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Despite the growing recognition of the complex interplay between macroeconomic shock indexes and stock market dynamics, there is a significant research gap concerning their interconnectedness and return spillovers in the context of the African stock market. This leaves much to be desired, given that the financial market in Africa is arguably one of the most preferred destinations for hedge and portfolio diversification (Alagidede, 2008; Anyikwa and Le Roux, 2020). Further, like other financial markets across the globe, the increased capital flow, coupled with declining information asymmetry in Africa, has deepened intra and inter-sectoral integration within and across national borders. This has, thus, increased the susceptibility of financial markets in Africa to spillover of shocks from other sectors and jurisdictions. Additionally, while previous studies have investigated these factors individually (Asafo-Adjei et al., 2020), with much emphasis on developed markets, an all-encompassing examination of spillovers and the connectedness between the aforementioned macroeconomic shock indexes and stock market returns remains largely unexplored. This study happens to be the first to consider the impact of each of the indexes on stock returns in Africa, with evidence spanning from May 2007 to April 2023, covering notable global crisis episodes such as the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine war.

This study employs the novel quantile vector autoregression (QVAR) model, making it the first of its kind in literature. By applying the QVAR, the study captures the potential nonlinear and asymmetric relationship between stock returns and the factors of interest across different quantiles, i.e. bearish, normal and bullish market conditions. Thus, the approach allows for a more accurate and nuanced examination of the tail dependence and extreme events, providing insights into the behaviour of the variables under extreme events.

The study revealed that connectedness and spillovers intensified under bearish and bullish market conditions. It was also observed that, among the macroeconomic shock indicators, FSI exerted the highest influence on stock returns in Africa in both bullish and normal market conditions. Across the various market regimes, the Egyptian Exchange (EGX) and the Nairobi Stock Exchange (NSE) were net receiver of shocks.

This study happens to be the first to consider the impact of each of the indexes on stock returns in Africa, with evidence spanning from May 2007 to April 2023, covering notable global crisis episodes such as the GFC, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine war. On the methodology front, this study employs the novel QVAR model, making it one of the few studies in recent literature to apply the said method.

We study five exogenous shocks: climate, violence, price hikes, spoilage and the COVID-19 lockdown. We analyze the association between these shocks and trader characteristics, reflecting trader vulnerability.

Using primary survey data on 1,100 Nigerian maize traders for 2021 (controlling for shocks in 2017), we use probit models to estimate the probabilities of experiencing climate, violence, disease and cost shocks associated with trader characteristics (gender, size and region) and to estimate the probability of vulnerability (experiencing severe impacts).

Traders are prone to experiencing more than one shock, which increases the intensity of the shocks. Price shocks are often accompanied by violence, climate and COVID-19 shocks. The poorer northern region is disproportionately affected by shocks. Northern traders experience more price shocks while Southern traders are more affected by violence shocks given their dependence on long supply chains from the north for their maize. Female traders are more likely to experience violent events than men who tend to be more exposed to climate shocks.

The data only permit analysis of the general degree of impact of a shock rather than quantifying lost income.

This paper is the first to analyze the incidence of multiple shocks on grain traders and the unequal distribution of negative impacts. It is the first such in Africa based on a large sample of grain traders from a primary survey.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and analyse the dynamic relationship between remittances inflows of Egyptians working abroad and asymmetric oil price shocks.

This study uses a vector autoregressive (VAR) model to explain the impulse response functions (IRFs) and the forecast error variance decomposition (FEVD). The rationale behind using these tools is its ability to examine the dynamic effects of our variables of interest.

The impulse response functions confirmed that remittance inflows have various responses to asymmetric oil price shocks. For instance, inflowing remittances increase in response to positive oil price shocks, while it decreases in response to negative oil price shocks. Also, the results indicate that the responses are significant in the short and medium-run and insignificant in the long run. The magnitude of these responses reaches its peak or trough in the third year. Further, the variance decomposition reveals that oil price decreases are more influential than oil price increases.

This means that remittances inflows in Egypt are pro-cyclical with oil price shocks. That explained by the fact that more than one-half of those remittances sent from GCC countries where real economic growth is very pro-cyclical with the oil prices. This empirical assessment will help policymakers to determine the behaviour of remittances and highlights the impact of different kinds of oil prices shocks on remittances. Unlike the little existing literature, this study is the first study applied the VAR model using a novel dataset spanning 1960-2016.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a dating system for the Italian residential real estate market from 1927 to 2019 and investigate its interaction with credit and business cycles.

To detect the local turning point of the Italian residential real estate market, the authors apply the honeycomb cycle developed by Janssen et al. (1994) based on the joint analysis of house prices and the number of transactions. To this end, the authors use a unique historical reconstruction of house price levels by Baffigi and Piselli (2019) in addition to data on transactions.

This study confirms the validity of the honeycomb model for the last four decades of the Italian housing market. In addition, the results show that the severe downsizing of the housing market is largely associated with business and credit contraction, certainly contributing to exacerbating the severity of the recession. Finally, preliminary evidence suggests that whenever a price bubble occurs, it is coincident with the start of phase 2 of the honeycomb cycle.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that the honeycomb approach has been tested over such a long historical period and compared to the cyclic features of financial and real aggregates. In addition, even if the honeycomb cycle is not a model for detecting booms and busts in the housing market, the preliminary evidence might suggest a role for volume/transactions in detecting housing market bubbles.

This article provides evidence of a long-term structural relationship between demand for heated tobacco products (HTPs) and for combustible cigarettes in a Marshallian demand framework, using data from the Italian market.

A cointegration-based approach allows to capture the substitution effects between the two products arising for reasons (possibly) other than price.

The authors find that such a relationship exists and is sufficiently strong to constitute a cointegration.

Since a fully consolidated consensus on reduced harm from smokeless tobacco products is absent, symmetric policies on both markets are therefore necessary in terms of regulation and excise incidence to minimize the social cost of substitution and to maximize government revenues, which are a necessary counterpart to negative externalities that arise with smoking both products.

This paper focuses on the Italian market with product specific volume and price data, both for cigarettes and HTPs. Because of the detected relationship, a regulatory trade-off arises in case of a relatively mild regulation on heated-tobacco products: benefits from decreasing demand for combustible cigarettes may be offset by the social cost of increasing consumption of heated tobacco products. Moreover, a milder regulation makes price related policies to curb smoking less effective.

This paper aims to empirically investigate the sources of real exchange rate fluctuations in Egypt using structural vector autoregression (SVAR). The data covers the period between 1980 and 2016, where exchange regime has been changed more than once.

This paper investigates the source of real exchange rate fluctuations for the period between 1980 and 2016 using the SVAR method. The SVAR method will incorporate real gross domestic product (GDP), real effective exchange rate (REER) and price level in a multidimensional equations system. However, impulse response function (IRF) and error variance decompositions (EVDC) will be generated by the system to have a behavioral insight of real exchange rate in response to economic shocks.

The IRF and EVDC results indicate a significant impact of demand shocks over the real exchange rate relative to supply shocks and monetary shocks in the period between 1980 and 2016. On the other hand, monetary shocks will have a negligible effect on the real exchange rate in the short run and converging to its previous level in the covering period of the study.

In the best of the authors' knowledge, the topic of the source of the real exchange rate fluctuations in Egypt has not been discussed in a wide range due to the lack of time series data. However, this study provides constructed data for REER for Egypt with the published method in the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Furthermore, the study involves theoretical and econometric modeling to ensure the reliability of the economic results.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post-COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future.

How did investors in the Swedish Premium Pension System (PPS) react to the stock market shock ignited by the COVID-19 pandemic?

The authors use fund-level data from the Swedish Pensions Agency on investment choices in the PPS. For each fund, the authors use monthly information on the number of investors and holdings' market value up to November 2020. The authors also use information on the total number of portfolio changes per day. For analyzing whether PPS investors reacted to the pandemic with claiming their pension, the authors use monthly data on the number of investors of a certain age group who initiate their public pension payment.

Trades more than doubled, and shifted capital from equity funds to low risk interest funds. In economic terms, however, trading stayed at low levels–less than two percent of investors traded in March 2020 and there was no effect on pension withdrawals. The increased trading during the market tumult was disproportionately concentrated among investors in the top of the pension capital distribution.

With fund-level data, the authors cannot investigate what in particular made retirement investors stay calm in the midst of a severe market decline. Either, those investors have a long-term investment horizon as they save for their pension or particular features of the system's choice architecture induce inertia and discourage from trading. The sub-group analyses are more consistent with the explanation that PPS-induced inertia is responsible for the relatively small increase in trading activity, but future research could exploit individual level data to explore this in more detail.

The often-criticized PPS choice architecture provided positive side effects in times of a severe market shock by shielding retail investors from committing trading mistakes when trying to outsmart the market.

The study complements previous evidence on the effects of COVID-19 on investor activity. The small response of PPS investors to COVID-19 is in line with earlier US findings on 401(k) accounts during the 2007 financial crisis (Tang et al., 2012) and industry reports about the COVID-19 period (see, e.g. Mitchell, 2020). The authors find no effects at all on public pension withdrawals in Sweden, while evidence from US 401(k) plans indicates a small share of workers taking COVID-related early withdrawals.

This research aims to determine the factors that affected Bitcoin price return in the period before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The independent variables used in this study are hashrate, transaction volume, social media and some macroeconomics variables. The data are processed using the vector error correction model (VECM) to determine the short-term and long-term relationships between variables.

The research shows that (1) Twitter and Gold significantly affected Bitcoin in the short term before the COVID-19 pandemic; (2) hashrate, transaction volume, Twitter and the financial stress index had a significant effect on Bitcoin in the long term before the COVID-19 pandemic; (3) the volatility index had a significant effect on Bitcoin in the short term during the COVID-19 pandemic; and (4) hashrate, transaction volume, Twitter and CHF/USD had a significant effect on Bitcoin in the long term during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This research provides explanation about factors affecting Bitcoin so investors and regulators can pay more attention and prepare for the potential risks as well as to get a good understanding of market conditions for greater crypto adoption in the future.

The novelty in this study is the various factors driving the Bitcoin price were analyzed before and during the COVID-19 pandemic including the social media, as sentiment, interestingly, is being a predictive power for Bitcoin price return.

This study aims to analyze the contagious effects of economic policy uncertainties in the USA on the economies of its important trading partners, such as Japan, Canada, Mexico and the Eurozone.

In the study using the uncertainty index created by Baker et al. (2016), the interaction between variables was analyzed with structural VAR (SVAR) models.

According to the results obtained from the analysis, economic policy uncertainties in the USA had significant effects on the economies of its high-volume trading partners. The internal debt crisis experienced in the Eurozone after the 2008 crisis caused the European Central Bank to respond to the economic policy uncertainties in the USA with contractionary monetary policies, unlike other countries. In addition to these results, Mexico, which has a more fragile economic structure than other countries in the analysis, was more impacted by increasing uncertainties, as expected.

The present study aimed to bring a new perspective to the literature by evaluating the contagiousness of local uncertainty in the globalizing world and the monetary policies implemented as a precaution against this situation on an empirical plane.