Volatility Spillovers Between China’s Financial Markets and Strategic Metal Assets: Evidence from LLM Knowledge Distillation

This study employs a TVP-VAR-BK-DY framework to examine volatility spillovers between China’s financial markets and strategic metal assets. To capture retail investor sentiment, we construct a sentiment index using an LLM knowledge distillation framework. Building on this index, the analysis further incorporates economic policy uncertainty to investigate the joint effects of retail investor sentiment and economic policy uncertainty on cross-market volatility spillovers. The results show that: (1) Price movements in certain assets exhibit leading effects, while metals with stronger financial characteristics generate more pronounced spillover effects. (2) The spillover structure between China’s financial markets and strategic metal assets displays substantial heterogeneity across time horizons and frequency bands. In the 1–5-day frequency band, the stock market serves as a net transmitter of volatility to the banking sector, gold, and copper. In the frequency band exceeding five days, these three assets exert reverse net spillover effects on the stock market. (3) The effects of retail investor sentiment and economic policy uncertainty on volatility spillovers differ significantly. The impact of retail investor sentiment is primarily concentrated in the 1–5-day frequency band, whereas economic policy uncertainty exhibits significant spillover effects in the frequency band exceeding six months.