Authour: Beum-Jo Park(Dankook Univ.)

<Abstract>

This study found an interesting fact that the nonlinear relationship structure between volatility and trading volume changed before and after the COVID-19 pandemic according to empirical analysis using Bitcoin (BTC) market data that sensitively reflects investors’ trading behavior. That is, their relationship appeared positive (+) in a stable market state before COVID-19 pandemic, as in theory based on the information flow paradigm. In a state under severe market stress due to COVID-19 pandemic, however, their dependence structure changed and even negative (-). This can be seen as a consequence of increased market stress caused by COVID-19 pandemics from a behavioral economics perspective, resulting in structural changes in the asset market and a significant impact on the nonlinear dependence of volatility and trading volume (in particular, their dependence at extreme quantiles). Hence, it should be recognized that in addition to information flows, psychological phenomena such as behavioral biases or herd behavior, which are closely related to market stress, can be a key in changing their dependence structure. For empirical analysis, this study performs a test of Ross (2015) for detecting a structural change, and proposes a Copula Regression Quantiles (CRQ) approach that can identify their nonlinear relationship structure and the asymmetric dependence in their distribution tails without the assumption of i.i.d. random variable. In addition, it was confirmed that when the relationship between their extreme values was analyzed by linear models, incorrect results could be derived due to model specification errors.