Is the relationship between gold and the U.S. dollar always negative? The role of macroeconomic uncertainty

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe main work of this article is to access the role of macroeconomic uncertainty in effecting the correlation between gold and the dollar. The empirical analysis is divided into two parts. Firstly, we examine the impact of macroeconomic uncertainty on short and long correlation between gold and the dollar. Secondly, we analyse the explanatory power of economic uncertainty for the abnormal market relation between gold and the dollar with a threshold model. In particular, we investigate impacts of economic uncertainty sourced from different economies. The empirical results indicate that economic uncertainty generates direct impacts on the correlation between gold and the dollar. Moreover, our results emphasize that uncertainty sourced from different economies have different impacts on the dynamics between gold and the dollar. This article also presents the relative contribution of gold and the dollar shocks to the likelihood of being in the high-uncertainty regime. These results have implications for risk management, international asset allocation and hedging strategies.