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This paper aims to investigate the COVID-19 pandemic impacts on the interconnectedness between the Chinese stock market and major financial and commodity markets—gold, silver, Bitcoin, WTI, S&P 500, and Euro STOXX 50—and analyze the portfolio design implications. Using daily data from 2018 to 2021, we first apply the wavelet power spectrum (WPS) to visualize volatility shifts. In contrast to previous research, we empirically identify the precise COVID-19 outbreak dates for each market using the Perron (1997) breakpoint test. Finally, we employ the bivariate DCC-GARCH model to analyze the connectedness between markets. The findings reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic caused volatility shifts of different intensities for all of the studied markets. Moreover, each return series exhibits one break date, which is specific to each market and corresponds to a distinct COVID-19-related event. Correlations, hedge ratios, and optimal portfolio weights changed significantly after the COVID-19 outbreak. There is evidence of contagion effects between the Chinese stock market and S&P 500, Euro STOXX 50, gold, and silver. Interestingly, the latter two assets lost their safe haven property with SSE. However, WTI and Bitcoin act as safe havens against SSE risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The circulation of silver between the Americas, Europe and China has provided a critical impetus for modern globalization since the 16th century. Even though substantial documentary information about this process has been collected and processed, there is still an ongoing debate about its underlying mechanism and the nature of the economic model. This article argues that the scientific analyses of the silver bullion and coins of Ming–Qing China and the Americas can offer a new source of information about this issue. This pilot study shows that the Ag concentration in Ming and Qing silver bullion is higher than that of the Americas, by around 3% and 8%, respectively. In particular, Qing silver bullion made in different reigns shows a remarkably consistent Ag content. Such a difference in the fineness could further contribute to the colossal arbitrage noted by scholars for decades, resulting in high volumes of global trading fundamentally driven by the higher price of silver in China. While quantifying its exact economic and political impacts still appears a distant prospect, as the current database is rather sketchy and many intermediate processes remain unclear, integrating scientific analyses into historical research illustrates several new patterns which helps to rethink the global silver circulation in the early modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides the first systematic econometric study on the evolution of Chinese silver exchange and monetary regimes during the period 1898–1933. Using high‐quality datasets of monthly and daily prices of silver dollars, we apply the threshold autoregressive models to estimate the silver points between Shanghai and 18 other cities in northern and central China. We find a noticeable improvement in monetary integration between Shanghai and Tianjin from the 1910s, which then spread to other cities in our sample throughout the 1920s and 1930s. We supplement our analysis with new datasets on volumes and costs of silver flows and with an in‐depth historical narrative. This article re‐evaluates the efficiency of the silver regime and China's economic performance in the Republican era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay aims to reconceptualize the monetary regime of late Qing and modern China as a multilayer system of currencies and examine the features and logics of its operation from the 16th century to early 20th century. We argue that this system consists of a variety of silver and copper currencies, each occupying a particular layer in the structure and each satisfying a specific market demand. Analyzing the production and circulation of copper and silver currencies, we first trace their evolution from the Qing to the Republican era and demonstrate the multi-layer currency structure persisted in China across the modernizing changes that took place at the end of the 19th century. Second, using data drawn from gazetteers, this essay adopts a quantitative approach to empirically examine the mechanism and speed of interactions between the different layers of the monetary market and reveal the operational mechanism of the multi-layer system. We suggest that this multi-layer system, while bringing some efficiency loss, also constituted an effective institutional arrangement that helped to ensure the stability of the Chinese economy in tumultuous times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the coinage during the Jiajing reign (1522-1566) with the objective of showing why the Ming government issued copper cash, but instead ultimately used silver bullion as its unit of account. Throughout the long reign of forty-five years, the Jiajing government attempted to establish a single form of legal money. As early as 1527, when the government cast the Jiajing coins, it considered the money as merely one of many forms of legal tender. Besides the Jiajing coin, the government also accepted tax remittances paid in various kinds of coins produced in different reigns and dynasties. This policy brought into play Gresham's law of "bad money driving out the good." Inferior coins from earlier dynasties and outlaws prevailed. As a solution, in 1552 the Jiajing emperor ordered that taxpayers should pay the government with only Jiajing coins. However, the effort to drive those inferior private coins, now in the shape of Jiajing coins, out of market was still in vain. In 1565, at last, the government gave up collecting tax payment in copper cash. It accepted silver bullion originally paid in coins. From then onwards, silver bullion played a prime role in the fiscal policy of the Ming government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]