Do Bitcoin and Traditional Financial Assets Act as an Inflation Hedge during Stable and Turbulent Markets? Evidence from High Cryptocurrency Adoption Countries

Abstract

This study analyzes whether Bitcoin, gold, oil, and stock have the ability to hedge against inflation in high cryptocurrency adoption countries in the periods from January 2010 to March 2021. It is hypothesized that the assets behave differently and thereby respond differently to inflation in different market conditions. Therefore, we employ the Markov Switching Vector Autoregressive to examine these assets’ hedging ability against inflation in both stable and turbulent market regimes. Our main findings are threefold: We show that there exists a structural change and nonlinear relationship between the returns of hedging assets and inflation. Second, all assets can hedge against inflation more effectively in the short run than in the long run. We find that the inflation hedging ability of these assets are weak in the long run for both market regimes. We also find some evidence that the rigidity between the assets and inflation is relatively high in the stable regime. Third, according to the impulse response analysis, we also find that the responses of assets to inflation shock are heterogeneous across two market regimes.

Keywords

• bitcoin
• hedging
• inflation
• MS-VAR
• structural change
• shocks