Oil price fluctuations, online public concern and safe haven markets during covid-19

Abstract

The spread of COVID-19 across the globe, which began at the end of december 2019, is an invisible global shock whose impact is not limited to health related issues. Its effects have rapidly propagated to the global economic and financial system as well. This thesis measures the effects of the outbreak of covid-19 and of related public concerns with respect to the oil, gold and real estate markets. Public concern is proxied through topic and country specific google trends indices. Whereas, the severity of the outbreak is proxied through the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Stringency indices. First, I analyse their cross-correlation with the performance of financial markets. Second, I estimate their impact on oil and safe haven market indices. This for five oil producing countries, namely the US, Saudi Arabia, Russia, China and Nigeria. In addition, I check if during the outbreak the exchange rate of the currencies of these countries, with respect to the dollar, responded to COVID-19, and to related concerns measured with Google Trends indices.