Crude oil, Bitcoin, and carbon dioxide emissions are major issues that are significantly impacting the global economy and environment. These three issues are complexly interlinked, with profound economic and environmental implications. In this study, we explore the correlation among these three issues and attempt to understand the influence of crude oil and Bitcoin on carbon dioxide emissions. We created a novel approach, named quantile mediation analysis, which blends mediation regression with quantile regression, enabling us to explore the influence of Brent crude oil on carbon dioxide emissions by considering the mediating impact of Bitcoin. According to the findings from using our new approach, the impact of Brent crude oil on carbon dioxide emissions is partly mediated by Bitcoin, and the association between Brent crude oil and carbon dioxide emissions involves both direct and indirect effects. Since the carbon dioxide generated by the extraction of crude oil and Bitcoin has a great impact on the environment, accelerating the use of clean energy technologies to reduce our reliance on crude oil should be the direction that the cryptocurrency industry ought to pursue in the future.
Investigating the essential impact of the cryptocurrency market on carbon emissions is significant for the U.S. to realize carbon neutrality. This exploration employs low-frequency vector auto-regression (LF-VAR) and mixed-frequency VAR (MF-VAR) models to capture the complicated interrelationship between cryptocurrency policy uncertainty (CPU) and carbon emission (CE) and to answer the question of whether cryptocurrency policy uncertainty could facilitate U.S. carbon neutrality. By comparison, the MF-VAR model possesses a higher explanatory power than the LF-VAR model; the former’s impulse response indicates a negative CPU effect on CE, suggesting that cryptocurrency policy uncertainty is a promoter for the U.S. to realize the goal of carbon neutrality. In turn, CE positively impacts CPU, revealing that mass carbon emissions would raise public and national concerns about the environmental damages caused by cryptocurrency transactions and mining. Furthermore, CPU also has a mediation effect on CE; that is, CPU could affect CE through the oil price (OP). In the context of a more uncertain cryptocurrency market, valuable insights for the U.S. could be offered to realize carbon neutrality by reducing the traditional energy consumption and carbon emissions of cryptocurrency trading and mining.
Green finance is an important source for raising necessary funds for preserving/conserving the environment through developments of green projects. It is a loan raised especially for environmentally friendly activities such as biodiversity financing, optimum use of natural resources, etc. Prudent use of green finance attracts the use of digitized technologies which will facilitate prosperous accomplishment of environmental projects. One of the primary and significant digitized technology is blockchain. Further, it ensures effective monitoring of environmental projects, enhances transparency and accountability, and minimizes greenwashing risk. The bank for international settlement (BIS) has stressed blockchain for bringing transparency in usage of green finance thereby improving efficiency. Thus, the present study is an attempt to have insights on the use of blockchain for streamlining green finance. The study proposes the use of digitalized technologies for supporting and promoting green finance.
Save the green and live in the green should be the mottos of the modern high-tech world. Industry 4.0 introduces the most advanced automated technologies, but many of them cause high CO2 emissions around the globe that need strong compelling force because any catastrophic changes in the climate causes dreadful vandalization in the economy and society. This chapter discusses the climate-friendly economic and low-emission technological developments in the 4IR and 5IR by using the practical-sense mechanism. Reading this chapter will therefore increase the knowledge of blockchain technology (BT), artificial intelligence (AI), and climate finance in the low carbon economic sustainability. Furthermore, the proposed green development themes (i.e., hybrid green city and industrial layout, hybrid low emission agriculture farm) affirms the sustainable low carbon economic developments in the forthcoming Industry 5.0. Finally, the strategic recommendations will assist in developing the low carbon economy with the perfection of BT, AI, and global climate finance in the world.
Despite the growing interest in Blockchain Innovation (BI), there is a lack of research on its predictors. This study draws on the policy uncertainty literature to hypothesize the positive influence of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and cryptocurrency policy uncertainty (UCRY Policy) on country-level BI, determined by the total number of blockchain patents in a country. We tested our hypotheses using a two-level sample of 126 quarterly observations nested in five countries: Australia, China, Japan, Korea, and the United States. The results confirm our expectation that the EPU and UCRY Policy lead to an enhanced BI. Moreover, we found that the UCRY Policy is more impactful on BI than EPU, and that when examining the two policy uncertainty indicators simultaneously, the effect of EPU on BI becomes insignificant. This study has important implications for policymakers and investors.
Purpose This study aims to identify the ability of gold and cryptocurrency (Cryptocurrency Uncertainty Index (UCRY) Price) as safe haven assets (SHA) for stocks and bonds in both conventional (i.e. stock indices and government bonds) and Islamic markets (i.e. Islamic stock indices and Islamic bonds (IB)). Design/methodology/approach The authors employed the nonadditive panel quantile regression model by Powell (2016). It measured the safe haven characteristics of gold and UCRY Price for stock indices, government bonds, Islamic stocks, and IB under gold circumstances and level of cryptocurrency uncertainty, respectively. The period spanned from 11 March 2020 to 31 December 2021. Findings This study discovered three findings, including: (1) gold is a strong safe haven for stocks and bonds in conventional and Islamic markets under bearish conditions; (2) UCRY Price is a strong safe haven for conventional stocks and bonds but only a weak safe haven for Islamic stocks under high crypto uncertainty; and (3) gold offers a safe haven in both emerging and developed countries, while UCRY Price provides a better safe haven in developed than in emerging countries. Practical implications Gold always wins big for safe haven properties during unstable economy. It can also win over investors who consider shariah compliant products. Therefore, it should be included in an investor's portfolio. Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies are more common for developed countries. Thus, the governments and regulators of emerging countries need to provide more guidance around cryptocurrency so that the societies have better literacy. On top of that, the investors can consider crypto to mitigate risks but with limited safe haven functions. Originality/value The originality aspects of this study include: (1) four chosen assets from conventional and Islamic markets altogether (i.e. stock indices, government bonds, Islamic stock indices and IB); (2) indicator countries selected based on the most used and owned cryptocurrencies for the SHA study; and (3) the utilization of UCRY Price as a crypto indicator and a further examination of the SHA study toward four financial assets.
This paper assesses the effectiveness of a broad set of 1066 active and continuously traded cryptocurrencies as a safe haven instrument against extreme oil price movements, in comparison to the corresponding roles of gold. The uncertainty for the oil market during the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent Russia–Ukraine conflict set the tone for natural experiments for our study. We use a trail-blazing dynamic generalized autoregressive score model to estimate the tail riskiness of the potential safe haven assets from January 1, 2020, to September 30, 2022. By estimating the risk exposure of all cryptocurrency assets, we determine top ten safest assets for investment. Our results show the emergence of new safe haven cryptocurrencies, which have previously been ignored by the academic literature and policy makers alike. Intriguingly, our findings reveal that gold has been replaced by altcoins as the safest assets during both the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine conflict. At this instance, our findings suggest that Bitcoin provides lengthier safe haven properties than gold for oil returns in both periods. However, the safe haven properties of gold and cryptocurrencies are time varying. Last but not least, we introduce a new Cryptocurrency Tail Risk Index (CTRI) that captures the risk exposure of cryptocurrency market, as a whole. Our results suggest that investment in numerous cryptocurrencies provides lengthier safe haven properties than investing in gold alone.
In the context of accelerating economic transformation and upgrading, and comprehensively promoting the construction of digital China and ecological civilization in China, this paper uses text mining and OLS to quantitatively study the relationship between fiscal decentralization, enterprise digital transformation and green innovation in 31 provinces from 2011 to 2021. This study finds that fiscal decentralization will promote enterprise green innovation and digital transformation, and that digital transformation has a partial mediating effect between fiscal decentralization and enterprise green innovation. Furthermore, this expansive study finds that fiscal decentralization has a positive role in promoting the green innovation of heterogeneous enterprises and enterprises in different regions, among which its promotion effect on state-owned enterprises is higher than that of private enterprises, and its promotion effect on enterprises in the central and western regions is higher than that of enterprises in the eastern region. Moreover, an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between fiscal decentralization and the green innovation of enterprise. In addition, financing constraints have a masking effect between fiscal decentralization and green innovation in enterprise and green innovation significantly promotes enterprise environmental, social and governance (ESG) development.
The green transformation of the manufacturing industry is related to the low-carbon and green development of the economy. The study explored the impact mechanism of the implementation of green finance policy on the green transformation of China’s manufacturing industry from 2013 to 2021 from three aspects of capital formation and incentive, credit catalysis, integration and decentralization, and conducted a quasi-natural experiment using difference-in-difference (DID) model. Research finds that: (1) The implementation of green finance significantly promotes the green transformation of China’s manufacturing industry and has good sustainability. The mechanisms of fund formation and orientation, credit catalysis, integration and decentralization are the primary mechanism of green finance to promote the green transformation of the manufacturing industry, and the implementation effect of green finance has apparent heterogeneity; (2) The promoting effect of green finance on the green transformation of the manufacturing industry is solely vast in state-owned industries however now not enormous in non-state-owned industries; (3) The influence of green finance on the green transformation efficiency of manufacturing industry with a better information environment is more significant than manufacturing industry with a worse information environment; (4) Faced with the pressure of investing in green industries, the coping strategies adopted by enterprises in different industries are quite different. The promoting effect of green finance on the green transformation of the manufacturing industry is significant in low-competition industries but insignificant in high-competition industries. This study has enriched the research on the effect of green finance policies, explored solutions based on quasi-nature, and provided policy references for the green transformation of the manufacturing industry.
Our investigation strives to unearth the best portfolio hedging strategy for the G7 stock indices through Bitcoin and gold using daily data relevant to the period 2 January 2016 to 5 January 2023. This study uses the DVECH-GARCH model to model dynamic correlation and then compute optimal hedge ratios and hedging effectiveness. The empirical findings show that Bitcoin and gold were rather effective hedge assets before COVID-19 and diversifiers during the pandemic and Russia–Ukraine war. From hedging effectiveness perspectives, gold and Bitcoin are safe-haven assets, and the investment risk of G7 stock indices could be hedged by taking a short position during thepandemic period and war except for the pair Nikkei/Gold. Additionally, gold beats Bitcoin in terms of hedging efficiency. We thus demonstrate the central role of Bitcoin and gold as financial market participants, particularly during market turmoil and downward movements. Our findings can be of interest to investors, regulators, and governments to take into consideration the role of Bitcoin in financial markets.
This study employs a non-linear framework to investigate the impacts of central bank digital currency (CBDC) news on the financial and cryptocurrency markets. The time-varying vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model developed by Primiceri (2005) is estimated based on weekly data from the first week of January 2015 to the last week of December 2021. The vector of endogenous variables in the VAR estimation contains the Central Bank Digital Currency uncertainty index (CBDCU), cryptocurrency policy uncertainty index, S&P 500 index, VIX, and Bitcoin price. The TVP-VAR model’s time-varying responses demonstrated that the reactions of the cryptocurrency market to central bank digital currency announcements vary remarkably over time. The impacts of the CBDC shocks on the financial market have been increasingly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the time-varying forecast error decompositions, CBDCU and VIX shocks have accounted for most of the variance in cryptocurrency uncertainty and Bitcoin return shocks, notably during the COVID-19 period.