The Impact of Global Financial Crisis and COVID-19 Pandemic on Crude Oil Futures Returns

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of the global financial crisis and of the present COVID-19 pandemic on daily and weekly Crude oil futures using four variants of ARMA-GARCH models: ARMA-sGARCH, ARMA-eGARCH, ARMA-TGARCH and ARMA- aPARCH with dummy variables We also investigated the persistence, half-life and backtesting of the models. This study therefore seeks to contribute to the body of literature on the impact of the global financial crisis and the present COVID-19 pandemic on the crude oil futures market. The impact of the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 on the crude oil futures has not been investigated at present. We obtained and analyzed the daily and weekly crude oil futures from secondary sources. The daily crude oil futures used in this study cover the period from 4th January 2000 to 27th April 2020 while the weekly crude oil futures covered the period from 2nd January 2000 to 26th April 2020. The global financial crisis period covered the period from 2nd July 2007 to 31st March 2009 and the current COVID-19 pandemic covered the period from 1st January 2020 to 27th April, 2020.  The study used both Student t and skewed Student t innovations with AIC, goodness-of-test fit and backtesting to select the best model.  Most of the estimated ARMA-GARCH models are supported by skewed Student t distribution while most of the ARMA-GARCH models exhibited high persistence values in the presence of the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. In the overall, the estimated ARMA(1,0)-eGARCH(2,1) and ARMA(1,0)-eGARCH(2,2) model for daily crude oil futures and weekly crude oil futures respectively have been significantly impacted by the global financial crisis and the Present COVID-19 pandemic while the preferred estimated models also passed the goodness-of-test fit and backtesting. This study recommends shareholders and investors should think outside the box as crude oil futures tend to be affected by the global financial crisis and COVID-19 pandemic while countries also that depend mostly on crude oil are encouraged to diversify their economy in order to survive and be sustained during the financial and health crisis.