Abstract
The study of volatility in crude oil and natural gas markets and its interac-
tion with returns (leverage) has a broad range of financial impacts both from
a hedging point of view and also for forecasting purposes.The main limitation
of using daily data is that volatility is not observable. In contrast, intra-day
data provide an almost continuous observation of the return series, making
volatility observable. From an econometric point of view, the employment of
intra-day data leads to the estimation of structural parameters of stochastic
volatility models using simple moment conditions while fitting all the relevant
empirical features of energy and stock index returns. This paper contributes
to the current debate by: 1) exploring evidence of leverage effects and jumps in
energy futures markets versus financial stock indexes (S&P500) and 2) evalu-
ating the impact of leverage on risk forecasting in a VaR and CVaR sense. We
find significant evidence of a leverage effect for S&P500 and crude oil markets:
a negative shock to returns increases volatility in these markets. We also find
evidence of an inverse leverage effect for the natural gas market: volatility
becomes higher when energy returns increase. We also find evidence for jumps
in the energy futures markets. We show that the introduction of leverage
improves the forecasting ability of the SV model using the RMSE and MAE
criteria for all the markets considered while introducing jumps improves only
the ability of modeling the behaviour of the volatility for the crude oil futures
market.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 104481 |
Journal | Energy economics |
Early online date | 19 Aug 2019 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 19 Aug 2019 |