Emerging Market Riskiness and Uncertainty Spillovers: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper investigates the effects of uncertainty spillovers on emerging markets. We focus on COVID-19-related news as news about global uncertainty and estimate the dynamic response of high-frequency risk measures in emerging markets. Using heteroskedasticity-based estimation and aggregate emerging market indices, we show that heightened uncertainty increases government bond and CDS spreads and decreases stock prices. Using seven emerging markets, we show that country-level risk measures respond to uncertainty consistently with aggregate measures. We argue that the results are consistent with standard consumption-based asset pricing theory.