Oil, Gold and Stocks: Massive Review Maps 15 Years of Market Interdependence

Crude oil, gold and stock markets have long been treated by investors as three separate worlds — an energy commodity, a precious metal and a basket of corporate ownership claims. A new systematic review published in Frontiers in Environmental Economics argues that this separation is an illusion, and it backs the claim with the largest bibliometric corpus ever assembled on the oil–gold–equity triad. The study, led by Eveling Sussety Balcazar-Paiva of Universidad Señor de Sipán in Peru with colleagues from two other Peruvian universities, analyzed 1,081 unique peer-reviewed documents published between 2010 and 2025, drawn from Web of Science and Scopus under PRISMA 2020 guidelines. It is, according to the authors, roughly 58 percent larger than the closest comparable triad-focused review and the first to treat the three assets jointly rather than as separate pairs.

The stakes of the question are easy to state. Portfolio managers rely on stable correlations to diversify, yet those correlations tend to spike precisely when stress hits — the moment diversification is needed most. Regulators and central banks need tools that anticipate how energy and commodity shocks propagate into financial stability, while strategic allocators must contend with financialization, the phenomenon in which institutional money treats commodities as financial assets in their own right. The 2008 global financial crisis, the 2014–2016 oil price shocks, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine war since 2022 each demonstrated that the three markets are far more tightly bound than conventional wisdom assumes, with abrupt regime shifts and volatility spillovers that demand serious analytical machinery.

To map the field, the researchers combined performance analysis with four complementary science-mapping techniques: co-occurrence of lemmatized keywords with Louvain community detection, author co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling restricted to 2022–2025, and country-level co-authorship. The search equation required co-presence of a precious-metal term, an energy-commodity term, an equity term and an interdependence term in every record’s title, abstract or keywords — a design that enforced topical relevance at the database level rather than through later manual screening. After deduplication by DOI and fuzzy title matching, the final corpus totaled 1,081 documents, of which 829 came from Web of Science and 252 were exclusive Scopus contributions.

The growth trajectory the review documents is striking. Output expanded at a compound annual rate of 27.4 percent between 2010 and 2024, before leveling off from 2023, with year-over-year rates falling to 4.1 percent, 0.0 percent and finally −3.4 percent. The field’s history divides into three phases: a foundational period from 2010 to 2015 with just 36 documents, a consolidation phase from 2016 to 2020 with 209, and a vast expansion from 2021 to 2025 holding 832 documents — 77 percent of the entire corpus — set off by a 92.8 percent jump between 2020 and 2021, the first full pandemic year. The plateau from 2023 onward is something earlier reviews, which closed in 2021 or 2022, simply could not observe.

Intellectually, the field resolves into three schools. The first, anchored by Baur, Reboredo, Engle, Ciner and Kroner, carries the classical GARCH tradition of modeling gold’s hedge and safe-haven roles, tracing back to Baur and Lucey’s 2010 distinction between a hedge — an asset with negative or zero average correlation — and a safe haven, which decouples only during turmoil. The second school, built around Mensi, Diebold, Antonakakis and Tiwari, develops the directional-connectedness framework, which decomposes forecast-error variance to identify net transmitters and net receivers of shocks across markets. The third and most recent school, anchored by Bouri, Shahzad and Corbet, grapples with cryptocurrencies, COVID-19 and alternative havens — including the question of whether Bitcoin can replace gold, a debate the review shows has not survived stress-testing: digital assets show haven-like behavior under moderate uncertainty but shed it in systemic crises such as the COVID-19 crash.

What has the empirical literature actually established? The review’s synthesis is nuanced. Gold’s protective role is real but conditional: it acts as a hedge for stocks on average and as a safe haven in extreme negative episodes, but the protection fades within roughly fifteen trading days, and the hedge and safe-haven properties switch on and off with regime changes rather than holding uniformly. Volatility spillovers between commodity and stock markets intensified visibly after 2008, and directional measures show that the roles of shock transmitter and receiver rotate with market conditions. Connectedness is both time-varying, spiking around systemic events, and frequency-dependent, with short-run linkages behaving differently from long-run ones. Co-movements, in short, are strongest exactly when diversification is most needed.

The thematic map built from keyword co-occurrence — 72 keywords and 241 edges resolved into four clusters — confirms gold as the most structurally central node in the field, with 170 mentions and the strongest co-occurrence pairs linking it to crude oil and Bitcoin. The clusters span COVID-19 and dynamic hedging, markets and economic uncertainty, Bitcoin and safe-haven GARCH modeling, and the gold–oil core with cointegration analysis. Meanwhile, bibliographic coupling of the 567 most recent documents revealed nine emerging fronts, the largest being TVP-VAR connectedness and post-COVID portfolios with 144 documents, followed by Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies with 117. But the most consequential discovery may be the smallest: a 42-document front on green bonds and the energy transition that no earlier review registered — a nascent stream examining how traditional fossil-energy commodities interact with low-carbon financial instruments.

The review also exposes a stark geographic asymmetry. Five Asian countries — China, India, Pakistan, South Korea and Vietnam — together account for 53.3 participations per 100 corpus documents, with China leading at 205 participations. Tunisia, with 110 participations, is a striking outlier within Africa, explained by a single research cluster centered on the École Supérieure de Commerce de Tunis. Latin America and the Caribbean, by contrast, contribute at most 1.76 percent of corpus documents despite supplying 9.5 percent of world commodity exports — a representation ratio of just 0.19. The authors attribute this gap to limited R&D spending, thin indexing of Spanish- and Portuguese-language research in major databases, and an agenda dominated by the concerns of commodity-importing, financially central economies rather than those of exporters facing boom–bust cycles.

For practitioners, the implications are concrete. Portfolio managers should treat digital assets as conditional substitutes for gold — useful under moderate macroeconomic uncertainty but unreliable in systemic crises. Regulators watching the financialization of energy and commodity markets should prepare for a reconfiguration in which green bonds and energy-transition assets interact with traditional commodities in still poorly understood ways. The review’s authors argue that frameworks built around a commodity–equity architecture will need to absorb this third dimension, and they propose tools the field has barely used: time-varying asymmetric copulas for tail dependence, quantile-connectedness restricted to left tails, and multivariate GARCH with leverage effects to estimate the so-called greenium and its covariance with gold.

The deeper message of the review is conceptual. The field rests on three intellectual pillars — financialization, connectedness and the safe-haven hypothesis — that share methods but not a common theory. Financialization explains why commodity and equity prices became coupled at all; connectedness measures how shocks travel across that coupling; and the safe-haven hypothesis asks what protection remains available when the coupling tightens. The review shows these traditions run as semi-independent literatures, densely connected in practice yet unintegrated in their conceptual architecture, a fragmentation reflected in the low modularity of the co-citation network. Whether the emerging green-finance front forces that integration — and whether the post-2023 plateau gives way to a new expansion driven by energy-transition risk — are the questions the field’s next decade will answer.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric mapping of spillovers and co-movements among crude oil, gold, and equity markets from 2010 to 2025

Article Title: Interdependence among crude oil, gold, and stock markets: a systematic bibliometric review of spillovers and co-movements (2010–2025)

Article References: Interdependence among crude oil, gold, and stock markets: a systematic bibliometric review of spillovers and co-movements (2010–2025). (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/frevc.2026.1939134

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frevc.2026.1939134

Keywords: crude oil, gold, stock markets, volatility spillovers, safe haven, bibliometric analysis, financialization, connectedness, green bonds, energy transition, portfolio diversification, COVID-19