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This study systematically reviewed existing literature on the impact of economic uncertainty on property performance to highlight focus areas and spur future research amid unprecedented global uncertainty levels. Conceptually, uncertainty levels and environmental dynamism are related to investors' risk judgement and decision-making.

Peer-reviewed journal articles published from 2007 to 2022 were assembled and arranged through the Scientific Procedures and Rationales for Systematic Literature Reviews (SPAR-4-SLR) protocol. The initial search produced 2,028 results from the Web of Science and Scopus databases, which were rigorously purified for a final dataset of 70 articles. These records were subsequently assessed through content analysis, bibliographic modelling, topic modelling and thematic analysis. Recurring themes were visualised using the VOSviewer software.

The existing literature suggests that economic uncertainty negatively impacts investment volumes, returns and performance. Research has also increased since 2018, with a strong emphasis on the housing sector and developed property markets. Commercial property and emerging markets account for only 10 and 8% of previous research, respectively.

These findings highlight the negative impact of economic uncertainties on property performance and investment volumes, which necessitate careful risk assessment. Given the high susceptibility of emerging and commercial property markets to uncertainty, these markets warrant further research amid ongoing uncertainty concerns across the globe.

Given current unprecedented levels of global uncertainty, the effects of economic uncertainty have received renewed interest. This study synthesised the current understanding of how different property markets respond to increased uncertainty and outlined future research directions to enhance understanding. Themes and relationships were also integrated into a conceptual map summarising the reported effects of economic uncertainty on housing, commercial property, investment and behaviour in the property market.

This study seeks to build a financial uncertainty index for Saudi Arabia. This index serves as a leading indicator of Saudi economic activity and helps to describe economic fluctuations and forecast economic trends.

This study adopts an extension of the Jurado et al. (2015) procedure by combining financial uncertainty factors with their net spillover effects on GDP and inflation to construct an aggregate financial uncertainty index. The authors consider 13 monthly financial variables for Saudi Arabia from January 2010 to June 2021.

The empirical results show that the constructed financial uncertainty estimates are good leading indicators of economic activity. The robustness analysis suggests that the authors’ proposed financial uncertainty estimators outperform the alternative estimates used by other existing approaches to estimate the financial conditions index.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt at constructing a financial uncertainty index for Saudi Arabia. This study extends the empirical literature, from which the authors propose a novel conceptual framework for building a financial uncertainty index by combining the approach of Jurado et al. (2015) and the time-varying connectedness network approach proposed by Antonakakis et al. (2020)

Using a GED-GARCH model to estimate monthly data from January 1990 to February 2022, we test whether gold acts as a hedge or safe haven asset in 10 countries. With a downturn of the stock market, gold can be viewed as a hedge and safe haven asset in the G7 countries. In the case of inflation, gold acts as a hedge and safe haven asset in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, China, and Indonesia. For currency depreciation, oil price shock, economic policy uncertainty, and US volatility spillover, evidence finds that gold acts as a hedge and safe haven for all countries.

Exchange rate volatility is an important factor affecting investors and policymakers. This study aims to examine the impact of uncertainties, in terms of changes in economic policy, monetary policy and global financial markets, on exchange rate volatility.

The study uses the GARCH (1,1) univariate model to calculate exchange rate volatility. Economic and monetary policy uncertainties are measured using news-based indices, while global financial market volatility is measured using the implied volatility index. Panel autoregressive distributed lag modeling is used to analyze the impact of uncertainty on exchange rate volatility in the short and long run. The sample consists of 26 developed and emerging markets from 2005 to 2020.

The study finds that economic policy uncertainty significantly increases exchange rate volatility. Similarly, global financial market uncertainty leads to increased exchange rate volatility. The effect of US monetary policy uncertainty reduces exchange rate volatility.

This research contributes to the existing literature on exchange rate fluctuations by examining the impact of uncertainties on exchange rate volatility. The study uses novel news-based indices for measuring economic and monetary policy uncertainties and includes a broader sample of emerging and advanced markets. The findings have important implications for investors and policymakers.

This paper assesses the environment of legitimacy by determining the role of institutional quality and policy uncertainty on the performance of five major South Asian stock markets (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal) using 21 years data from 2000 to 2020. The focus of this study is to approach the issue of the environment of legitimacy that leads to sustained market returns.

Panel cointegration tests of Kao and Pedroni are applied, and the Dynamic Panel Vector Autoregressive (PVAR) model is used to determine the estimates.

ADF P-Values of both Kao and Pedroni tests show that the panels are cointegrated; the statistical significance of the results of the Kao and Pedroni panel cointegration test confirms cointegration among the variables. After determining the most appropriate lag, the analysis is done using PVAR. The results indicate that institutional quality, policy uncertainty, and GDP positively affect stock market return. Meanwhile, government actions and inflation negatively affect stock market returns. On the other hand, stock market return positively affects institutional quality, government action, policy uncertainty, and GDP. While stock market return negatively affects inflation.

The sample is taken only from a limited number of South Asian countries, and the period is also limited to 21 years.

Based on our research findings, we have identified several policy implications recommended to enhance and sustain the performance of stock markets.

This paper uses a unique analytical tool, which gives a better insight into the problem. The value of this work lies in its findings, which also have practical implications and theoretical significance.

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)).

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this paper, the authors examine the short-term and long-term impact of general economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and crypto-specific policy uncertainty on Bitcoin’s (BTC) exchange inflows – a form of crypto investor behaviors that the authors expect to drive the cryptocurrency volatility.

The authors use an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL), coupled with the bounds testing approach by Pesaran et al. (2001), to analyze a weekly dataset of BTC’s exchange inflows and relevant policy uncertainty indices.

The authors observe both short-term and long-term impacts of the crypto-specific policy uncertainty on BTC’s exchange inflows, whereas the general EPU only explains these inflows in a short-term manner. In addition, the authors find exchange inflows of BTC “Granger” cause its price volatility. Furthermore, the authors document a significant and relatively persistent response of BTC volatility to shocks to its exchange inflows.

This study’s findings offer significant contributions to research in policy uncertainty and investor behaviors.

This study aims to investigate the impact of digital transformation on supply chain resilience. Additionally, the paper examines the mediating effect of supply chain process integration as well as the moderating effect of environmental uncertainty in the relationship between digital transformation and supply chain resilience.

Drawing on digital empowerment theory, this study proposes a theoretical model. Using survey data collected from 216 enterprises in China, the study employs structural equation modeling to validate the theoretical model.

The results reveal that digital transformation has a significant impact on supply chain resilience. Three dimensions of supply chain process integration, namely, information flow integration, physical flow integration, and financial flow integration mediate the relationship between digital transformation and supply chain resilience. In addition, environmental uncertainty including market uncertainty and technology uncertainty positively moderates the relationship between digital transformation and supply chain resilience.

First, this paper provides empirical evidence on both the direct and indirect effects of digital transformation on supply chain resilience. Second, this paper enriches the understanding of how supply chain integration impacts supply chain resilience in the digital transformation era by adopting a more granular perspective of process integration rather than broad external and internal integrations. Furthermore, this paper extends the knowledge of the role of external environment in digital transformation and supply chain risk management by examining the moderating effects of market uncertainty and technology uncertainty.

This study examines the value implications of oil price uncertainty for investors in diversified firms using a sample of 922 USA firms from 2001 to 2019.

Our study employs a panel dataset to examine the value implications of oil price uncertainty for diversified firm investors. We consider several alternative specifications to account for unobserved factors and measurement errors that could potentially bias our results. In particular, we use alternative measures of the excess value of diversified firms and oil price uncertainty, additional control variables, fixed-effects models, the Oster test, impact threshold for confounding variable (ITCV) analysis, two-stage least square instrumental variable (2SLS-IV) analysis and the system-GMM model.

We find that the excess value of diversified firms, relative to a benchmark portfolio of single-segment firms, increases with high oil price uncertainty. The impact of oil price uncertainty is asymmetric, as corporate diversification is value-increasing for diversified firm investors only when the volatility is due to positive oil price changes and amidst supply-driven oil price shocks. The excess value increases irrespective of diversified firms’ financial constraints and oil usage. Diversified firms become conservative in their internal capital allocations with high oil price uncertainty. Such conservatism is value-increasing for diversified firm investors, as it supports higher performance in response to oil price uncertainty.

Our study has three important implications: first, they are relevant to investors in understanding the portfolio value implications of oil price uncertainty. Second, they are helpful for firm managers while comprehending the value-relevant implications of internal capital allocations. Finally, our findings are policy relevant in the context of the future of diversified firms in developed markets.

The performance of financial markets is significantly influenced by the political environment during general elections. This study investigates the effect of general elections on stock market performance in selected African markets.

Prior studies have been inconsistent in determining whether electioneering events negatively or positively influence stock market performance. The study utilized panel data set with annual observations from 1990 to 2020. The generalized method of moments (GMM) is employed to investigate the effect of electioneering and change in government on key stock market performance indicators, including stock market capitalization, stock market turnover ratio and the value of stock traded.

The study finds that electioneering activities generally have a positive impact on the performance of the stock market, whereas a change in government has a negative impact. As a result, the study recommends that stakeholders of the stock market remain vigilant and actively monitor electioneering events to devise and implement effective policies aimed at mitigating political risks during general elections. By adopting these measures, investor confidence can be significantly enhanced, fostering a more robust and secure investment environment.

The study investigates a neglected section of the literature by highlighting not only the effect of elections on stock market indicators but also possible change in government during elections.