The Economic Policy Uncertainty in China, the United States, and Europe: The Empirical Impact on Chinese Stock Markets

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) in China, the United States, and Europe, which are influent to the Chinese stock markets. We employed Vector Autoregression (VAR) model with relative variables including the EPU indices and three Chinese stock markers indices to display the impulse responses of the markets to the EPUs. Our results indicate that the Chinese stock markets negatively respond to their domestic economic policy uncertainty in the first, second, and third month after the EPU shocks. Moreover, we also found the negative responses of the Chinese markets to the EPU from the United States that require five months to rebalance the markets. However, the Chinese markets seem positively respond to the shocks of the economic policy uncertainty in Europe and also took five months to archive market rebalancing. The significant correlation of the economic policy uncertainty between China and the United States resulted in cross-sectional correlation estimates among the EPU indices. Furthermore, there is the reasonable interesting result to claim that the economic policy uncertainty in China is statistically influenced by their own trade and fiscal policy uncertainty that may be considered to be related with China-US trade war in our conclusion.