Inter-industry risk spillovers in the Chinese stock market under epidemic outbreaks

This paper reviews six major epidemic outbreaks of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, with a particular focus on downside risk transmission among industry stock indices. Utilizing 136 Wind industry stock indices, this paper constructs marginal spillover networks and extracts transmission pathways during each outbreak, summarizing the risk accumulation and transmission characteristics. Empirical research findings indicate that during the outbreak of the pandemic, market downside risk initially spread in the healthcare sector and related industries such as pharmaceutical retail, life science tools and service. Due to the dual nature of silver as a crucial industrial raw material and a financial instrument, the silver index is more sensitive to the impact of the pandemic than is the gold index. Additionally, owing to variations in functional orientation and industry characteristics across cities, there are differences in downside risk spillovers among stock market industries following the outbreak of the pandemic.