Analysis of Granger Casuality between Gold and Selected Financial Assets

Abstract

Gold belongs among the assets which show low or negative correlations with the markets for fundamental financial assets, and can serve as an alternative form of capital investment. Therefore, it becomes material to assess the impact of these markets on the gold market (prices), and the correlations existing between them. Investors' decisions to allocate capital in these markets determine the kind and direction of causation between the assets in question. The aim of this article is to assess the causality between the rates of return on investments in gold and in the following assets: stocks, bonds, and real estate, represented by the corresponding market indices. The research covered the period 1997-2018. The analysis employed the VAR model to test linear Granger (non)causality and the variance decomposition. Apart from two cases of unidirectional causality, i.e. from bond returns to gold, and from gold returns to real estate, no other types of causality occurred, which except for these cases, implies that changes in gold prices did not impact on investors' decisions of engaging capital on other analyzed markets, and vice versa.