Time-Varying Relationship and Volatility Spillovers Among Oil, Gold, Forex and Stock Markets in Indian Context: The Juxtaposition of Global Economic Crisis and COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This article explores the dynamic interdependencies, returns and volatility spillovers among oil, gold, foreign exchange and equity markets. It also compares how the leading and most active commodity markets, forex and equity markets reacted to each other during the period of the global economic crisis and COVID-19 pandemic. The time-varying relationship between oil and gold, oil and forex and gold and exchange rate is predominantly positive, whereas it is negative for oil and stock price, gold and stock price and exchange rate and stock price. This continues to hold even in the crisis period, except for the oil and stock price relationship during the COVID-19 crisis. However, the degrees of relationship significantly high during both crises. The returns and volatility spillovers obtained from forecasted error variance decomposition based on vector autoregression show that the spillovers among these four markets remained low for the whole period but drastically increased during both crises. Compared to the return spillover, the volatility spillover is strong in the crisis period and was too high during the COVID-19 crisis. The rolling-sample spillover analysis shows that both return and volatility spillovers significantly vary across different periods, and the volatility spillovers are predominant. JEL Codes: C32, F31, G15, Q40