ABSTRACT
The article is focused on the changes of the market capitalization in the Bulgarian pharmaceutical sector during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the article is to measure and justify the impact of a set of factors that affect the market capitalization of public companies from the Bulgarian pharmaceutical sector in a pandemic environment. The main performance indicator under consideration is the market capitalization of the leading pharmaceutical companies included in the BGBX40 stock exchange index during the two-year pandemic period (from June 2020 until May 2022). For the purpose of the research, a multiple linear regression model (OLS) is employed with the help of GRETL open-source software. Four of the selected eight impact factors are related to the sales of medical products;three are related to COVID-19 statistics and the last is a stock market index. The results from the analyses evidence a strong relationship between the impact factors and the market capitalization of Bulgarian pharmaceutical companies during the pandemic. The coefficient of determination shows that 96% of the change in the market capitalization could be explained by the change in the factors included in the model. The growth of the market capitalization of the studied Bulgarian companies over a period of 2 years is comparable to that of the world leading pharmaceutical companies that offer COVID-19 vaccines. © 2022, Dimitar A Tsenov Academy of Economics. All rights reserved.