Connectedness of green investments and uncertainties: new evidence from emerging markets

Abstract

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the response of green investments of emerging countries to own-market uncertainty, oil-market uncertainty and COVID-19 effect/geo-political risks (GPRs), using the tail risks of corresponding markets as measures of uncertainty.Design/methodology/approachThis study employs Westerlund and Narayan (2015) (WN)-type distributed lag model that simultaneously accounts for persistence, endogeneity and conditional heteroscedasticity, within a single model framework. The tail risks are obtained using conditional standard deviation of the residuals from an asymmetric autoregressive moving average – ARMA(1,1) – generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity – GARCH(1,1) model framework with Gaussian innovation. For out-of-sample forecast evaluation, the study employs root mean square error (RMSE), and Clark and West (2007) (CW) test for pairwise comparison of nested models, under three forecast horizons; providing statistical justification for incorporating oil tail risks and COVID-19 effects or GPRs in the predictive model.FindingsGreen returns responds significantly to own-market uncertainty (mostly positively), oil-market uncertainty (mostly positively) as well as the COVID-19 effect (mostly negatively), with some evidence of hedging potential against uncertainties that are external to the green investments market. Also, incorporating external uncertainties improves the in-sample predictability and out-of-sample forecasts, and yields some economic gains.Originality/valueThis study contributes originally to the green market-uncertainty literature in four ways. First, it generates daily tail risks (a more realistic measure of uncertainty) for emerging countries’ green returns and global oil prices. Second, it employs WN-type distributed lag model that is well suited to account for conditional heteroscedasticity, endogeneity and persistence effects; which characterizes financial series. Third, it presents both in-sample predictability and out-of-sample forecast performances. Fourth, it provides the economic gains of incorporating own-market, oil-market and COVID-19 uncertainty.