How does stock market reflect the change in economic demand? A study on the industry-specific volatility spillover networks of China's stock market during the outbreak of COVID-19

TL;DR

This study analyzes how China's stock market industry-specific volatility networks reflect changes in economic demand during COVID-19, revealing demand-driven spillover effects and sector roles amid the pandemic.

Contribution

It introduces a demand-oriented network reconstruction method to better understand economic demand shifts through industry volatility spillovers during COVID-19.

Findings

Spillover effects from investment to consumption sectors increased during COVID-19 outbreak.

Post-outbreak containment, spillover effects significantly decreased.

Services sectors like utilities and transportation became more influential in volatility networks.

Abstract

Using the carefully selected industry classification standard, we divide 102 industry securities indices in China's stock market into four demand-oriented sector groups and identify demand-oriented industry-specific volatility spillover networks. The "deman-oriented" is a new idea of reconstructing the structure of the networks considering the relationship between industry sectors and the economic demand their outputs meeting. Networks with the new structure help us improve the understanding of the economic demand change, especially when the macroeconomic is dramatically influenced by exogenous shocks like the outbreak of COVID-19. At the beginning of the outbreak of COVID-19, in China's stock market, spillover effects from industry indices of sectors meeting the investment demand to those meeting the consumption demands rose significantly. However, these spillover effects fell after the outbreak containment in China appeared to be effective. Besides, some services sectors including utility, transportation and information services have played increasingly important roles in the networks of industry-specific volatility spillovers as of the COVID-19 out broke. By implication, firstly, being led by Chinese government, the COVID-19 is successfully contained and the work resumption is organized with a high efficiency in China. The risk of the investment demand therefore was controlled and eliminated relatively fast. Secondly, the intensive using of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) led to supply restriction in services in China. It will still be a potential threat for the Chinese economic recovery in the next stage.