This paper studies the dependence between crude oil and RCEP stock markets before and after COVID-19 by using local Gaussian correlations, contagion tests, and time-frequency domain causality tests. Empirical results show that the lower tail dependence considerably enhanced except in China, while the higher tail dependence significantly increased in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Thailand. Contagion is detected from the WTI oil to New Zealand and Thailand stocks. The crude oil market has a short-term (0–32 day frequency) effect on RCEP stock markets, whereas the RCEP stock markets have a relatively stronger, long-term (64–128 day frequency) impact on crude oil markets. RCEP public panic disrupted the oil and stock markets during the Delta and Omicron spread. These findings may help the RCEP governments, institutions, and investors boost energy cooperation, capital flow, and cross-border investments under different market states and investment horizons.

Given that policy uncertainty shocks in the economic environment can exacerbate financial market volatility and pose financial risks, this paper utilizes a smooth transition version of the GARCH-MIDAS model to investigate the impact of different structural state changes in economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on stock market volatility. The extended model explains the nonlinear effects of the macro variables and the structural break changes in regime transitions. The empirical results confirm that the EPU indicators provide effective prediction information for stock volatility from the in-sample and out-of-sample analyses, which reveals that the smooth transition model provides an effective method for detecting the possible regime changes between stock volatility and macro-economic uncertainty. Additionally, we further confirm that some category-specific EPU indicators also have strong smooth transition behaviour with respect to stock volatility. More important, our new model provides significant economic value to investors from a utility gain perspective. Overall, the institutional changes present in EPU play a nonnegligible and important role in stock market volatility. Accurate identification of the struc-tural features of financial data helps investors deepen their understanding of the sources of stock market volatility.

Energy is the material basis of national development, which supports national economic development. With the sustained and rapid economic growth, the energy problem has become the bottleneck hindering sustainable economic and social development, and countries around the world are paying attention to its impact. The development and utilization of New Energy (NE) are inseparable from the support of technological innovation. Technological innovation is an important part of technological philosophy in technological philosophy and the embodiment of value theory. At the current stage of NE economic and ecological development, the contradiction of social values can be solved, because these contradictions can be solved through technological innovation” has been added to the article. To some extent, NE technologies are becoming a new basis for influencing the global pattern and human development. The research on the impact of technological innovation on energy is also helpful to study the impact of science and technology on society. Therefore, this paper studied the relationship between energy technology innovation and economic sustainability by analyzing the characteristics, elements, and challenges of NE technology innovation. Finally, the corresponding implementation strategy was optimized according to the current situation of the NE industry. The resource utilization rate, energy system perfection, and economic benefits after NE technology innovation in complex environment were higher than those before technology innovation. Among them, the resource utilization rate after NE technology innovation was 12.3% higher than that before NE technology innovation; the degree of energy system perfection after NE technology innovation was 9.4% higher than that before NE technology innovation; the economic benefit after NE technology innovation was 9.4% higher than that before NE technology innovation. In short, energy technology innovation was closely related to economic sustainability.

In the period of extreme events, this paper aims to study the extreme risk transmission between Bitcoin and crude oil market by using the extreme Granger causality test to test their causal relationship under extreme and non-extreme shocks. First, we can obtain different shocks of Bitcoin and crude oil returns based on empirical quantiles. Second, considering the different role that these shocks played in the causality between Bitcoin and crude oil, we conduct our research by testing the causality among different pairwise shocks. Further, given that these relationships may be changed at different time horizons, we also detect them from a frequency-domain perspective. Hence, we not only find the strong evidence of extreme risk transmission between Bitcoin and crude oil but also investigate the time-varying characteristic of this transmission, which may have a great impact on market participants and scholars related to Bitcoin-oil relations.

Since the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, global economic performance has been severely affected, which also causes natural resource price instability. Recently, scholars and policy-makers put more attention towards the global economic performance and natural resource volatility nexus. This study investigates four South Asian economies (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan) from 1991 to 2021. Using the (Pesaran, 2007) CIPS unit root test, the study found first differenced stationary data cointegrated as confirmed by the (Westerlund, 2007) cointegration test. However, this study employed the CCEMG approach to identify the association of natural resource volatility and economic performance in the selected region. Empirical results revealed that total natural resource rents, forest rents, and oil prices negatively and significantly affect economic performance. While oil rents, coal rents, and natural gas rents have a significant contribution to the region's economic performance. Results further illustrate a bidirectional causal association between economic performance and other variables except for coal rents, which is unidirectional. Based on the empirical findings, the current study acclaims some practical implications that could potentially reduce the negative influence of natural resources volatility on economic performance.

Infectious disease pandemic has been proved to have deep effects on financial and commodity markets. Gold and crude oil as two commonly used commodities to diversify a wide variety of uncertainties are both very susceptible to public health emergencies. The aim of this paper is to quantify the impacts of infectious disease pandemic on the long-term volatility and correlation of gold and crude oil markets by using the DCC-MIDAS approach. The empirical results show that infectious disease pandemic does has prominent positive impacts on the long-run volatilities of both gold and crude oil markets, and these impacts are strengthened with the time lags of infectious disease pandemic. Furthermore, crude oil market is more vulnerable to public health emergencies than gold market. Finally, infectious disease pandemic also has significantly positive effects on the long-term correlation between gold and crude oil markets. These findings have profound implications for gold and crude oil traders in terms of risk management and portfolio allocation.

Gold as a vital hedging asset plays increasing critical roles in risk management during turmoil macroeconomic environments. For the massive and indistinct impactors of gold price volatility, this paper tries to investigate whether the short- and long-term asymmetry, extreme observations, and jump components in past gold volatility help to obtain higher forecasting accuracy in future volatility from both in-sample and out-of-sample perspectives. A variety of evaluation methods are utilized to compare the performances of GARCH-MIDAS models incorporating these volatility components and the standard ones without them. The results of in-sample estimation show first that all the short-term and long-term asymmetry, extreme observations, and jump components have significantly impact on gold volatility. The evaluation results of out-of-sample forecasts suggest that the forecasting accuracy of gold volatility can be significantly improved by most of the extended GARCH-MIDAS models including asymmetry, extreme observations, and jump components. The model including short-term jump intensity and the model with both long-term asymmetry and long-term leverage effects have better forecasting performances than other models for gold volatility, especially for regular volatility. Moreover, GARCH-MIDAS models incorporating long-term leverage and long-term jump have better performances in forecasting accuracy of extreme gold volatility.

This article uses a variety of survey methods to conduct investigations and analyses the proportion and economic benefits of cultural industries in China's emerging markets in the past five years, as well as the impact of new cultural industries and economic industries in the context of economic globalisation. The research results show that in the total economic output value, the proportion of new cultural industries is getting higher and higher, which stems from the support of national policies. However, it also inevitably has some shortcomings, such as the rigid content form of some cultural industries, which is inconsistent with consumer psychology; the level of industrial clusters is low, the market environment problems are prominent; the protection of intellectual property rights is not strong enough, and infringements occur from time to time, etc. Only by solving these problems can the cultural industry achieve healthy and substantial development.