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This paper investigates the impact of global sentiment and various coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)-related media coverage news (Media-Hype index; Panic Index; Media Coverage Index, infodemic index and coronavirus statistics) on the dynamics of bitcoin returns during the COVID-19 pandemic using an asymmetric framework.

The authors use an asymmetric framework based on quantile regression (QR) and quantile-on-quantile regression.

QR results show that COVID-19 panic news negatively affects bitcoin market returns at times of extreme bearish. However, COVID-19 bullish sentiment negatively impacts bitcoin market returns during bullish market conditions. Quantile-on-quantile approach's (QQA) empirical results show that the effects of COVID-19-related news on bitcoin returns were heterogeneous, mainly negative and varied across quantiles.

The authors find some significant differences regarding the impact of news on bitcoin return dynamics compared to stock markets, suggesting the safe-haven role of bitcoin against stock during the ongoing epidemic.

The authors find some significant differences regarding the impact of news on bitcoin return dynamics compared to stock markets, suggesting the safe-haven role of bitcoin against stock during the ongoing epidemic.

This study contributes to understanding the dynamics of bitcoin returns using various COVID-19 media news.

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)