Investigating the Effect of Currency Shock on Stock Returns in Middle East Stock Markets

Similar to other main markets in an economy the stock market is also affected by various shocks that can negatively or positively affect the stock market and subsequently the national economy. Despite the fact that the economies of the Middle East are generally dependent on oil revenues, the change in the views of their politicians in recent decades and moving towards the replacement of incomes from other economic activities, such as capital market incomes instead of traditional income channels, has caused to pay special attention to the impact of different economic variables on these markets. In the meantime, the way the stock markets of the Middle East economies respond to various shocks, especially the shocks of competing markets such as the gold market and the foreign exchange market, has gained so importance. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to investigate the response of stock market returns of selected Middle Eastern countries to the shocks of parallel markets such as the foreign exchange market and the gold market as two competing markets. The estimated panel vector autoregression (PVAR) approach was used to estimate the model and impulse response functions (IRF) to extract the effect of shocks in the period from 2010 to 2021 using monthly data. The results show the positive response of the Middle East stock markets to the currency shock and the gold price shock. Increase in the exchange rate and the gold price lead the returns of the stock markets in the Middle East economies to increase at the first month. Moreover, the results of the variance decomposition (VDC) reveal that the most explanation in the variation of the forecast error variance is caused by the gold price variable and the exchange rate stands as the second.