Does Uncertainty Indices Impact the Cryptocurrency Market?

Abstract

Research Question: Does uncertainty indices have impact on cryptocurrency? Motivation: Most of the previous study investigate the impact of geopolitical risk and economic policy uncertainty on Bitcoin only and less research investigate the long run and short run relationship between the uncertainty indices and cryptocurrency. Hence, this study investigates whether the economic policy uncertainty, geopolitical risk and US equity market uncertainty have an impact on Bitcoin, Ethereum and Binance Coin by the multivariate VAR Granger non-causality. Idea: This study applied three different uncertainty indices (geopolitical risk, economic policy uncertainty and US equity market uncertainty) and top three ranking cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Ethereum and Binance Coin) to investigate and compare the impact of uncertainty indices on cryptocurrency with different uncertainty conditions and applied top three ranking cryptocurrency in cryptocurrency market to reinforce the result. Data: This study applied monthly data with 42 observations which cover the period of December 2017 until May 2021 and data for cryptocurrency extracted from investing.com, while the uncertainty indices from policyuncertainty.com. Method/Tools: This study utilize multivariate VAR Granger non-causality to examine the cointegration relationship between the cryptocurrency and uncertainty indices. Findings: The results show that the economic policy uncertainty, geopolitical risk and US equity market uncertainty cointegrated with Bitcoin, while Binance Coin cointegrated with geopolitical risk only. Hence, the economic policy uncertainty, geopolitical risk and US equity market uncertainty plays a vital role in the Bitcoin prediction and geopolitical risk plays an important role to forecast the Binance Coin. Contributions: The Bitcoin investors may focus on the changes in economic policy uncertainty, geopolitical risk and US equity market uncertainty to predict the Bitcoin return, and Binance Coin investors focus on the geopolitical risk.