Spillovers between energy and FX markets: The importance of asymmetry, uncertainty and business cycle

This study constructs a theoretical volatility transmission model for petroleum and FX markets, taking into account major stylized facts and uncertainty measures and the interactions between them under stages of the business cycle. It examines the impacts of those different specifications and economic factors on the spillovers between those considered markets. The results show that the impacts of the “own” shocks (petroleum on petroleum and currency on currency) are statistically significant and positive in almost all cases as expected for the models of natural gas and WTI oil, irrespectively of the currency considered. The asymmetry effect is stronger in the oil than in the natural gas markets. There is stronger and significant evidence that uncertainty affects volatility much more the mean. For the WTI oil, almost all policy and other uncertainty measures lead to an increase in the conditional variance. For currencies, coefficients are commonly significant independent of the presence of petroleum commodities in the bivariate model. The striking result for natural gas is the limited statistical relevance of the economic policy and other uncertainty measures due to the long contracts that characterize this market. Finally, common macroeconomic forces associated with the business cycle can drive these petroleum and currency markets and may cause jumps and co-jumps in the volatility of these markets. The conclusion provides policy implications of the paper’s results.