IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iis/dispap/iiisdp198.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Is Gold a Hedge or a Safe Haven? An Analysis of Stocks, Bonds and Gold

Author

Listed:
  • Dirk G. Baur
  • Brian M. Lucey

Abstract

This paper addresses two questions. First, we investigate whether gold is a hedge against stocks and/or bonds and second, we investigate whether gold is a safe haven for investors if either stocks or bonds fall. A safe haven is defined as a security that loses none of its value in case of a market crash. This is counterpoised against a hedge, defined as a security that does not co-move with stocks or bonds on average. We study constant and time-varying relationships between stocks, bonds and gold in order to investigate the existence of a hedge and a safe haven. The empirical analysis examines US, UK and German stock and bond prices and returns and their relationship with the Gold price. We find that (i) Gold is a hedge against stocks, (ii) Gold is a safe haven in extreme stock market conditions and (iii) Gold is a safe haven for stocks only for 15 trading days after an extreme shock occurred.

Suggested Citation

  • Dirk G. Baur & Brian M. Lucey, 2007. "Is Gold a Hedge or a Safe Haven? An Analysis of Stocks, Bonds and Gold," The Institute for International Integration Studies Discussion Paper Series iiisdp198, IIIS.
    • Handle: RePEc:iis:dispap:iiisdp198
    Note: Length:
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.tcd.ie/iiis/documents/discussion/pdfs/iiisdp198.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. P. Hartmann & S. Straetmans & C. G. de Vries, 2004. "Asset Market Linkages in Crisis Periods," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 86(1), pages 313-326, February.
    2. Engle, Robert, 2002. "Dynamic Conditional Correlation: A Simple Class of Multivariate Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity Models," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 20(3), pages 339-350, July.
    3. Brian M Lucey, Valerio Poti, Edel Tully, 2006. "International Portfolio Formation, Skewness & the Role of Gold," Frontiers in Finance and Economics, SKEMA Business School, vol. 3(1), pages 49-68, June.
    4. Capie, Forrest & Mills, Terence C. & Wood, Geoffrey, 2005. "Gold as a hedge against the dollar," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 15(4), pages 343-352, October.
    5. Olmo, José & Gonzalo, Jesús, 2005. "Contagion versus flight to quality in financial markets," UC3M Working papers. Economics we051810, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía.
    6. Christophe Faugere & Julian Van Erlach, 2004. "The Price of Gold: A Global Required Yield Theory," Finance 0403003, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    7. Davidson, Sinclair & Faff, Robert & Hillier, David, 2003. "Gold factor exposures in international asset pricing," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 13(3), pages 271-289, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Safe haven; gold; stock-bond correlation; flight-to-quality;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:iis:dispap:iiisdp198. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Maeve). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/cetcdie.html .

    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 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.

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.