Pandemic waves, government response, and bank stock returns: evidence from 36 countries

Purpose>The paper examines the impact of COVID-19 on bank stock returns over various time scales and frequencies for 36 countries. Moreover, the authors look at the governments' responses to the corona crisis and examine its impact on bank stock returns.Design/methodology/approach>The paper applies continuous wavelet transformation to obtain robust estimates of the co-movement (coherency) between confirmed cases and bank stock returns over time and at different time scales. Furthermore, the authors apply fixed effects panel regression to examine the response of bank stocks to domestic COVID-19 policies.Findings>The results indicate that the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases negatively impacts bank stock returns during different waves of the pandemic in the medium-run. However, there is only little dependence in the very short-run. Moreover, bank stock returns positively react to domestic COVID-19 polices. This demonstrates that governmental interventions not only reduce the spread of COVID-19 but are also able to thereby calm financial markets.Originality/value>The application of wavelet methods to the field of economics and finance is relatively recent and allows the distinction between short-term and long-term effects. Standard econometric methods, in contrast, only operate within the time domain. This paper combines wavelet methods with conventional econometrics to answer the research question.

Outbreak of epidemic diseases and stock returns: an event study of emerging economy

The massive contagion diseases such as COVID-19 amongst others, has affected nearly all the economies and business concerns that leads to substantial decline in the cashflows and returns dynamics. Considering the same, this paper intends to investigate the impact of outbreak of epidemic diseases on the stock return (observed through cumulative average abnormal return (CAAR)) for the listed banks in Pakistan from 2011 to 2020. Event study method was employed and five days pre and ten days post event of each disease were observed as an event window. The results confirm that none of the epidemic disease outbreak significantly determines the CAAR for all listed banks, except COVID-19 and Dengue Fever during the event day. There is a negative and significant impact of COVID-19 on the stock returns for all the banks in Pakistan from the event day to day eight except day seven. More specifically, COVID-19 is found to be a significant indicator for the stock returns of private banks. However, in case of public listed banks, only the outbreak of HIV cases possesses significant and positive impact on CAAR at the day of event. These findings would guide all stakeholders such as investors, financial analysts, regulators, and chief risk officers specifically in banks to make strategic decisions while analyzing the relationship between epidemic outbreaks and stock returns.