More attention and better volatility forecast accuracy: How does war attention affect stock volatility predictability?

This paper aims to explore the impact of war attention on stock volatility predictability by constructing a new war attention index and employing an extended GARCH-MIDAS-ES model. The war attention index is developed by incorporating the Google search volume data for 56 war-related keywords using natural language processing methods and dimensionality reduction techniques. Since war attention is considered an exogenous shock, we modify the new extended MIDAS model by incorporating the extreme effects caused by war attention into the GARCH-MIDAS-ES framework. Compelling evidence demonstrates that our proposed war attention index is a statistically significant driver of S&P 500 volatility, and our extended model exhibits higher out-of-sample predictive accuracy as it captures both the normal and extreme effects of war attention on stock volatility within the MIDAS framework. By examining how war attention affects stock volatility predictability during the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war, we observe that the extended model's forecasting performance deteriorates as the forecasting horizon increases to a relatively large extent, which is in line with the findings of Andrei and Hasler (2015).