Economic Activity and Energy Markets in the Time of Crisis : Fresh Evidence during COVID-19 Pandemic Using Dynamic Time-Frequency Analysis

We investigate dynamics between the economic activities and energy markets – both conventional and clean energy markets, with a sample of daily data from January 01, 2020, to November 25, 2020. We perform wavelet-based time-frequency techniques; we measure the market volatility with continuous wavelet transforms (CWT), co-movement of economic activities, and energy markets using wavelet coherency as well as non-linear phase-difference technique to understand the time-varying causality between different series. Our CWT results show that all three market indices experience significant volatility in the COVID-19 period, notably during the initial period of the outbreak. The market volatilities are comparatively more substantial in the short frequency band than the long frequency, while the latter sustained longer in the markets. Moreover, wavelet coherency results show a strong correlation between the economic activity index and both energy market indices; however, the co-movement is significantly higher for the conventional energy market than the clean energy market. We further detect a positive and bi-directional causality between economic activities and energy market indices. Besides providing fresh and time-varying and frequency-varying variance, correlation and causal relationship between global economic activity and the energy markets, which is currently lacking in the existing literature, our study has significant implications for the heterogeneous market participants in terms of improved price prediction accuracy and policymakers for decision-making during the crisis period