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This paper investigates co-movements among the Chinese stock market, Shanghai International Energy Exchange (INE) crude oil futures and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures. We use Copula models to capture tail dependencies and employ the VAR-BEKK-GARCH model to examine the direction of volatility spillovers. We find that there are positively time-varying dependency relationships among the three markets. Compared with the corresponding upper-tail dependencies, the lower-tail dependencies were larger before the COVID-19 pandemic while relatively weaker after the breakout of the pandemic. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, there was only a statistically significant volatility spillover from WTI crude oil future market to the INE crude oil future market. After the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were statistically significant volatility spillovers in the two pairs of markets, namely, the WTI–INE and Chinese stock–WTI. However, we only find statistically significant evidence of unidirectional volatility spillover from the Chinese crude oil future market to the Chinese stock market during the pandemic.

In this study, we constructed two pandemic anxiety indexes based on an assumption that people's emotions fluctuate with the COVID-19 reported cases and deaths, to examine the dynamic co-movements between these anxiety indexes and the stock markets in the BRICS and G7 countries. We found that the anxiety indexes are volatile over time but have an overall downtown trend. The correlations between stock market returns and the epidemic anxiety indexes are time varying. We found a common feature across the countries studied, namely that the correlation becomes weaker and has smaller fluctuations after the announcement of the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine.