The Impact of Financial Stress on Gold, Currency and Stock Markets in Iran: Time-Varying Granger-Causality Approach

This study provides a comprehensive and different sight at the theoretical literature of the relationship between financial stress index and financial markets and presents a new method in order to investigate the nonlinear relationship between the financial stress index and financial markets for Iran's financial system. To that end, the time-varying Granger-causality tests were used. After calculating the financial stress index, the causality between these variable and other variables (gold price, exchange rate, and stock price index) was evaluated. The time-varying causality tests included forward, rolling, and recursive estimators from April 2005 to December 2019. All results were recalculated regarding time series variance heterogeneity for sensitivity assessment. The estimation findings were more credible in terms of variance heterogeneity due to the monthly nature of the data employed and the high probability of variance heterogeneity. The estimation results with variance heterogeneity and time-varying Granger-causality variable test used to investigate the relationship between financial stress and the stock market also revealed no evidence of causality between financial stress and the stock price index using forward and rolling algorithms. Findings indicate that the financial stress is the source of variations in the Iranian gold market, it does not affect the currency or stock markets.