Causality, Connectedness, and Volatility pass-through among Energy-Metal-Stock-Carbon Markets: New Evidence from the EU

The EU carbon market serves as an innovative financial instrument with the primary objective of contributing to mitigating the impacts of climate change. This market demonstrates significant interconnectedness with fossil energy, precious metal, and financial markets, although limited research has focused on the causality, dependency, intensity and direction of time-varying spillover effects. This study examines how the energy, metal, and financial markets have an impact on the EU carbon market. It focuses on three main research questions, namely: 1) how do these markets affect each other?; 2) how do they connect?; 3) how do volatilities spillover among them? By answering these questions, the study aims to assist EU decision makers to develop effective carbon policies, help investors manage risks and promote practices that are consistent with the EU’s climate goal. To achieve these objectives, this paper proposes a novel methodological approach that combines the most recent econometrics methods, such as Directed Acyclic Graph analysis, Canonical Vine Copula models, and Time-Varying parameter Vector Auto Regressive models with Stochastic Volatility with the use of a comprehensive sample of daily data from April 26, 2005 to December 31, 2022. The major findings of this study demonstrate that causality predominantly runs from energy, metal, and financial markets to the EU carbon market. The dependency structure, although varying across different sub-periods, shows a strong relationship observed between oil, coal, silver, copper, EuroStoxx600, and CO2 market. Additionally, the oil and copper futures prices exhibit the highest dependence on EUA prices. Furthermore, the study establishes that the EU carbon market is a net receiver of shocks from all other markets, with the energy, metal, and financial markets significantly influencing volatility in EUA prices. The time-varying spillover effect is most pronounced with a one-day lag, and the duration of the spillover effects ranges from 2 to 15 days, gradually diminishing over time. These results have the potential to increase the understanding of the EU carbon market and offer practical guidance for policymakers, investors, and companies involved in this domain.