J. Risk Financial Manag., Volume 14, Issue 1 (January 2021) – 41 articles

This paper conducts a review on theoretical and empirical findings on the increasingly popular measure of trade policy uncertainty (TPU) in economics and finance. Moreover, an empirical investigation takes place in order to find the impact that TPU exerts on Bitcoin market values by employing a spectrum of Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) specifications. Existing studies support that trade policy uncertainty leads to lower-quality and more expensive products and weak participation in international trade. Moreover, it contributes to lower democratic sentiment, hesitant internal migration and lesser socio-economic mobility and higher fluctuations in profitable assets. Moreover, our econometric findings reveal that TPU positively affects Bitcoin prices while crude oil values negatively influence this major cryptocurrency. Thereby, higher trade policy uncertainty is found to increase demand and favorite investments into risky assets in order to ameliorate the risk-return trade-off in investors’ portfolios. This study provides a compass for investing during turmoil due to trade wars and tariffs. Full article

Even though formalization of ethical principles is a must in today’s business, research and evidence in the Slovak conditions remain scarce. Yet, creating an ethical business climate and especially the formalization of ethics through codes of ethics incorporated in corporate standards is a particularly interesting phenomenon in the conditions of transit economies due to the significant role of multinationals in this process. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine main factors influencing the extent of ethical codes in 225 subsidiaries of multinational companies operating in Slovakia. The conducted questionnaire study containing items focused on area and extent of ethical code, number of employees, economic performance, regional and industrial scope, ownership structure, and nationality of executive director was used as a tool for data collection. Factor analysis was processed to identify the interdependencies between observed variables and to find the latent variables. Further, the Kruskal–Wallis test was applied to identify the differences among the variables along with the Bonferroni correction test, which specified the items between which the significant difference occurred. The following findings emerged. First, companies with lower extent of ethical code use general phrases. When they want to specialize on any ethics problems, extent must be wider. Second, companies with a lower number of employees do not need extensive ethical code due to clear rules with which they are familiar in a direct way by owners. In multinational companies, the communication of ethical rules is realized via ethical codes with specific purposes because the direct way is impossible. Third, companies with foreign ownership used different managerial approaches, and therefore ethical codes differ in extent and content. Full article

Rising concerns over climate change have increased investors’ and policymakers’ interests in environmentally friendly investments, which have led to the rapid expansion of the green equity market recently. Previous studies have focused on analyzing the green equity market at the aggregate level, thereby overlooking the heterogeneity across green equity sub-sectors. This paper contributes to the literature by investigating how interdependence between green equity markets and other financial assets varies across regions, market conditions, and investment horizons. To this end, the paper employs the recently developed cross-quantilogram framework, which measures the cross-quantile dependence across time series without any moment condition requirement. The results show that within the green equity market, movements in the U.S. market can predict movements in the Asian and European markets during all market conditions. In contrast, the Asian and European green equity markets only predict movements in the U.S. market during bearish periods. The paper also finds that regional green equity markets respond differently to movements in other financial assets, such as energy commodity and general stock returns. In addition, the interdependence among regional green equity and other assets varies across market conditions and investment horizons. These results have important implications for environmentally friendly investors and policymakers. Full article

In the context of globalized processes, the importance of the sustainable development concept in solving the problems of local tourism systems development is growing. Unprecedented challenges caused by the COVID-19 crisis in the tourism sector, on the one hand, questioned the possibility of fulfilling the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the goals of sustainable tourism. On the other hand, they emphasized the need for balance between three pillars of sustainability, both as an urgency tool to cope with the pandemic crisis and as a solid basis for long-term development in the post-pandemic period. The study presented in the paper discusses sustainability issues in rural tourism as one of the most promising sectors for the development of domestic tourism on the example of the Russian tourism industry. The overall goal of the study initiated in the pre-pandemic period is to find ways to support sustainable rural tourism in Russian regions and to develop indicators for monitoring the effectiveness of local strategic development programs, taking into account national and regional specifics. This paper discusses intermediate results obtained with the adjustment for pandemic challenges. The authors combined a number of methods and techniques, namely desk research, statistical analysis, and analysis of empirical data obtained by means of in-depth interviews, as well as a survey using a formal questionnaire. The results confirm that Russian enterprises and local communities considered the three pillars of sustainability as important to develop tourism in rural destinations both in the pre-pandemic period and in times of challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, the findings show weaknesses in the federal and local policy, including the lack of systemic measures to improve the sustainable management of Russian tourism destinations. From the authors’ point of view, it makes sense to adapt the European tourism indicator system for sustainable destinations (ETIS) for local peculiarities. ETIS is a useful tool to boost the sustainable development of rural destinations by encouraging stakeholder engagement and monitoring processes. In the case of Russia, one needs to add indicators for monitoring the effectiveness of the implementation of strategic development programs in the field of tourism. Full article

Much research has examined performance or market efficiency by using the moving average convergence divergence (MACD) technical analysis tool. However, most tests fail to verify efficiency with the traditional parameter settings of 12, 26, and 9 days. This study confirms that applying the traditional model to Japan’s Nikkei 225 futures prices produces negative performance over the period of 2011–2019. Yet, it also finds that the MACD tool can earn significant positive returns when it uses optimized parameter values. This suggests that the Japanese market is not weak-form efficient in the sense that futures prices do not reflect all public information. Hence, the three parameters values of the MACD tool should be optimized for each market and this should take precedence over finding other strategies to reduce false trade signals. This study also tests which models are able to improve profitability by applying additional criteria to avoid false trade signals. From simulations using 19,456 different MACD models, we find that the number of models with improved performance resulting from these strategies is far greater for models with optimized parameter values than for models with non-optimized values. This approach has not been discussed in the existing literature. Full article

Economic sanctions are among the most powerful instruments of international policy. However, this study, using the example of the so-called anti-Russian sanctions, shows that in the global economy, countries are rapidly using other alternatives, and sanctions in the case analyzed act as a catalyst for balance of trade between the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. The study is based on a highly topical sophisticated model of neural networks, which provides clear results confirming the unintended positive effect. The time series and aggregated data became inputs into multilayer perceptron networks, while the methodology used enabled eliminating of both too large averaging and extreme fluctuations of the equalized time series. Out of 10,000 networks created for each variable and each time lag, five showing the best characteristics given by correlation coefficients and absolute residual sums were retained. Thus, the created equalized time series were able to describe the basic trend of the actual development of export and import, while also capturing their local extremes. The interpolation of the two time series shows that the sanctions imposed on the Russian Federation in 2014 have clearly strengthened its balance of trade with the People’s Republic of China. The results of the study also predict further growth in the balance of trade between the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, although this development may be delayed by current events. Full article

This study aims to investigate the unsettled issue of the relationship between CEO duality and a firm’s value through the perspective of investors’ reaction to news which mention apical directors with a single role and Board Chair CEOs. With a unique and hand-collected database of 60,805 newspaper articles, text-analysis, event-study and regression analysis methodologies were applied to capture news sentiment and study the direction and the magnitude of the stock market reaction. Results reveal that news mentioning Board Chair CEOs are negatively processed by investors, revealing a negative perception by investors about CEO duality. The study provides empirical support for the agency theory, in contrast to the stewardship theory, in the interpretation of CEO duality. It also proposes the methodology of systematically quantifying language to explore corporate governance issues and their link with financial markets. Full article

We present a novel technique for cardinality-constrained index-tracking, a common task in the financial industry. Our approach is based on market graph models. We model our reference indices as market graphs and express the index-tracking problem as a quadratic K-medoids clustering problem. We take advantage of a purpose-built hardware architecture to circumvent the NP-hard nature of the problem and solve our formulation efficiently. The main contributions of this article are bridging three separate areas of the literature, market graph models, K-medoid clustering and quadratic binary optimization modeling, to formulate the index-tracking problem as a binary quadratic K-medoid graph-clustering problem. Our initial results show we accurately replicate the returns of various market indices, using only a small subset of their constituent assets. Moreover, our binary quadratic formulation allows us to take advantage of recent hardware advances to overcome the NP-hard nature of the problem and obtain solutions faster than with traditional architectures and solvers. Full article

Prior studies provide evidence that both corporate governance and corporate investment efficiency affect corporate disclosure practice. In this paper, we examine their joint effect on disclosure. In particular, we examine whether corporate governance quality and corporate investment efficiency act as substitutes or complements in their impact on narrative disclosure. We collect disclosure scores from Lancaster University’s Corporate Financial Information Environment (CFIE) website for a sample of non-financial UK companies for the period 2007–2014. We regress measures of corporate governance and corporate investment efficiency on two different proxies of disclosure practice (performance commentaries disclosure and the tone of narrative disclosure). Consistent with prior studies, we find that both governance and investment efficiency affect disclosure. We contribute to narrative disclosure studies in two crucial respects. First, we provide empirical evidence that governance and investment efficiency has a complementary effect on performance commentaries disclosure. Second, we contribute to the disclosure tone literature by providing empirical evidence that both governance and investment efficiency have a substitution effect on the tone of narrative disclosure. Full article

The unprecedented growth of tourism over the last century has led to increasing concerns over the sustainable development of many popular tourism destinations throughout the globe. High concentrations of tourists and residents, especially in urbanized areas, have heightened this concern with the arrival of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Over reliance on tourism has left residents vulnerable to external factors, such as the coronavirus pandemic that has halted tourists from coming to this remote destination. As a result, Hawaii’s overall economy is suffering greatly. A survey was developed and distributed to potential tourists in order to acquire their perceptions regarding tourism and well-being, as well as the COVID-19 outbreak. The focus of this study was to examine practices in tourism that moves beyond solely economics which will allow repositioning in a manner that promotes the well-being of both residents and tourists and to transition this unique tourism destination for sustainable development practices for the future. One of the results from the study reported that the majority of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that testing for COVID-19 should be a travel requirement prior to flying to Hawaii, as well as having an additional COVID-19 test administered upon arrival. Full article

We examine the role of employee stock option plans (ESOPs) in mitigating agency problems in New Zealand firms. We find that ESOPs have a significant and positive effect on firm performance relative to their non-ESOP counterparts. This relation appears within a year from the first ESOP announcement, and for two to four years after the announcement. Our results show that ESOPs improve corporate performance by 10 times the cost of the ESOPs’ adoption in the first year of issue. The improvement persists for four years after the first issuance. These findings confirm the effectiveness of employee stock option plans for companies issuing ESOPs compared with companies that do not issue ESOPs, and show how much the value creation of ESOPs contributes to these firms. Full article

By analyzing the case of Athens during the Classical period (508-323 BCE) the main thesis of this paper is that under direct democracy procedures and the related institutional setup, a monetary system without a Central Bank may function relatively well. We focus on the following issues: (i) Τhe procedures of currency issuing in the Athenian city-state, (ii) why the Athenian drachma become the leading international currency in the Mediterranean world (iii) how and towards which targets monetary policy without a Central Bank was possible (iv) defining the targets of monetary policy and the mechanisms for its implementation (v) the role of money in the economy (vi) the issue of deficit spending (vii) the reasons of the replacement of the Athenian drachma as a leading currency by others from the Hellenistic period onwards (viii) the correlation of our findings regarding the decentralized character of monetary policy in Classical Athens to today’s realities, such as the issue of cryptocurrencies. Our analysis shows that monetary policy without a Central Bank was possible, with its foremost aim being the stability of the currency (mainly, silver coins) in order to enhance trust in it and so, make it an international currency which could outcompete other currencies. Since there was no Central Bank like today, monetary policy decisions were taken by the popular assembly of citizens in combination with the market forces themselves. Full article

A large amount of literature in the field of social psychology and product pricing discusses the role of reference prices in affecting buyer’s price perception and purchase intention. Reference price denotes a standard against which the consumer compares the offer price of a product. In this paper, we investigate whether reference prices play any role in affecting the trading decision of stock market investors. We use firm-level, fixed-effect panel data methodology to empirically investigate whether investors respond to a violation of their internalized reference price range by executing a trading decision. Our results, based on a sample of Indian firms with small capitalization, show that investors respond to a violation of their internalized reference price range by executing a trading decision. However, consistent with the prior findings that investors suffer from myopic loss aversion, they continue to hold the positions when the reference price range is violated on the downside but sell stocks that have violated the high point of the reference price range. Our findings are robust for the reference price ranges that are constructed using the prior day’s trading prices, prior week’s trading prices, and prior year’s trading prices. The portfolio managers can develop a better understanding of expected trading intensity by incorporating reference price range in their models. The policymakers can use our results to find ways to improve the liquidity and efficiency of financial markets. Full article

This paper has two main aims. Firstly, we examine whether, given a critical mass of female board members, their presence has a different effect on the firm’s CSR practices according to its family or non-family nature. We then consider whether the moderating role of the institutional environment in Latin America enhances the role of female directors in influencing the board’s attitude towards CSR strategies. The results obtained—from a sample of 22,958 observations, corresponding to an unbalanced data panel of 5124 companies for the period 2010–2016—confirm our hypothesis and also highlight the existence of type I (organisational) and type II (institutional) compensation effects, which reduce or eliminate differences between family and non-family firms, whether or not they are located in Latin American countries. Full article

This study empirically presents evidence of nonlinearity and heterogeneity relation between intellectual capital and risk-taking for the Vietnamese banking system. We used quantile regression methods on a data set of 30 Vietnamese banks from 2007 to 2019. The results showed that bank insolvency was positively affected by its value-added intellectual coefficient (VAIC) at the upper quantiles (i.e., 80th and 90th), while the opposite was true for credit risk (i.e., 10th and 20th quantiles). When observing the VAIC’s components, risk-taking behaviors were also significantly affected by HCE (Human Capital Efficiency), CEE (Capital Employed Efficiency) and SCE (Structural Capital Efficiency) at the 90th quantile of instability distribution and the 10th quantile of credit risk distribution. Furthermore, the results also emphasized that there was an inverse U-shaped association between intellectual capital and bank risk-taking. Therefore, this study provides important implications for policymakers, regulators, bank managers and academics that encourage increasing investment in knowledge assets to minimize bank risks in the long run. Full article

The COVID 19 pandemic has had wide-ranging and severe effects on global economies. Stock markets as usual were the first to react, with drop rates as much as the global financial crises of 2008. This study uses daily data to model the dynamic impact of the COVID 19 pandemic on the first affected countries’ stock market indices and the global commodity markets. The panel least squares Vector Auto-Regressive (VAR) estimation results confirm the negative short-termed impact of the virus spread rate on the returns of the stock market indices. The spread rate is also significant to explain changes related to the prices of platinum, silver, West Texas Intermediate (WTI), and Brent crude oil. Full article

Researchers question the impact of governmental venture capitalists (GVC) compared to private venture capitalists (PVC), but we know little about why this difference occurs and if this criticism is justified. We observed a group of GVCs and developed a new model that describes the way that GVCs process signals pre- and post-decisions. Certain macro level factors severely undermine micro level performance, causing GVCs to financially underperform with respect to PVCs. This helped us to understand that GVCs do not make investment decisions in the same way as PVCs, and what undermines the performance of GVCs’ decision-making processes. The main goals of GVCs are to promote investments in responsible SMEs, mobilizing societal impact. We discuss that the criticism of GVC needs to be more nuanced, as they have a different role than PVC in the financial system as providers of sustainable investments in responsible SMEs. Full article

This paper reviews the cost-benefit analysis, or “regulatory impact analysis” (RIA), in US bank regulators’ risk-based capital (RBC) rule proposals. We review the principles of cost-benefit analysis and its application by US bank regulators. We provide a brief background on RBC rules and review the literature on their costs and benefits. We then evaluate 27 proposed RBC rules and related rules on bank liquidity. We find that nine of the 27 rules include RIAs. Five of the RIAs claim the proposed rule will create net benefits, but none provide quantitative evidence that the benefits exceed the costs. In two proposals, the evidence cited indicates the rules’ net benefits may actually be negative. Full article

This paper analyses Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) investment in Ireland and Iceland from other European countries during two periods, i.e., the pre-financial crisis period of 2000–2007 and the financial crisis period of 2008–2010. The aim of this research is to determine what made the countries interesting to foreign investors in both good and bad times; and, secondly, to examine whether European Union membership (and the Euro) made a difference in this respect. The results were obtained by using data from the OECD, the World bank, and other sources. The model constructed for the study applies the inverse hyperbolic sine transformation of the gravity model, which is a novel approach. The results demonstrate that before the financial crisis of 2008, European Union (EU) membership did not help Ireland attract more FDI from other EU countries. However, once it had been hit by the crisis, Ireland attracted more FDI from other EU countries. Iceland, on the other hand, which is not an EU country, attracted FDI from non-EU countries rather than from EU countries before the financial crisis. After the crisis, however, the origin within Europe, of FDI in Iceland had no significant effect on the flow of FDI into the country. Full article

We exploit data from the China Household Finance Survey to examine the impact of changes in the minimum wage on employment and investment decisions. We are able to non-parametrically identify the average treatment effect on the treated via exogenous variation in the minimum wage across provinces. We find that changes in the minimum wage had no adverse effects on employment (in terms of days worked per month or hours worked per work day) but found evidence that changes in the minimum wage impacted the percentage of families that had a bank account, a family in a rural area owned their home, and whether families (whose highest level of education was primary school) planned to purchase a home. Full article

Several studies have explored the linkage between non-performing loans and major macroeconomic indicators, using a wide variety of methodologies, sometimes with different results. This occurs, we argue, because these relationships are generally derived in terms of correlation coefficients evaluated in certain time spans, which represent a sort of average level of correlations. However, such correlations are necessarily time-varying, because the relationships between bank loan indicators and macroeconomic variables could be stronger during particular periods or in correspondence with important economic events. We propose an empirical exercise using dynamic conditional correlation models, with constant and time-varying parameters. Applying these models to quarterly delinquency rates and an array of macroeconomic variables for the US, for the period 1985–2019, we find that the correlation is often negligible in this period except during periods of economic crises, in particular the early 1990 crisis and the subprime mortgage crisis. Full article

This study aims at examining the short-run and long-run dynamic linkages among exchange rates and stock market index in India through a structured cointegration and Granger causality tests. Daily exchange rates of USD, EUR, CNY, JPY, and GBP to INR along with the daily movement of NSE NIFTY for a period spanning 13 years from 6 September 2005 to 31 December 2018 were used for the analysis. The results reveal that there is no evidence for a stable long-run relationship between NSE NIFTY and the exchange rates under study. However, the VAR-based Granger causality test shows that USD, JPY, and CNY have short-run causal relationship with NSE NIFTY. The NSE NIFTY also seemed to have an influence on USD expressed in terms of Indian rupee. The impulse response analysis further supports the results of the Granger causality test and provides information on the time required for the NSE NIFTY index to recover from a shock caused by the fluctuation in exchange rates. Full article

Country Risk (CR) is a relevant instrument to analyze and understand economic performances and relationships between different countries in the actual economic and political international globalized context. The present work develops indexes for the European Union countries by applying three different methods in the field of formative approach. Our aim is to show how robust CR measurements can be developed by operational and easily computable methods. We identify a set of significant variables included in the reference literature. Then, we propose three simple aggregative processes in order to obtain CR measures, at a precise time and over time. As a result, if we compare the outcomes, similar CR rankings emerge. In other words, there are no relevant differences in results also due to different methods of applications. The findings demonstrate that the choice of the aggregation method depends on the willingness of the researcher to baste the analysis with or without weighing and, therefore, on the semantic content that is assigned to the entire research structure. Each analysis should follow a disinterested theoretical–methodological consistency, knowing that the choice of a particular indexing process in the field of aggregation does not significantly alter the nature of the results compared to what would result by applying a different method. Full article

This paper demonstrates how the contract theory framework can and should complement standard financial mathematics for analysing Islamic financial securities (IFSs). It is motivated by the perception that most valuations of IFSs are rather simplistic and are as simple as risk and reward, leading to very simplistic investment strategies, especially by buyers. In fact, there are more dimensions to IFSs and IF in general which can only be properly analysed with more advanced approaches, such as contractual issues which are well-recognised and discussed in the fields of Islamic commercial law and contract theory but not always considered in valuation models. Contract theory can bring together financial mathematics and contractual issues, providing a more sophisticated framework for analysing IFSs. This paper aims to demonstrate this by providing a brief outline of the contract theory approach, followed by a simple demonstration of its use in the analysis of diminishing mushārakah (DM) contracts. The resulting model led to three main conclusions regarding DM contracts: That (i) finance seekers have no ready incentive to spend on asset maintenance, (ii) finance seekers will only spend on asset maintenance if their marginal benefit from the asset’s appreciation is greater than the financier’s share of the asset, and (iii) if the magnitude of asset appreciation and depreciation is equal, an increase in either will also increase the optimal level of spending on asset maintenance. Full article

The objective of this study is to identify the current state of, and the prospects for, information and communication technologies (ICT) dissemination in rural areas in Ukraine in juxtaposition with other post-transition countries. The spread of ICT is discussed within the frame of economic, infrastructural, and social factors affecting rural areas in Ukraine since the post-communist transition period. Information and communication technologies may support the socio-economic development of peripheral areas in many ways—including rural ones. Dissemination of ICT contributes to the emergence of sources of income, equalizes education opportunities, and increases the attractiveness of rural areas. However, the rural—urban divide in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and other former USSR countries is still remarkable and, as a type of structural inequality, should be better recognized. The source material is based on secondary data, which consists of selected literature on the subject of rural development in Central and Eastern European Countries, strategic documents, available reports and studies of international institutions, research from agencies, state documents and statistics, and research conducted by international and domestic NGOs. In reference to the paper’s objective, the method of content analysis was employed. Dissemination of ICT in rural areas in Ukraine is influenced by two groups of factors. The infrastructural divide concerning Internet access between rural and urban populations in Ukraine has been diminishing, but the issue of structural exclusion due to place of residence has still not been solved. As far as the social aspects of ICT dissemination in rural areas in Ukraine are concerned, the level of digital literacy among rural dwellers is significantly lower in comparison to urban residents. Rural areas are more exposed to the consequences of various aspects of digital exclusion. Full article

Investment decisions in the field of sustainable development should be taken based on an economic calculation, taking into account the analysis of a diverse economic environment. The economic calculus of an enterprise is treated as a kind of way of thinking about the rationality of decisions made by an entrepreneur. In the case of sustainable development, the economic calculus serves as an instrument to support the selection of the investment measure. The result of the economic calculus is based on various types of economic parameters, which are subject to frequent changes and high risk. A risk-based financial account may be of little use in the context of the unpredictability of the forecasted situations. In the article, I attempted to determine the importance of a variable interest rate in the economic calculus of a company as an instrument to support sustainable development. For this purpose, I modified the Net Present Value (NPV) meter, which contains actual (variable) discount rates. Full article

Considering the recent debates regarding Brexit and the potential negative effects of immigrants on Italian labor market, the main aim of this paper is to assess the impact of immigrants from Italy on the labor market of this country using econometric techniques. Based on these results, one answer regarding the potential exit of Italy from the EU (Italexit) because of the immigration issue is provided. According to a Johansen co-integration test, there was not any long-run relationship between the number of EU immigrants from Italy and the variation of unemployment rate in the period from 1990 to 2019. The estimations based on Bayesian ridge regressions indicated that the number of EU immigrants did not affect labor cost index in business economy, manufacturing or industry, construction and services in the period 2001–2019. The variation in employed immigrants from Italy in the period 2008–2019 depends on changes in risk of poverty or social exclusion, housing cost overburden rate, exports of goods and services, inflation and tax rate on low wage earners and adult participation in learning. Full article

This paper presents an evaluation index system of public service quality, which contains 35 indexes from the dimensions of the output and effect. Based on data from 2010 to 2017 in 12 coastal provinces and cities of China, this paper assesses public service quality by using the methods of entropy weight order preference similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) and analyzes the effect of fiscal transparency on public service quality. The results show that the public service quality in the 12 coastal provinces and cities of China studied is relatively high, and fiscal transparency has a positive effect on public service quality. This analysis showed that an increase of 1% in fiscal transparency would lead to an increase of 0.0323% in the quality of public services. Fiscal transparency contributes to the quality of public services by improving the scale of investment and the efficiency of public services expenditure; this is because fiscal transparency can increase the expenditure on public welfare services and curb official corruption. Furthermore, the proposed evaluation index can enable government administrators to take the necessary steps on the appropriate dimensions to improve public service quality. This study can provide some guidelines for other countries, especially to improve public service quality by increasing fiscal transparency. Full article

In the Dynamic Conditional Correlation with Mixed Data Sampling (DCC-MIDAS) framework, we scrutinize the correlations between the macro-financial environment and CO${}_2$ emissions in the aftermath of the COVID-19 diffusion. The main original idea is that the economy’s lock-down will alleviate part of the greenhouse gases’ burden that human activity induces on the environment. We capture the time-varying correlations between U.S. COVID-19 confirmed cases, deaths, and recovered cases that were recorded by the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Center, on the one hand; U.S. Total Industrial Production Index and Total Fossil Fuels CO${}_2$ emissions from the U.S. Energy Information Administration on the other hand. High-frequency data for U.S. stock markets are included with five-minute realized volatility from the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance. The DCC-MIDAS approach indicates that COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths negatively influence the macro-financial variables and CO${}_2$ emissions. We quantify the time-varying correlations of CO${}_2$ emissions with either COVID-19 confirmed cases or COVID-19 deaths to sharply decrease by −15% to −30%. The main takeaway is that we track correlations and reveal a recessionary outlook against the background of the pandemic. Full article