Oil prices implied volatility or direction: Which matters more to financial markets?

Brice V. Dupoyet () and Corey A. Shank ()
Additional contact information
Brice V. Dupoyet: Florida International University, College of Business
Corey A. Shank: Dalton State College

Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, 2018, vol. 32, issue 3, No 2, 275-295

Abstract: Abstract We examine the impact of oil price uncertainty on US stock returns by industry using the US Oil Fund options implied volatility OVX index and a GJR-GARCH model. We test the effect of the implied volatility of oil on a wide array of domestic industries’ returns using daily data from 2007 to 2016, controlling for a variety of variables such as aggregate market returns, market volatility, exchange rates, interest rates, and inflation expectations. Our main finding is that the implied volatility of oil prices has a consistent and statistically significant negative impact on nine out of the ten industries defined in the Fama and French (J Financ Econ 43:153–193, 1997) 10-industry classification. Oil prices, on the other hand, yield mixed results, with only three industries showing a positive and significant effect, and two industries exhibiting a negative and significant effect. These findings are an indication that the volatility of oil has now surpassed oil prices themselves in terms of influence on financial markets. Furthermore, we show that both oil prices and their volatility have a positive and significant effect on corporate bond credit spreads. Overall, our results indicate that oil price uncertainty increases the risk of future cash flows for goods and services, resulting in negative stock market returns and higher corporate bond credit spreads.

Keywords: Oil implied volatility; OVX; Stock returns; Industries; Credit spreads; E43; G12; Q43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11408-018-0314-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:fmktpm:v:32:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s11408-018-0314-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... nt/journal/11408/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11408-018-0314-7

Access Statistics for this article

Financial Markets and Portfolio Management is currently edited by Manuel Ammann

More articles in Financial Markets and Portfolio Management from Springer, Swiss Society for Financial Market Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().