Nº 22-18: Global Production Linkages and Stock Market Comovement

Although real integration conceptually plays an important role for the comovement of international equity markets, documenting this link empirically has proven challenging. We construct a new dataset of theory-guided, relevant measures of bilateral trade in final and intermediate goods and services. With these measures, we provide evidence of a strong link between changes in real integration – in particular global value chains – and equity market comovement. This also holds when controlling for financial openness and other factors that could confound the role of real openness. These results suggest that supply chain disruptions, for instance due to political tensions and the COVID-19 crisis, might also affect the interconnections between stock markets via rippling through the global production network.