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This study aims to investigate the impact of the rise in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases on stock prices, exchange rates and sovereign bond yields in both Brazil and India.

The authors employ the wavelet transform coherence (WTC) and continuous wavelet transform (CWT) techniques on daily data from March 17, 2020 to May 8, 2021.

The findings show that COVID-19 has no impact on exchange rates but slightly increases sovereign bond yields from 2021 onwards. In contrast, the effect of COVID-19 on stock prices is quite high in both countries. There is a considerable consistency between COVID-19 cases and stock prices across different time–frequency dimensions. The rise in COVID-19 cases has an increasing effect on stock prices in Brazil and India, especially in the high-frequency ranges.

As far as the authors know, no prior study has simultaneously analyzed the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on exchange rates, stock prices and sovereign bonds in Brazil and India.

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and stock prices during the period from March 2003 to March 2021.

The study uses asymmetric and symmetric frequency domain causality tests and focuses on BRIC countries, namely, Brazil, Russia, India and China.

The findings of the symmetric causality test confirm unidirectional permanent causality from EPU to stock prices for Brazil and India and bidirectional causality for China. However, according to the asymmetric causality test, the findings for China show that there is no causality between the variables. The results for Brazil and India indicate that there is unidirectional permanent causality from positive components of EPU to positive components of stock prices. Moreover, for Brazil, there is unidirectional temporary causality from the negative components of EPU to the negative components of stock prices. For India, there is temporary causality in the opposite direction.

The reactions of financial markets to positive and negative shocks differ. In this context, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to examine the causal relationships between stock prices and uncertainty using an asymmetric frequency domain approach. Thus, the study enables the analysis of the effects of positive and negative shocks in the stock market separately.