19 crisis, a stronger influence of the equity market on the oil market can be observed. Based on symmetric causality tests that are typically employed in the literature, this cannot be observed for the gold market. However, once we control for asymmetric causal interactions, we find that positive shocks in VIX cause positive shocks in GVZ. Hence, the typical flight to safety effect, similar to the one observed during other (financial) crises can also be identified for the COVID-19 crisis. The causality between the equity and oil market is triggered by political factors as well as the economic impact of the crisis which induces a sharp drop in demand for oil. Public Library of Science 2021-05-26 /pmc/articles/PMC8153428/ /pubmed/34038444 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251752 Text en © 2021 Löwen et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Löwen, Celina Kchouri, Bilal Lehnert, Thorsten Is this time really different? Flight-to-safety and the COVID-19 crisis |
title | Is this time really different? Flight-to-safety and the COVID-19 crisis |
title_full | Is this time really different? Flight-to-safety and the COVID-19 crisis |
title_fullStr | Is this time really different? Flight-to-safety and the COVID-19 crisis |
title_full_unstemmed | Is this time really different? Flight-to-safety and the COVID-19 crisis |
title_short | Is this time really different? Flight-to-safety and the COVID-19 crisis |
title_sort | is this time really different? flight-to-safety and the covid-19 crisis |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8153428/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34038444 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251752 |
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