Some evidence on political information and exchange coupon in Brazil

Abstract

We investigate whether political news affect the exchange coupon in Brazil, on a period ranging from November 24, 2016, until April 16, 2019. Our sample of news was collected via web scrapping, which we applied on a Brazilian news portal. We used two measures for the exchange coupon, and we utilized a GARCH model to estimate conditional volatility, which we filtered with both parametric and non-parametric approach. The results from the parametric analysis indicate that the exchange coupon was affected by the corruption scandal of President Temer (May 2017), the announcement of Jair Bolsonaro as candidate for the republic’s presidency (July, 2018), the first round of the presidential elections (October, 2018), and the announcement of a new Pension Reform (January, 2019). The results from the non-parametric analysis indicate that, besides the events above, the exchange coupon was also affected by news related to the Labour Reform (March 2017) and the impeachment requests of President Temer following the corruption scandal (August and October 2017).