The effects of oil price shocks on stock market volatility: Evidence from European data

The paper investigates the effects of oil price shocks on stock market volatility in Europe by focusing on three measures of volatility, i.e. the conditional, the realized and the implied volatility. The findings suggest that supply-side shocks and oil specific demand shocks do not affect volatility, whereas, oil price changes due to aggregate demand shocks lead to a reduction in stock market volatility. More specifically, the aggregate demand oil price shocks have a significant explanatory power on both current-and forward-looking volatilities. The results are qualitatively similar for the aggregate stock market volatility and the industrial sectors' volatilities. Finally, a robustness exercise using short-and long-run volatility models supports the findings

The quest for banking stability in the euro area: The role of government interventions

We build upon a Markov-Switching Bayesian Vector Autoregression (MSBVAR) model to study how the credit default swaps market in the euro area becomes an important chain in the propagation of shocks through the entire financial system. The study sheds light on the regime-dependent interconnectedness between the risk of investing in banking and public sector bonds and provides novel evidence that a rise in sovereign debt, due to the countercyclical fiscal policy measures, is perceived by stock market investors as a burden on growth prospects. We also document that government interventions in the banking sector deteriorate the credit risk of sovereign debt. Higher risk premium required by investors for holding riskier government bonds depresses the sovereign debt market, it impairs banks’ balance sheets, and it depresses the collateral value of loans leading to bank retrenchment. The ensuing two-way banking-fiscal feedback loop indicates that government interventions do not necessarily stabilize the banking sector

Dangerous Infectious Diseases: Bad news for Main Street, Good News for Wall Street?

We examine whether investor mood, driven by World Health Organization (WHO) alerts and media news on dangerous infectious diseases, is priced in pharmaceutical companies' stocks in the United States. We argue that disease-related news (DRNs) should not trigger rational trading. We find that DRNs have a positive and significant sentiment effect among investors (on Wall Street). The effect is stronger (weaker) for small (large) companies, who are less (more) likely to engage in the development of new vaccines. A potential negative investor climate (on Main Street) – induced by disease-related fear – does not alter the positive sentiment effect

Oil price shocks and EMU sovereign yield spreads.

This study examines for the first time the relationship among the oil price shocks and the sovereign yield spreads in the EMU (which is collectively the largest oil-importer of the world), in a time-varying environment. In particular, we examine the timevarying correlation between oil price shocks and the 10-year sovereign yield spread of core and periphery countries in the EMU, by employing a scalar-BEKK framework. The main findings reveal that the correlations between sovereign yield spreads and oil price shocks are indeed time-varying and are influenced by specific economic and geopolitical events that took place during the study period. Furthermore, even though the correlation patterns are constantly low or zero prior to the Great Recession, a change is revealed in the post-2008 period, when correlations become moderate and more volatile. Finally, we do not observe noteworthy differences in the correlation behaviour between core and periphery countries to different oil price shocks. The findings of this study are particularly useful and provide valuable information to marketplace participants

Investor Sentiment and Sectoral Stock Returns: Evidence from World Cup Games

It is well known that investor sentiment affects aggregate stock returns. We investigate the economic link between sport sentiment and US sectoral stock returns. We find that sport sentiment affects only the financial sector. We argue that this result might be explained by the high liquidity that makes the financial sector more attractive to foreign investors who in turn are more prone to sport sentiment than local investors in the US. Accordingly, an arbitrageur can build a profitable trading strategy by selling short the financial sector during the FIFA World cup periods and buying it back afterwards. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Suicide, sentiment and crisis

A lack of clarity surrounds the precise nature of the transmission mechanism by which an economic crisis actually affects suicide. This study posits the hypothesis that this influence broadly translates as emotional reaction, ‘gut feelings’ and as such explicitly considers the use of subjective factors of economic performance to better explain variations in suicide rates. Alongside traditional economic indicators we use a 'consumer sentiment' measure, a sense of how economic factors are perceived to be impacting on individuals, to explain suicide rates. Furthermore, we explicitly consider the impact of the global financial crisis and test the impact of state public and health expenditures. Results show that consumer sentiment is found to offer a significantly greater explanatory role in exploring variations in the suicide rate compared to traditional economic indicators. Moreover, the effect of consumer sentiment is greater for females than for males, with some nuances in explaining this result. State public and health expenditures do not seem to have any significant influence on suicide rates

Oil price shocks and EMU sovereign yield spreads

This study examines for the first time the relationship among the oil price shocks and the sovereign yield spreads in the EMU (which is collectively the largest oil-importer of the world), in a time-varying environment. In particular, we examine the time-varying correlation between oil price shocks and the 10-year sovereign yield spread of core and periphery countries in the EMU, by employing a scalar-BEKK framework. The main findings reveal that the correlations between sovereign yield spreads and oil price shocks are indeed time-varying and are influenced by specific economic and geopolitical events that took place during the study period. Furthermore, even though the correlation patterns are constantly low or zero prior to the Great Recession, a change is revealed in the post-2008 period, when correlations become moderate and more volatile. Finally, we do not observe noteworthy differences in the correlation behaviour between core and periphery countries to different oil price shocks. The findings of this study are particularly useful and provide valuable information to marketplace participants

The WTI/Brent oil futures price differential and the globalisation-regionalisation hypothesis

This study examines the globalisation-regionalisation hypothesis in the WTI/Brent crude oil futures price differential by considering a set of potential crude oil-market specific and oil futures market specific determinants at 1, 3 and 6 months to maturity contracts. We employ monthly data over the period 1993:1-2016:12. Our results show that different determinants explain the spread between the WTI and Brent futures prices at different maturities. In the shorter-run maturities (1-month and 3-month) we find that spreads of the convenience yield, oil production, open interest and trading volume exercise significant effects in the WTI/Brent futures price differential. By contrast, for longer-run maturities (6-month), spreads of the oil production, oil consumption and open interest seem to exercise the most significant effects. We further provide evidence of a regionalised oil futures market over the short-run. The findings of this study provide valuable information to energy investors, traders and hedgers