IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/uts/wpaper/174.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Destruction of a Safe Haven Asset?

Author

Abstract

Gold has been a store of value for centuries and a safe haven for investors in the past decades. However, the increased investment in gold for speculative or hedging purposes has changed the safe haven property. We demonstrate theoretically and empirically that investor behaviour has the potential to destroy the safe haven property of gold. The results suggest that an asset cannot be both an investment asset and an effective safe haven asset. This finding has important implications for financial stability since assets are more likely to exhibit excess comovement and volatility in the absence of a safe haven.

Suggested Citation

  • Dirk G Baur & Kristoffer Glover, 2012. "The Destruction of a Safe Haven Asset?," Working Paper Series 174, Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney.
    • Handle: RePEc:uts:wpaper:174
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.finance.uts.edu.au/research/wpapers/wp174.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Dirk G. Baur & Brian M. Lucey, 2010. "Is Gold a Hedge or a Safe Haven? An Analysis of Stocks, Bonds and Gold," The Financial Review, Eastern Finance Association, vol. 45(2), pages 217-229, May.
    2. Markus K. Brunnermeier & Lasse Heje Pedersen, 2009. "Market Liquidity and Funding Liquidity," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(6), pages 2201-2238, June.
    3. Peter C. B. Phillips & Jun Yu, 2011. "Dating the timeline of financial bubbles during the subprime crisis," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 2(3), pages 455-491, November.
    4. Brian H. Boyer & Tomomi Kumagai & Kathy Yuan, 2006. "How Do Crises Spread? Evidence from Accessible and Inaccessible Stock Indices," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 61(2), pages 957-1003, April.
    5. Baur, Dirk G. & McDermott, Thomas K., 2010. "Is gold a safe haven? International evidence," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 34(8), pages 1886-1898, August.
    6. Merton, Robert C., 1971. "Optimum consumption and portfolio rules in a continuous-time model," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 3(4), pages 373-413, December.
    7. M. H. A. Davis & A. R. Norman, 1990. "Portfolio Selection with Transaction Costs," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 15(4), pages 676-713, November.
    8. Angelo Ranaldo & Paul Söderlind, 2010. "Safe Haven Currencies," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 14(3), pages 385-407.
    9. Ke Tang & Wei Xiong, 2010. "Index Investment and Financialization of Commodities," NBER Working Papers 16385, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Laura E. Kodres & Matthew Pritsker, 2002. "A Rational Expectations Model of Financial Contagion," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 57(2), pages 769-799, April.
    11. Merton, Robert C, 1969. "Lifetime Portfolio Selection under Uncertainty: The Continuous-Time Case," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 51(3), pages 247-257, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Woon Sau Leung & Nicholas Taylor, 2013. "Testing for contagion: the impact of US structured markets on international financial markets," Chapters, in: Adrian R. Bell & Chris Brooks & Marcel Prokopczuk (ed.), Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Empirical Finance, chapter 11, pages 256-284, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    2. Huang, Xiaoyong & Jia, Fei & Xu, Xiangyun & Yu shi,, 2019. "The threshold effect of market sentiment and inflation expectations on gold price," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 62(C), pages 77-83.
    3. Ahmed, Walid M.A., 2021. "Stock market reactions to upside and downside volatility of Bitcoin: A quantile analysis," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 57(C).
    4. Dirk G Baur & Kristoffer Glover, 2012. "A Gold Bubble?," Working Paper Series 175, Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney.
    5. Dirk G. Baur & Thomas K.J. McDermott, 2011. "Safe Haven Assets and Investor Behaviour Under Uncertainty," The Institute for International Integration Studies Discussion Paper Series iiisdp392, IIIS, revised Feb 2012.
    6. Kateryna Anatoliyevna Kopyl & John Byong-Tek Lee, 2016. "How safe are the safe haven assets?," Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, Springer;Swiss Society for Financial Market Research, vol. 30(4), pages 453-482, November.
    7. Isaenko, Sergei, 2010. "Portfolio choice under transitory price impact," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 34(11), pages 2375-2389, November.
    8. Christophe Boucher & Sessi Tokpavi, 2019. "Stocks and Bonds: Flight-to-Safety for Ever?," Post-Print hal-02067096, HAL.
    9. Benjamin Hippert & André Uhde & Sascha Tobias Wengerek, 2019. "Portfolio benefits of adding corporate credit default swap indices: evidence from North America and Europe," Review of Derivatives Research, Springer, vol. 22(2), pages 203-259, July.
    10. Tachibana, Minoru, 2022. "Safe haven assets for international stock markets: A regime-switching factor copula approach," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 60(C).
    11. Bjork, Tomas, 2009. "Arbitrage Theory in Continuous Time," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, edition 3, number 9780199574742, Decembrie.
    12. Jan Kallsen & Johannes Muhle-Karbe, 2013. "The General Structure of Optimal Investment and Consumption with Small Transaction Costs," Papers 1303.3148, arXiv.org, revised May 2015.
    13. Marcos Escobar-Anel & Michel Kschonnek & Rudi Zagst, 2022. "Portfolio optimization: not necessarily concave utility and constraints on wealth and allocation," Mathematical Methods of Operations Research, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research (GOR);Nederlands Genootschap voor Besliskunde (NGB), vol. 95(1), pages 101-140, February.
    14. Xinfu Chen & Min Dai & Wei Jiang & Cong Qin, 2022. "Asymptotic analysis of long‐term investment with two illiquid and correlated assets," Mathematical Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(4), pages 1133-1169, October.
    15. Jean-Pierre Fouque & Ruimeng Hu & Ronnie Sircar, 2021. "Sub- and Super-solution Approach to Accuracy Analysis of Portfolio Optimization Asymptotics in Multiscale Stochastic Factor Market," Papers 2106.11510, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2021.
    16. Wei Long & Dingding Li & Qi Li, 2016. "Testing explosive behavior in the gold market," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 51(3), pages 1151-1164, November.
    17. Baojun Bian & Xinfu Chen & Min Dai & Shuaijie Qian, 2021. "Penalty method for portfolio selection with capital gains tax," Mathematical Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(3), pages 1013-1055, July.
    18. Dimitrios Koutmos & Timothy King & Constantin Zopounidis, 2021. "Hedging uncertainty with cryptocurrencies: Is bitcoin your best bet?," Journal of Financial Research, Southern Finance Association;Southwestern Finance Association, vol. 44(4), pages 815-837, December.
    19. Geert Bekaert & Michael Ehrmann & Marcel Fratzscher & Arnaud Mehl, 2014. "The Global Crisis and Equity Market Contagion," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 69(6), pages 2597-2649, December.
    20. Yasuhiro Iwanaga & Ryuta Sakemoto, 2023. "Commodity momentum decomposition," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 43(2), pages 198-216, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    safe haven; gold; investor behaviour; funding constraints; contagion;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D03 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Behavioral Microeconomics: Underlying Principles
    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • G01 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Financial Crises
    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:uts:wpaper:174. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Duncan Ford (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sfutsau.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.