Mudassar Hasan

We examine the dynamics of liquidity connectedness in the cryptocurrency market. We use the connectedness models of Diebold and Yilmaz (Int J Forecast 28(1):57–66, 2012) and Baruník and Křehlík (J Financ Econom 16(2):271–296, 2018) on a sample of six major cryptocurrencies, namely, Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP), Monero (XMR), and Dash. Our static analysis reveals a moderate liquidity connectedness among our sample cryptocurrencies, whereas BTC and LTC play a significant role in connectedness magnitude. A distinct liquidity cluster is observed for BTC, LTC, and XRP, and ETH, XMR, and Dash also form another distinct liquidity cluster. The frequency domain analysis reveals that liquidity connectedness is more pronounced in the short-run time horizon than the medium- and long-run time horizons. In the short run, BTC, LTC, and XRP are the leading contributor to liquidity shocks, whereas, in the long run, ETH assumes this role. Compared with the medium term, a tight liquidity clustering is found in the short and long terms. The time-varying analysis indicates that liquidity connectedness in the cryptocurrency market increases over time, pointing to the possible effect of rising demand and higher acceptability for this unique asset. Furthermore, more pronounced liquidity connectedness patterns are observed over the short and long run, reinforcing that liquidity connectedness in the cryptocurrency market is a phenomenon dependent on the time–frequency connectedness.

This study draws a comparison between the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 pandemic crisis to assess the safe-haven potential of Islamic stocks for G7 stock markets. We employ the cross-quantilogram framework of Han et al., which considers the non-linearity in the relationship, and thus captures the correlation between the Islamic and G7 stock markets across various quantiles reflecting different market conditions. The analysis also includes the time-varying cross-quantile correlation to observe the evolution of Islamic stocks' safe-haven potential. Our full sample analysis shows that Islamic stocks do not exhibit safe-haven properties for G7 stock markets. During the GFC period, Islamic stocks show some diversification benefits for the G7 stock markets. Notably, Islamic stocks emerged as a robust safe-haven asset for the G7 stock markets during the pandemic crisis. The study carries essential insights for equity investors and regulators of G7 and other countries to implement diversification/hedging strategies that would involve Islamic stocks to protect equity investments and the overall financial system amid the financial downturns.

This study investigates the integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) equity indices with conventional indices in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) individually and across all BRICS countries to better understand regional economic cooperation. Accordingly, we look at daily returns from 13 July 2013 to 28 February 2018 for the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) ESG indices and MSCI composite indices of the respective countries. To analyze the integration between the ESG equity indices of the sampled countries with their regional and across regional conventional counterparts, the Johansen Co-integration test is employed in this study. Further, the vector error correction model (VECM) is applied to test the causality between the sampled time-series. The impulse response function analysis further explains the impulse responses of each country’s MSCI ESG returns to one standard deviation of innovations to MSCI composite returns of the same country and across countries. Finally, the extent of the MSCI composite returns’ impact on the MSCI ESG returns in the same country indices, and cross-regional indices is examined with variance decomposition analysis. The results suggest that all ESG equity indices are integrated with conventional indices in all BRICS countries. Furthermore, there is a short-or long-run causality between MSCI ESG and MSCI composite equity indices of China and South Africa. Moreover, the study finds only short-run causality between conventional and non-conventional equity indices of Brazil and Russia, whereas we find only long-run causality between India’s non-conventional and conventional equity indices. Finally, the study finds that the all-individual country MSCI ESG equity indices shows a long-run causality with MSCI composite equity indices of all other BRICS countries. The findings also confirm the economic and financial cooperation between the BRICS countries.

A bulk of literature suggests that geopolitical events such as terrorist attacks dampen tourism demand. However, there is little research on whether this effect helps predict the return of the tourism equity sector. We provide country-level evidence on whether local and global geopolitical risk (GPR) predicts the first and second moments of tourism stocks in emerging economies. This objective was achieved by employing the non-parametric causality-in-quantiles (CiQ) model and a cross-quantilogram (CQ) test, which allowed us to uncover the predictive potential of GPR for the tourism sector equities. Our findings, obtained through the CiQ model, suggest that while both local and global GPRs carry significant potential for predicting the returns and volatility of tourism stocks of most emerging economies under normal market conditions, they seem to play no such role in certain countries. These countries include South Korea, for which only a limited number of tourism stocks trade on the domestic stock market compared to other sectors, and Colombia, for which both the domestic stock market and tourism sectors are at an emerging stage. Further, it turns out that, compared to its local counterpart, global GPR has a more pronounced predictive power for the tourism stocks of emerging economies. Finally, with some exceptions, the results are qualitatively similar, and hence reasonably robust, to those when a directional predictability model is applied. Given that geopolitical shocks are largely unanticipated, our findings underscore the importance of a robust tourism sector that can help the market recover to stability as well as an open economy that allows local investors to diversify country-specific risks in their portfolios. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

The implied volatility index is a forward-looking indicator of fear among stock market participants. We examine the extent to which the connectedness of fear among global stock markets is driven by the cross-country connectedness of economic policy uncertainty (EPU). We use data on stock market fear and EPU indices for 13 countries, which spans from January 2011 to December 2018. To measure the connectedness among stock market fear and EPU of our sample countries, we employ two connectedness models. A cross-sectional regression model is further employed to ascertain the extent to which EPU connectedness between two countries explains the connectedness of fear between their stock markets, while controlling for bilateral linkage and country-specific factors. We find that EPU connectedness between any two partner countries significantly drives the connectedness of fear between their stock markets. The driving potential not only holds for short- and long-term connectedness, but also after controlling for bilateral linkages (bilateral trade, geographical distance, common language) and country-specific (trade and financial openness of the transmitter country) factors indicating robustness in our results.

This paper provides evidence on the likelihood of formal finance usage among innovative small and medium enterprises (SMEs) operating in ASEAN countries. To this end, the SMEs are classified into four categories, namely non-innovators and product, process, and product-and-process innovator SMEs. Subsequently, a propensity score weighting (PSW) analysis is performed to adjust for diversity existing across innovative SMEs. The resulting propensity scores are further used to perform the causal effect analysis based on the average treatment effect (ATE) approach, which measures the likelihood of formal finance usage among different types of innovative SMEs. Our ATE results reveal that SMEs simultaneously engaged in product and process innovation show a higher likelihood of using formal finance than non-innovators. However, formal finance usage of SMEs perusing only product/service or process innovation is not any different from non-innovators. Furthermore, our pairwise analysis shows that product and process innovators also exhibit a higher likelihood of formal finance usage than product/service or process innovators. Besides, younger and medium-size product and process innovating SMEs are more likely to use formal finance. These results are robust for different subsamples and firm- and country-level controls.