Did weekly economic index and volatility index impact US food sales during the first year of the pandemic?

We explore the impacts of economic and financial dislocations caused by COVID-19 pandemic shocks on food sales in the United States from January 2020 to January 2021.We use the US weekly economic index(WEI)to measure economic dislocations and the Chicago Board Options Exchange volatility index(VIX)to capture the broader stock market dislocations.We validate the NARDL model by testing a battery of models using the autoregressive distributed lags(ARDL)methodology(ARDL,NARDL,and QARDL specifications).Our study postulates that an increase in WEI has a significant negative long-term effect on food sales,whereas a decrease in WEI has no statistically significant(long-run)effect.Thus,policy responses that ignore asymmetric effects and hidden cointegration may fail to promote food security during pandemics.

A Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization to Forecast Implied Volatility Risk

The application of optimization methods to prediction issues is a continually exploring field.In line with this,this paper investigates the connectedness between the infected cases of COVID-19 and US fear index from a forecasting perspective.The complex characteristics of implied volatility risk index such as non-linearity structure,time-varying and nonstationarity motivate us to apply a nonlinear polynomial Hammerstein model with known structure and unknown parameters.We use the Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization(HPSO)tool to identify the model parameters of nonlinear polynomial Hammerstein model.Findings indicate that,following a nonlinear polynomial behaviour cascaded to an autoregressive with exogenous input(ARX)behaviour,the fear index in US financial market is significantly affected by COVID-19-infected cases in the US,COVID-19-infected cases in the world and COVID-19-infected cases in China,respectively.Statistical performance indicators provided by the developed models show that COVID-19-infected cases in the US are particularly powerful in predicting the Cboe volatility index compared to COVID-19-infected cases in the world and China(MAPE(2.1013%);R2(91.78%)and RMSE(0.6363 percentage points)).The proposed approaches have also shown good convergence characteristics and accurate fits of the data.

Forecasting Stock Volatility Using Wavelet-based Exponential Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity Methods

In this study,we proposed a new model to improve the accuracy of fore-casting the stock market volatility pattern.The hypothesized model was validated empirically using a data set collected from the Saudi Arabia stock Exchange(Tada-wul).The data is the daily closed price index data from August 2011 to December 2019 with 2027 observations.The proposed forecasting model combines the best maximum overlapping discrete wavelet transform(MODWT)function(Bl14)and exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity(EGARCH)model.The results show the model's ability to analyze stock market data,highlight important events that contain the most volatile data,and improve forecast accuracy.The results were compared from a number of mathematical mod-els,which are the non-linear spectral model,autoregressive integrated moving aver-age(ARIMA)model and EGARCH model.The performance of the forecasting model will be evaluated based on some of error functions such as Mean absolute percentage error(MAPE),Mean absolute scaled error(MASE)and Root means squared error(RMSE).

Uncertainty and energy-sector equity returns in Iran:a Bayesian and quasi-Monte Carlo time-varying analysis

This study investigates whether the implied crude oil volatility and the historical OPEC price volatility can impact the return to and volatility of the energy-sector equity indices in Iran.The analysis specifically considers the refining,drilling,and petrochemical equity sectors of the Tehran Stock Exchange.The parameter estimation uses the quasi-Monte Carlo and Bayesian optimization methods in the framework of a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model,and a complementary Bayesian network analysis is also conducted.The analysis takes into account geopolitical risk and economic policy uncertainty data as other proxies for uncertainty.This study also aims to detect different price regimes for each equity index in a novel way using homogeneous/non-homogeneous Markov switching autoregressive models.Although these methods provide improvements by restricting the analysis to a specific price-regime period,they produce conflicting results,rendering it impossible to draw general conclusions regarding the contagion effect on returns or the volatility transmission between markets.Nevertheless,the results indicate that the OPEC(historical)price volatility has a stronger effect on the energy sectors than the implied volatility has.These types of oil price shocks are found to have no effect on the drilling sector price pattern,whereas the refining and petrochemical equity sectors do seem to undergo changes in their price patterns nearly concurrently with future demand shocks and oil supply shocks,respectively,gaining dominance in the oil market.

A Statistical Measure of Global Equity Market Risk

We construct a new index of global equity market risk (EMR) using market interconnectedness and volatilities. We study the relationship between our EMR and the VIX over the last two decades. The EMR is shown to be a novel approach to measuring global market risk, and an alternative to the VIX. Using data of 20 major stock markets, including G10 economies, we find spikes in our EMR index during the dotcom bubble, the global financial crisis, the European sovereign debt crisis, and the novel coronavirus pandemic. The result shows that the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 induced crisis record the historic highest spikes in financial market risk, suggesting stronger evidence of contagion in both periods.