Oil price uncertainty and sectoral stock returns in China: A time-varying approach

Article history: Received 20 June 2014 Received in revised form 25 September 2014 Accepted 26 September 2014 Available online 5 October 2014 This paper investigates the time-varying impact of oil price uncertainty on stock prices in China using weekly data on ten sectoral indices over the period January 1997–February 2014. The estimation of a bivariate VAR-GARCH-in-mean model suggests that oil price volatility affects stock returns positively during periods characterised by demand-side shocks in all cases except the Consumer Services, Financials, and Oil and Gas sectors. The latter two sectors are found to exhibit a negative response to oil price uncertainty during periods with supply-side shocks instead. By contrast, the impact of oil price uncertainty appears to be insignificant during periods with precautionary demand shocks. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). JEL classification: C32 Q43