This study explores the relation between financial uncertainty and volatility in China. The time variation in financial uncertainty shocks is theoretically closely related to stock return dynamics. Empirically, the financial uncertainty measure is based on a large set of economic and financial variables and captures its unpredictable component. Over the sample period from 2000 to 2021, we find that financial uncertainty positively impacts the trend component of market volatility and that it improves volatility predictions in both statistical and economic terms. Our study sheds new light on the sources driving volatility and the dynamic relation between uncertainty and volatility components.

This paper investigates the impact of macro variables on the volatility of bond returns. Using the principal components analysis, we extract the “real” and “money” factors from the real activities and monetary variables, respectively. Following Campbell, Lettau, Malkiel, and Xu (2001), we decompose the bond volatility into market-level volatility and maturity volatility. Using the daily returns on the 1-, 5-, 10- and 30-year US treasury bonds, we find that the macro factors significantly affect the bond volatility. In particular, the “real” factor affects the bond volatility of all maturities while the monetary variables are significantly related to the volatility of short-term bonds and weakly related to the volatility of medium-term bonds.