The role of economic policy uncertainty and geopolitical risk in predicting prices of precious metals: Evidence from a time-varying bootstrap causality test

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to analyze the causality effect of economic policy uncertainty and geopolitical risk on the prices of precious metals. We employ the Hacker and Hatemi-J (2012) bootstrap causality test and the time-varying version of this test to detect the instabilities in the causality relationship by using monthly data in the period of January 1995-August 2020. While the findings of the Hacker and Hatemi-J (2012) bootstrap causality test show there is no causal link from geopolitical risk to the precious metal prices, and there exists causality from economic policy uncertainty to all prices except gold, the findings of the time-varying causality test indicate these findings are unstable. The causality relationship exists in only some periods. It implies that the existence of the causality links from geopolitical risk and economic policy uncertainty to the precious metal prices is changing in the analysis period.