This study aims to examine the impact of geopolitical crises on stock markets and macroeconomic growth in the BRICS countries, focusing on the period around the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022. Specifically, we simultaneously construct a new model, GARCH-MIDAS-GPR/GPRA/GPRT, and use quantile regression to measure the impact of the Geopolitical Policy Risk Index (GPR) and its subindexes, the Geopolitical Policy Risk Acts Index (GPRA) and the Geopolitical Policy Risk Threats Index (GPRT), on the stock index as well as growth in the gross domestic product (GDP), the inflation rate, and the real effective BRICS exchange rate both before and after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, and over the full sample period. Our empirical results indicate that geopolitical crises significantly affect the short-term volatility of stock markets in the BRICS countries, especially the extreme volatility seen in Russia after the war. In addition, while the performances of the GPR, GPRA, and GPRT on GDP growth in BRICS countries varies across quartiles by country, they significantly affect inflation in BRICS countries at the median for before the war, after the outbreak of the war, and the entire sample period. In addition, all three types of geopolitical risk at the median quantile significantly and positively affect exchange rate growth in Brazil, Russia, and South Africa. By contrast, India is only affected by the GPRT, and China is mainly affected by the GPRA.
Zhang et al. (Fri,) studied this question.