The incremental information content of investor fear gauge for volatility
forecasting in the crude oil futures market
Xu Gong, Boqiang Lin
⁎
School of Management, China Institute for Studies in Energy Policy, Collaborative Innovation Center for Energy Economics and Energy Policy, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China
abstractarticle info
Article history:
Received 15 March 2018
Received in revised form 8 May 2018
Accepted 11 June 2018
Available online 4 July 2018
JEL Classification:
Q41
Q47
G13
G17
C53
C58
This paper aims to investigate whether investor fear gauge (IFG) contains incremental information content for
forecasting the volatility of crude oil futures. For this purpose, we use oil volatility index (OVX) to measure the
IFG. Adding the IFG to existing heter ogeneous autoregressive (HAR) models, we develop many HAR models
with IFG. Subsequently, we employ these HAR models to predict the volatility of crude oil futures. The results
from the parameter estimation and out-of-sample forecasting show that the in-sample and out-of-sample per-
formances of HAR models with IFG are significantly better than their corresponding HAR models without IFG.
The results are robust in different ways. Thus, the HAR models with IFG are more bene ficial to the decision
making of all participants (including financial traders, manufacturers and policymakers) in the crude oil futures
market. More importantly, the results suggest that the investor fear gauge has a significant positive effect on
volatility forecasting, and can help improve the performances of almost all the existing HAR models.
© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Volatility forecasting
Investor fear gauge
Crude oil futures
HAR models
Realized volatility
1. Introduction
The volatility of financial assets is closely related to portfolio optimi-
zation, risk management, and option pricing (see, e.g., Andersen et al.
2017; Billio et al., 2017; Dai and Wen 2018; Moreira and Muir 2017).
In the crude oil futures market, volatility plays a vital role in the decision
of all part icipants in the crude oil futures mar ket, including traders,
manufacturers, as well as policymakers. Additionally, the volatility of
crude oil futures has an important impact on the global economy and
financial stability (see, e.g., Charles and Darné 2017; Cheong 2009;
Gong and Lin, 2018a; Lin et al., 20 14; Wang et al. 2016a; Wen et al.
2018). Thus , understanding the volatility of crude oil futures is vital
for oil-related researchers and participants. Among the many issues re-
lated to the volatility of crude oil futures, forecasting volatility is one of
the major issues that have attracted the attentions of oil market-related
researchers and participants.
The existing literature shows that there are ample models based on
low-frequency data modeling used for predicting the volatility of crude
oil futures. These include historical volatility models (Xu and Ouenniche
2012), AR-type models (Xu and Ouenniche 2012), ARFIMA model (Choi
and Hammoudeh 2009), GARCH-type models (Arouri et al. 2012;
Manera et al. 2016), SV-type models (Baum and Zerilli 2016), power
autoregressive models (Sadorsky and McKenzie 2008), among others.
However, it is difficult for the models based on low-frequency data to ac-
curately measure the whole-day volatility information of crude oil futures.
Andersen and Bollerslev (1998) propose a new proxy of volatility
using high-frequency data. The proxy variable is named the realized vol-
atility (RV). Corsi (2009) develop a heterogeneous autoregressive model
of realized volatility (HAR-RV model) on the basis of the heterogeneous
market hypothesis of Müller et al. (1993), and is later extended. On the
basis of the HAR-RV model, some researchers propose many new HAR
models, such as the HAR-RV-J, HAR-CJ (Andersen et al. 2007), LHAR-RV
(Asai et al. 2012), LHAR-RV (Corsi and Renò, 2012), HAR-S-RV-J (Chen
and Ghysels 2011) models. The HAR models are some of the most popular
models for forecasting volatility in the financial markets. Thus, this paper
employs the HAR models to predict the volatility of crude oil futures.
Notably, Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) proposed the oil volatility
index (OVX) in 2007. The OVX can be used to mea sure the investor
fear gauge (IFG) in the crude oil market (see Ji and Fan 2016; Liu et al.
2017). The IFG (or OVX) is closely related to the crude oil futures mar-
ket. Some studies find that the IFG (or OVX) has an important effect
Energy Economics 74 (2018) 370–386
⁎ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: bqlin@xmu.edu.cn (B. Lin).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2018.06.005
0140-9883/© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Energy Economics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eneeco
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