Risk contagions between global oil markets and China's agricultural commodity markets under structural breaks

This article investigates the linear and non-linear dependence structures of risk contagions between global crude oil futures markets and China's agricultural futures markets based on a regime switching skew-normal (RSSN) model. We examine the oil-agriculture relationships and identify the contagion channels under the calm and turbulent oil market conditions. The directions of contagions are further identified with the directed acyclic graph (DAG) from the linear non-Gaussian acyclic models algorithm. The empirical results of contagions tests show the significance of correlation and covariance contagions across the oil and agriculture futures returns, especially under the turbulent oil market condition. The breaks in the variances through the moment-based break tests are found to be most significant, followed by the mean and skewness breaks. In addition, the DAG results support the volatility contagions from world oil future markets to China's agricultural commodity futures markets. Our empirical results have important policy implications for the government to take effective measures to stabilize China's commodity market and promote the development of alternative energy in China, as well as for market participants to best manage the market risks.