Empirical Evidence of Dynamic Conditional Correlation Between Asian Stock Markets and US Stock Indexes During COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This study aims to explore the dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) between ten Asian stock indexes, the US stock index, and Bitcoin by using the dynamic conditional correlation model. The time span of the daily data is between January 2015 to May 2021, the total observation is 1,116. DCC(1,1)-EGARCH(1,1) with multivariate t and normal distributions for the DCC and EGARCH models, respectively, outperforms other models by the goodness of fit values. Except for Bitcoin, we discovered that the majority of the securities' volatilities have a very high volatility persistence. Furthermore, the negative shocks/news have more impact on the volatilities than positive shocks/news in most of the cases, except the stock index of China and Bitcoin. Most of the correlation pairs exhibit higher correlation during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the pre-COVID-19, except Hong Kong-The US and Malaysia-Indonesia. Moreover, the correlation between Asian stock indexes during the COVID-19 pandemic is statistically higher than the pre-COVID-19 pandemic. However, there are a few instances where the Hong Kong stock index and a few countries are identical. The result of correlation size shows the connectedness between Asian stock markets, which are well-connected within the region, especially with South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong.