Does the COVID-19 Pandemic Disproportionately Affect the Poor? Evidence from a Six-Country Survey

The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought havocs on economies around the world. Yet, much needs to be learnt on the distributional impacts of the pandemic. We contribute new theoretical and empirical evidence on the distributional impacts of the pandemic on different income groups in a multi-country setting. Analyzing rich individual-level data from a six-country survey, we find that while the outbreak has no impacts on household income losses, it results in a 63-percent reduction in the expected own labor income for the second-poorest income quintile. The impacts of the pandemic are most noticeable in terms of savings, with all the four poorer income quintiles suffering reduced savings ranging between 5 and 7 percent compared to the richest income quintile. The poor are also less likely to change their behaviors, both in terms of immediate prevention measures against COVID-19 and healthy activities. We also find countries to exhibit heterogeneous impacts. The United Kingdom has the least household income loss and expected labor income loss, and the most savings. Japanese are least likely to adapt behavioral changes, but Chinese, Italians, and South Koreans wash their hands and wear a mask more often than Americans

Climate policy uncertainty and world renewable energy index volatility forecasting

Since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015, the global energy structure has undergone unprecedented adjustment, and renewable energy has ushered in a new period of development opportunities. From the perspective of energy stability and sustainable development, this paper uses the generalized autoregression-conditional heteroscedasticity mixed data sampling model (GARCH-MIDAS) to explore the predictive power of climate policy uncertainty (CPU) on the index volatility of renewable energy. At the same time, eight uncertainty indices, including the economic policy uncertainty index and geopolitical risk index variable, are introduced to discuss the impact on the volatility of renewable energy. Furthermore, the out-of-sample prediction accuracy of each model is tested by the out-of-sample R OS 2, Model Confidence Set (MCS), direction-of-change (DoC) and other evaluation methods. Climate policy exhibits a superior ability to predict renewable energy volatility, offers a new perspective for the accurate prediction of renewable energy volatility, and provides a reliable guarantee for the sustainable development of the energy market and financial market. </p

Does the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affect the poor? Evidence from a six-country survey

Purpose – The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought havoc on economies around the world. The purpose of this study is to learn about the distributional impacts of the pandemic. Design/methodology/approach – The authors contribute new theoretical and empirical evidence on the distributional impacts of the pandemic on different income groups in a multicountry setting. The authors analyze rich individual-level survey data covering 6,082 respondents from China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States. The results are robust to various econometric models, including ordinary least squares (OLS), Tobit and ordered probit models with country-fixed effects. Findings – The authors find that while the outbreak has no impact on household income losses, it results in a 63% reduction in the expected own labor income for the second-poorest income quintile. The pandemic impacts are most noticeable for savings, with all the four poorer income quintiles suffering reduced savings ranging between 5 and 7% compared to the richest income quintile. The poor are also less likely to change their behaviors regarding immediate prevention measures against COVID-19 and healthy activities. The authors also found countries to exhibit heterogeneous impacts. Social implications – Designing tailor-made social protection and health policies to support the poorer income groups in richer and poorer countries can generate multiple positive impacts that help minimize the negative and inequality-enhancing pandemic consequences. These findings are relevant not only for COVID-19 but also for future pandemics. Originality/value – The authors theoretically and empirically investigate the impacts of the pandemic on poorer income groups, while previous studies mostly offer empirical analyses and focus on other sociodemographic factors. The authors offer a new multicountry analysis of several prevention measures against COVID-19 and specific health activities

News sentiment and stock return: Evidence from managers’ news coverages

In this paper, we construct a monthly news-based manager sentiment (S M) based on the tone of managers’ news reports. Statistically, S M has excellent predictability for the subsequent month's return in both in- and out-of-sample periods. we find that S M contains additional information to forecast stock returns compared to popular economic predictors. After analysing the prediction performance at different sentiment levels, it is found that the prediction power of S M is far better in the high sentiment period than in the low sentiment period. In terms of investing, S M also generates considerable economic value for investors who use forecasting information to optimise their stock portfolios. </p