Volatility impacts on the European banking sector: GFC and COVID-19

Jonathan A Batten; Tonmoy Choudhury; Harald Kinateder; Niklas F Wagner

doi:10.1007/s10479-022-04523-8

Volatility impacts on the European banking sector: GFC and COVID-19

Ann Oper Res. 2022 Feb 18:1-26. doi: 10.1007/s10479-022-04523-8. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Jonathan A Batten¹, Tonmoy Choudhury², Harald Kinateder³, Niklas F Wagner³

Affiliations

¹ RMIT University College of Business, Melbourne, VIC Australia.
² IRC of Finance and Digital Economy, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Dhahran, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
³ School of Business, Economics and Information Systems, University of Passau, Passau, Germany.

Abstract

This paper analyses the volatility transmission between European Global Systematically Important Banks (GSIBs) and implied stock market volatility. A Dynamic Conditional Correlation Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity model is applied to determine the dynamic correlation between returns of Europe's GSIBs and the world's most prominent measure of market "fear", the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX). The results identify a higher negative co-relationship between the VIX and GSIB returns during the COVID-19 period compared with the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), with one-day lagged changes in the VIX negatively Granger-causing bank returns. The asymmetric impact of changes in implied volatility is examined by quantile regressions, with the findings showing that in the lower quartile-where extreme negative bank returns are present-jumps in the VIX are highly significant. This effect is more pronounced during COVID-19 than during the GFC. Additional robustness analysis shows that these findings are consistent during the periods of the Swine Flu and Zika virus epidemics.

Keywords: COVID-19; DCC-GARCH; Europe; GFC; Global systematically important banks; Implied volatility; Swine Flu (H1N1); Zika virus.