Asymmetric volatility spillover between oil-importing and oil-exporting countries' economic policy uncertainty and China's energy sector

Abstract

While the relationship between economic policy uncertainty(EPU) and energy market is of great interest to economist, previous research dose not differentiate the effect from oil-importing countries to oil-exporting countries' EPU on the a country's energy sector. In this paper, we address this issue by testing the effect of importer and exporter's EPU on the largest oil-importing country, China, as oil-importing affected greatly by the economic policy. TVP-FAVAR model is applied to obtain the factors and time-varying coefficients of 21 countries' EPU monthly indexes and energy stock realized volatility. We find that the Chinese energy sector's stock volatility is positively related to EPU shocks and that bad volatility has a stronger impact than good volatility. Second, the volatility spillover from oil-exporting countries' EPU on the Chinese energy sector is stronger than that from oil-importing countries' EPU, with a stronger effect for bad volatility than for good volatility. Finally, The bad volatility spillover and spillover asymmetry is stronger during the crisis periods, such as the debt crisis, energy contention, oil price turbulence, or limited production agreement, both symmetric and asymmetric spillovers increase. Our findings have potentially important implications for the regulators and investors on Chinese oil market with different types of countries' EPU.