The current study investigates the connectedness between US COVID-19 news, Dowes Jones Index (DJI), green bonds, gold, and bitcoin prices for the period 22 January 2020–3 August 2021. The study has employed wavelet coherency, the continuous wavelet transform, and the wavelet-based Granger causality methods to obtain the dependence result. The continuous wavelet transform (CWT) analysis reveals that the United States equity market prices are extremely sensitive with regard to spreading coronavirus (USCOVID-19) news and changes in the oil price. Green bonds, gold, and bitcoin have minimal connectedness with the equity market, which might lead to the hedge and safe haven role of these assets during the COVID-19 crisis period. Lastly, very strong comovement was found between bitcoin and gold during the entire sample. The results of the present study offer a number of fresh and noticeable policy implications for international investors and asset managers.
Over the last decade, Bitcoin has attracted a great deal of public interest and Bitcoin market has grown rapidly. One of the main characteristics of the market is that it often undergoes some events or incidents that cause outlying observations. To obtain reliable results in the statistical analysis of Bitcoin data, these outlying observations need to be carefully treated. In this study, we are interested in change point analysis for Bitcoin return series having such outlying observations. Since these outlying observations can affect change point analysis undesirably, we use a robust test for parameter change to locate change points. We report some significant change points that are not detected by the existing tests and demonstrate that the model allowing for parameter changes is better fitted to the data. Finally, we show that the model with parameter change can improve the forecasting performance of Value-at-Risk.
Khreshna Syuhada, Djoko Suprijanto, Arief Rachman Hakim
This paper aims to compare the safe-haven roles of gold and Bitcoin for energy commodities, including oils and petroleum, during COVID-19. Specifically, we examine the presence of reduction in downside risk after mixing gold/Bitcoin with such energy commodities. To do this, we account for dependence among energy commodities and gold/Bitcoin returns by applying a (vine) copula. The findings show that gold substantially reduces the downside risk of a portfolio containing any allocation to gold and energy commodities, indicating its safe-haven ability. In contrast, Bitcoin's safe-haven functionality is inconsistent since the downside risk reduction is achieved for Bitcoin's small allocation only.
The development of the green bond market has been magnificent recently, but it is necessary to be accelerated for financial sustainability over the globe. In response to increasing interest in the time-varying nexus between green bonds and other assets, the current study empirically investigates the asymmetric relationship between green bonds and other conventional assets, including Bitcoin price, S&P 500, Clean Energy Index, GSCI Commodity Index, and CBOE volatility using recently proposed and novel methods of quantile on quantile regression and Granger causality in quantiles approaches. Our mainstream results demonstrate that other assets under study strengthen green bonds over sample period studied, and this impact is more pronounced in higher quantiles of respective variables. Moreover, our quantile causality test further confirms these results with robust finding across time scales and quantiles. To enhance clean energy and energy efficiency, policymakers should take into consideration limiting eligibility criteria in policies supporting green bonds or limiting refinancing using green bonds. Stakeholders driving the green bond market should scale up the market to finance the required global investment level.
Adele Parmentola, Antonella Petrillo, Ilaria Tutore, Fabio De Felice
Abstract Blockchain is a disruptive technology that is revolutionizing information technology and represents a change of cultural paradigm for the way in which information is shared. Companies are rushing to understand how they can use blockchain distributed ledger technology to innovate processes, products and transactions. In a globalized world where environmental sustainability is a critical success factor, what is the role of the blockchain? By using a systematic review approach and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta‐Analyses (PRISMA) protocol, this study attempts to identify whether and how blockchain technology is considered able to affect environmental sustainability. Findings from 195 studies from 2015 to 2020 were analysed after the search protocol was applied. The results indicate that blockchain technology could contribute to environmentally sustainable development goals (SDGs) from different points of view, such as supporting the realization of a sustainable supply chain, improving energy efficiency and promoting the creation of secure and reliable smart cities. Furthermore, the investigation highlights the sectors where to focus research investments, providing a way to reward sustainable behaviour and increasing environmental sustainability. On the other hand, blockchain has no negligible negative effects on the environment that need to be considered before adoption.
Cryptocurrency literature is increasing rapidly nowadays. Particularly, the role of the cryptocurrency market as a risk management avenue has got the attention of researchers. However, it is an immature asset class and requires gaps in current literature for future research directions. This research provides a systematic review of the vast range empirical literature based on the cryptocurrency market as a risk management avenue against economic policy uncertainty (EPU). The review discovers that cryptocurrencies have mixed connectedness patterns with all national EPU therefore, the risk mitigation ability varies from country to country. The review finds that heterogeneous correlation patterns are due to the dependence of EPU on the policies and decisions usually taken by regulatory authorities of a particular country. Additionally, heterogeneous EPU requires heterogeneous solutions to deal with stock market volatility and economic policy uncertainty in different economies. Likewise, the divergent protocol and administration of currencies in the crypto market consequently vicissitudes the hedging and diversification performance against each economy. Many research lines can benefit investors, policymakers, fund managers, or portfolio managers. Therefore, the authors suggested future research avenues in terms of topics, data frequency, and methodologies.
This study uses a novel perspective to examine the causal connectedness between green bonds and other conventional assets, including clean energy, price of CO2 emission allowances, Bitcoin, and the S&P 500 stock market covering from January 2013 to March 2019. We apply the Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network Non-linear Granger causality and Transfer Entropy to detect possible changes in the causal direction between green bonds and other considered variables. We find a bidirectional relationship between green bonds, S&P 500, and Bitcoin markets, while green bonds have a unidirectional connection with the price of CO2 emission allowances.
Francisco Jareño, María de la O González, Raquel López, Ana Rosa Ramos
This study explores potential non-linear and asymmetric interdependencies between oil price shocks and leading cryptocurrency returns. In addition, this research splits changes in crude oil prices into three relevant components: risk, demand, and supply shocks. By applying the NARDL methodology, this paper examines the connection between oil and cryptocurrencies in the period between November 20, 2018 and June 30, 2020, conducting a study of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results confirm that demand shocks show the greatest connection with the returns of the cryptocurrencies analysed. In addition, both short-term and long-term results show a greater interdependence between oil and cryptocurrencies in periods of economic turbulence, such as the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus crisis.
Toan Luu Duc Huynh, Rizwan Ahmed, Muhammad Ali Nasir, Muhammad Shahbaz · 5 authors
In the context of the debate on cryptocurrencies as the 'digital gold', this study explores the nexus between the Bitcoin and US oil returns by employing a rich set of parametric and non-parametric approaches. We examine the dependence structure of the US oil market and Bitcoin through Clayton copulas, normal copulas, and Gumbel copulas. Copulas help us to test the volatility of these dependence structures through left-tailed, right-tailed or normal distributions. We collected daily data from 5 February 2014 to 24 January 2019 on Bitcoin prices and oil prices. The data on bitcoin prices were extracted from coinmarketcap.com. The US oil prices were collected from the Federal Reserve Economic Data source. Maximum pseudo-likelihood estimation was applied to the dataset and showed that the US oil returns and Bitcoin are highly vulnerable to tail risks. The multiplier bootstrap-based goodness-of-fit test as well as Kendal plots also suggest left-tail dependence, and this adds to the robustness of the results. The stationary bootstrap test for the partial cross-quantilogram indicates which quantile in the left tail has a statistically significant relationship between Bitcoin and US oil returns. The study has crucial implications in terms of portfolio diversification using cryptocurrencies and oil-based hedging instruments.
Sergio Luis Náñez Alonso, Javier Jorge-Vázquez, Miguel Ángel Echarte Fernández, Ricardo Francisco Reier Forradellas
There are different studies that point out that the price of electricity is a fundamental factor that will influence the mining decision, due to the cost it represents. There is also an ongoing debate about the pollution generated by cryptocurrency mining, and whether or not the use of renewable energies will solve the problem of its sustainability. In our study, starting from the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), we have considered several determinants of cryptocurrency mining: energy price, how that energy is generated, temperature, legal constraints, human capital, and R&D&I. From this, via linear regression, we recalculated this EPI by including the above factors that affect cryptocurrency mining in a sustainable way. The study determines, once the EPI has been readjusted, that the most sustainable countries to perform cryptocurrency mining are Denmark and Germany. In fact, of the top ten countries eight of them are European (Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Austria, and the United Kingdom); and the remaining two are Asian (South Korea and Japan).
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to extend the literature on the spillovers across economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and cryptocurrency uncertainty indices. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses cross-country economic policy uncertainty indices and the novel data measuring the cryptocurrency price uncertainties over the period 2013–2021 to construct a sample of 946 observations and applies the time-varying parameter vector autoregression (TVP-VAR) model to do an empirical study. Findings The findings suggest that there are cross-country spillovers of economic policy uncertainty. In addition, the total uncertainty spillover between economic policies and cryptocurrency peaked in 2015 before gradually decreasing in the following periods. Concomitantly, the cryptocurrency uncertainty has acted as the “receiver.” More importantly, the authors found the predictive power of economic policy uncertainty to predict the cryptocurrency uncertainty index. This paper’s results hold robust when using alternative measurement of cryptocurrency policy uncertainty. Originality/value This study is the first research that deeply investigates the association between two uncertainty indicators, namely economic policy uncertainty and the cryptocurrency uncertainty index. We provide fresh evidence about the dynamic connectedness between country-level economic policy uncertainty and the cryptocurrency index. Our work contributes a new channel driving the variants of uncertainties in the cryptocurrency market.
The study investigates the safe haven properties and sustainability of the top five cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash, Monero, and Ripple) and gold for BRICS stock markets during the COVID-19 crisis period from 31 January 2020 to 17 September 2020 in comparison to the precrisis period from 1 January 2016 to 30 January 2020, in a nonlinear and asymmetric framework using Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) methodology. Our results show that the relationship dynamics of stock market and cryptocurrency returns both in the short and long run are changing during the COVID-19 crisis period, which justifies our study using the nonlinear and asymmetric model. As far as a sustainable safe haven is concerned, Dash and Ripple are found to be a safe haven for all the five markets before the pandemic. However, all five cryptocurrencies are found to be a safe haven for three emerging markets, such as Brazil, China, and Russia, during the financial crisis. In a comparative framework, gold is found to be a suitable safe haven only for Brazil and Russia. The results have implications for index fund managers of BRICS markets to include Dash and Ripple in their portfolio as safe haven assets to protect its value during a stock market crisis.
We studied the extent to which bitcoin blockchain security permanently depends on the underlying distribution of cryptocurrency market outcomes using daily blockchain and bitcoin data for 2014–2019 and employing the autoregressive-distributed lag (ARDL) approach. We tested three equilibrium hypotheses: (i) sensitivity of the bitcoin blockchain to mining reward, (ii) security outcomes of the bitcoin blockchain and the proof-of-work cost, and (iii) the speed of adjustment of the bitcoin blockchain security to deviations from the equilibrium path. Our results suggest that bitcoin price and mining rewards were intrinsically linked to bitcoin security outcomes.The bitcoin blockchain security’s dependency on mining costs was geographically differenced – it was more significant for the global mining leader China than for other world regions. Bitcoin blockchain security tended to revert relatively fast to its equilibrium security level after the input or output of price shocks.
COVID-19 has morphed from a health crisis to an economic crisis that affected the global economy through several channels. This paper aims to study the impact of COVID-19 on the time-frequency connectedness between Green Bonds and other financial assets. Our sample includes the global stock market, bond market, oil, USD index, and two popular hedging alternatives, namely Gold and Bitcoin, from May 2013 to August 2020. First, we apply the methodologies of Diebold and Yilmaz (International Journal of Forecasting, 2012, 28(1), 57–66) and Baruník and Křehlík (Journal of Financial Econometrics, 2018, 16(2), 271–296). Then, we estimate hedge ratios and hedge effectiveness of green bonds for other financial assets. Green bonds are found to have a great weight in the overall network, particularly strongly connected with the USD index and bond index. While the bi-directional relationship with USD persists during COVID, the connectedness with conventional bonds is also strengthened. Notably, we find a weak relationship between Green bonds and Bitcoin, both in the short and long run. As portfolio implications, Gold and USD have the highest hedge ratio, which is confirmed by the hedging effectiveness. In contrast, oil and stocks exhibit the lowest hedging effectiveness. Our findings imply that financial assets might have a heterogeneous relationship with green bonds. Furthermore, despite its infancy, it seems that the role of green bond during a crisis should not be ignored, as it can be a hedger for some assets, while a contagion amplifier during crisis times.
Blockchain technology is one of the most critical emerging technologies. Countries are promoting the development of blockchain technology vigorously. Theoretically, blockchain technology improves the trust between enterprises, reduces information asymmetry, and promotes efficiency. It should promote corporate performance, but analyzing the actual data of Chinese listed companies, contrary to expectation, blockchain technology makes corporate performance decline. We found that this is mainly due to the effect of adverse selection through analysis and empirical tests. The enterprises that use blockchain technology are not accompanied by the increase in R&D expenditure, investment expenditure, and patents. The companies’ abnormal stock return and stock turnover rate have increased. The enterprises with worse performance are more likely to use blockchain to the hype. They can gain a short-term stock return. However, in the long run, the market-to-book ratio of government subsidies and the growth rate of corporate income are declining. Furthermore, the financial constraints are not alleviated as adverse selection only plays a role in the short term. Besides, the heterogeneity tests find that from the prospects of internal governance environment, the higher proportion of the largest shareholder, the better earning quality of the company. The enterprises with state-owned property rights have lower motivations of using blockchain to make an adverse selection. The study also found that the external environment prospects of enterprises with a lower degree of marketization and law environment are more likely to use the blockchain.