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 international trade – in particular global value chains – and equity market comovement. These results suggest that supply chain disruptions and reshoring, for instance due to political tensions, war, and the COVID-19 crisis, might affect the interconnections between stock markets via rippling through the global production network.