Commodity price volatility and the economic uncertainty of pandemics

We empirically investigate the impact of economic uncertainty related to global pandemics on the volatility of the broad commodity price index as well as on the sub-indexes of crude oil and gold. The results show that uncertainty related to pandemics have a strong negative impact on the volatility of commodity markets and especially on crude oil market, while the effect on gold market is positive but less significant. •We investigate the impact of pandemics uncertainty on commodity markets volatility.•The results show a strong negative effect of pandemics on commodity volatility.•The impact is negative for crude oil and positive but less significant for gold.