We study the stock market effects of the arrival of the three rounds of "stimulus checks" to U.S. taxpayers and the single round of direct payments to Hong Kong citizens. The first two rounds of U.S. checks appear to have increased retail buying and share prices of retail-dominated portfolios....

Information flows across international financial markets typically occur within hours, making volatility spillover appear contemporaneous in daily data. Such simultaneous transmission of variances is featured by the stochastic volatility model developed in this paper, in contrast to usually...