Oil prices and agricultural commodity markets: Evidence from pre and during COVID-19 outbreak

This paper represents an analysis of the spillover effects and time-frequency connectedness between crude oil prices and agricultural commodity markets using both the spillover index of Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) and the wavelet coherence model to evaluate whether the time-varying return spillover index exhibited the intensity and direction of transmission during the Covid-19 outbreak. Overall, the current results shed light on that in comparison with the pre-Covid-19 period, and the return spillover is more apparent during the Covid-19 crisis. However, levels of the intensity of this relationship vary through the period of research, with several intervals witnessing both negative and positive interactions. Further, our findings indicate significant heterogeneity among agriculture commodity markets in the degree of spillover to crude oil prices over time, amplifying our understanding of the economic channels through which the agriculture commodity markets are correlated. More importantly, there exist significant dependent patterns about the information spillovers across the crude oil and agriculture commodity markets might provide prominent implications for portfolio managers, investors, and government agencies.

Automated summary

This study finds that during the Covid-19 outbreak, the return spillovers between crude oil prices and agricultural commodity markets are more pronounced, but the intensity of the spillover relationship varies throughout the research period, with both negative and positive interactions.