Oil prices and the stock market: How COVID-19 impacts oil-importing countries?

This paper focuses on oil-exporting economies and measures the consequences of COVID-19 surgency on the magnitude and persistence of responses of stock markets in these economies to sudden changes in oil prices both before and during the pandemic. By the same token, we depict the significant structural breaks in oil-exporting stock markets over 2013-2021. Our results stipulate a majority of oil-exporting markets have been subject to a major structural break during the pandemic, whereas stock markets in China, Spain, Germany, and Japan experienced structural changes in 2014 and 2018, which are attributed to oil price shock and domestic economic factors, respectively. The results in this paper also find that, in general, the stock markets under consideration have become less responsive to fluctuations in oil price during COVID-19 than they were before its outbreak. Our findings suggest that policy makers in these countries should take further steps toward fostering the transition to alternative energy resources such as solar power and wind in order to make their economies less vulnerable to the global energy market’s shocks.