scholarly journals Evidence of Economic Policy Uncertainty and COVID-19 Pandemic on Global Stock Returns

2022 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 28
Author(s):  
Thomas Chinan Chiang

This paper examines the impact of changes in economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and COVID-19 shock on stock returns. Tests of 16 global stock market indices, using monthly data from January 1990 to August 2021, suggest a negative relation between the stock return and a country’s EPU. Evidence suggests that a rise in the U.S. EPU causes not only a decline in a country’s stock return, but also a negative spillover effect on the global market; however, we cannot find a comparable negative effect from global EPU to U.S. stocks. Evidence suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic has a negative impact that significantly affects stock return worldwide. This study also finds an indirect COVID-19 impact that runs through a change in domestic EPU and, in turn, affects stock return. Evidence shows significant COVID-19 effects that change relative stock returns between the U.S. and global markets, creating a decoupling phenomenon.

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xi Zhong ◽  
Weihong Chen ◽  
Ge Ren

PurposeMany studies have examined the antecedents of firms' strategic change on a micro and meso level, but few studies have explored it from the macrolevel (e.g. economic policy uncertainty) perspective. This research draws attention to the impact of economic policy uncertainty on firms' strategic change.Design/methodology/approachThis research empirically tests hypotheses based on a sample of listed firms in China during the period between 2010 and 2017.FindingsBased on real options theory, the authors theorize and find that economic policy uncertainty will negatively affect firms' strategic change through the mediating effect of CEO turnover. Moreover, organizational inertia will strengthen the negative impact of economic policy uncertainty on CEO turnover and will weaken the positive impact of CEO turnover on firms' strategic change.Originality/valueFirst, this research contributes to the strategic change literature by demonstrating the important impact of economic policy uncertainty on firms' strategic change. Second, this research expands the literature on the economic consequences of economic policy uncertainty. Third, this research clarifies the path and boundary conditions of economic policy uncertainty affecting strategic change by introducing the mediating effects of CEO turnover and the moderating effects of organizational inertia.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 4166
Author(s):  
Ying Chen ◽  
Xiaoqian Shen ◽  
Li Wang

While economic growth has been the main goal of countries around the world, environmental problems such as air pollution have also arisen. Since the increase in economic uncertainty is limiting production capacity and consumers’ marginal propensity to consume, which reduces CO2 emissions, economic policy uncertainty has become one of the most important factors affecting CO2 emissions. COVID-19 has demonstrated that economic policy uncertainty reduces the enthusiasm of market participants, which, in turn, reduces energy demand and CO2 emissions. In order to further study the impact of economic policy uncertainty on air pollution, this study uses a panel model to empirically test the data for a sample of 15 countries covering the period from 1997 to 2019. According to the empirical results, we find that the economic policy uncertainty has a significant negative impact on per capita CO2 emissions. That is, the higher the uncertainty of economic policy, the lower the per capita CO2 emissions of countries. What’s more, this negative effect is larger in emerging market countries than in advanced countries.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 6899
Author(s):  
Yuee Li ◽  
Jingdong Li

China is a considerable grain importer in the world. However, the sustainability of China’s grain imports has been greatly challenged by its increasing economic policy uncertainty (EPU). This paper constructs the indicators of economic and environmental sustainability of China’s net grain imports and analyzes the impact of its EPU index on these indicators with a Time-Varying Parameter Stochastic Volatility Vector Autoregression (TVP-SV-VAR) model to explore how China’s EPU affects the sustainability of its net grain imports. The main conclusions are as follows. (1) The sustainability of China’s net grain imports fluctuated from 2001 to 2019. (2) China’s EPU has a negative impact on the economic sustainability of its net grain imports. A higher EPU index leads to a lower net import potential ratio and higher trade cost. (3) China’s EPU has a significant negative impact on the environmental sustainability of its net grain imports. It has the greatest negative impact on virtual water imports and smaller impact on virtual land imports and embodied carbon emission. Therefore, China’s EPU affects the sustainability of its net grain imports negatively through its impact on its net grain import potential ratio, trade cost, and virtual land, virtual water, and embodied carbon emissions in net grain imports.


Author(s):  
Yanyun Yao ◽  
Haijing Yu ◽  
Huimin Wang ◽  
Tsung-Kuo Tien-Liu ◽  
◽  
...  

This study examines the impact of external economic policy uncertainty on the distribution of China’s stock returns. The Chinese Economic Policy Uncertainty (CEPU) and global EPU (GEPU) indexes compiled by [1] are employed as a measurement of the external uncertainty. An empirical study is conducted using the GARCH-MIDAS framework. The first innovation of this study is extending the symmetric GARCH-MIDAS model to the case of GJR; the leverage effect is therefore considered. The second innovation is considering the impact of EPU on the overall distribution of returns, rather than on the mean or volatility. Full-sample fitting shows that CEPU can explain around 14% of the return volatility, and CEPU together with GEPU can explain about 17%. Out-of-sample recursive forecasting demonstrates that it is meaningful to extend the models to GJR; the EPU information improves the return distribution forecasting. However, the impact of EPUs is limited, which implies that external uncertainty is quite different from the “internal” economic policy uncertainty directly driving the China’s stock market.


Author(s):  
Liangliang Jiang ◽  
Jeffrey A. Pittman ◽  
Walid Saffar

We study how policy uncertainty influences textual disclosure in the U.S. from 1996 to 2015. Consistent with incentives for voluntary disclosure, we find that policy uncertainty increases textual disclosure quantity, as evident in disclosure length, but lowers textual readability and increases the tone of uncertainty and negativity. We also document that the negative impact on readability subsides when firms are subject to tough external monitoring. Finally, we provide evidence implying that investors perceive such disclosure to be valuable, as evident in cheaper equity financing costs under economic policy uncertainty.


2021 ◽  
pp. 135481662098314
Author(s):  
Conrado Diego García-Gómez ◽  
Ender Demir ◽  
Ming-Hsiang Chen ◽  
José María Díez-Esteban

This study analyzes the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the performance of US tourism firms using a sample of 296 publicly traded tourism companies from 2000 to 2018 with a sample of 3068 firm-year observations. Estimation results of panel regressio tests based on the system-generalized method of moments indicate that EPU has a negative impact on return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), and Tobin’s Q. Our results are consistent for different variable specifications. We also find that firm size and leverage play a moderating role in the relationship between EPU and firm performance. Panel quantile regression results show that the impact of EPU on US tourism firm performance is asymmetric. Specifically, low-performing (25% quantile of ROA and ROE) firms are less affected by EPU, and for the case of Tobin’s Q, EPU does not affect firms with a high growth opportunity (100% quantile of Tobin’s Q).


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 242-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick A. Adjei ◽  
Mavis Adjei

Purpose Using the economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index as a proxy for the level of EPU, we study the impact of the level of EPU on the conditional mean of market returns and we examine the predictive power of EPU on future market returns. Design/methodology/approach We employ a GARCH-in-Mean model with exogenous variables. Findings The results show that even after controlling for business cycle effects, EPU is inversely related to contemporaneous market returns. Particularly, the authors find that the negative impact of EPU subsists only during recessions or recessionary states of the economy, and has no discernible effects during expansionary periods. Originality/value This is the first study to examine the predictive power of EPU on future market returns.


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