Analysing the behavioural, psychological, and demographic determinants of financial decision making of household investors.

Adding to the behavioural science domain, the principal idea behind the study is to investigate the impact of an array of behavioural, psychological, and demographic factors on financial decision making. The study utilizes a structured questionnaire to collect the opinions of 634 investors using a blend of random and snowball sampling techniques. The partial least squares structural equation modelling has been used to test hypotheses.

COVID-19 and stock returns: Evidence from the Markov switching dependence approach.

This paper aims to investigate the regime-switching and time-varying dependence between the COVID-19 pandemic and the US stock markets using a Markov-switching framework. It makes two contributions to the empirical literature by showing that: (a) the variations of the daily reported COVID-19 cases and cumulative COVID-19 deaths induced asymmetric lower (left) and upper (right) tail dependence with the stock markets, and its left and right tail dependence exhibited significant time-varying trends; and (b) the left and right tail dependence between the stock markets and the pandemic exhibited significant regime-switching behaviours, with its switching probabilities in the higher tail dependence stage all being greater than in the lower tail dependence stage after 1 December 2019. Moreover, given that there is concurrent but significant financial market reaction to any unexpected emergence of a transmittable respirational disease or a natural calamity, the outcomes have some vital implications to market players and policymakers.

Testing the moderating role of trade openness on the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis: a novel approach.

We explore the moderating role of trade openness (TO) by gauging its main and interaction effects on the economic growth and environmental quality nexus. In this direction, we implement a novel approach by using three different measures of pollution emissions (CO-CH-PM) in the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis and applying a structural equation modelling methodology to 115 countries, grouped into low-, middle- and high-income countries, spanning the period 1992-2018. The evidence suggests that energy consumption has a positive impact on CO emissions for all income panels whilst the moderating effect of TO appears to be a key degrading factor of environmental quality in low- and middle-income countries.