Time-frequency dependencies of financial and economic risks in South American countries

This study fills a gap in the relevant literature by exploring the time-frequency domain causal relationship between financial risk and economic risk for five South American countries, namely Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela, over the period from 1984Q1 – 2018Q4. To the best of our knowledge, the causal relationship between finance and economics has not been comprehensively explored for the case of South America within the framework of risk. Therefore, the empirical findings of this study are likely to shed light on and open a new debate regarding the nexus between financial and economic activities. Based on our aims, the time domain Toda-Yamamoto causality test is performed as a robustness check, and the wavelet coherence approach is implemented to explore the joint time-frequency domain causal relationship between financial and economic risk. The empirical findings reveal that: (1) there is a feedback causality between financial risk and economic risk in Venezuela; (2) there is a one-way causality that runs from economic risk to financial risk in Colombia and Peru, and; (3) financial risk significantly leads to changes in economic risk in Argentina and Brazil. The empirical results are crucial for policy decision making and can be used by both researchers and macro-economic policymakers to take suitable actions, if necessary, by implementing more appropriate or alternative economic and financial decisions.