Do dividend announcements override the pandemic impacts? Evidence from the BSE 500 constituent firms

With a sample of 332 dividend announcements from January 2019 to December 2020, using the event study methodology with the market model, we provide evidence that the dividend announcements failed to influence the stock prices under the pandemic stress. Although the pre-pandemic period announcements significantly impacted the stock returns, the pandemic period dividend announcements failed to generate significant abnormal returns even for an increase in dividend over the previous year. The pre-pandemic period results are consistent with previous literature with significant returns for constant, increase, and decrease in dividends. During the pre-pandemic period, we also find the possibility of information leakage in the Indian stock market as the pre-announcement period is marked with positive significant abnormal returns while the post-announcement period seems to be profit booking. The industry-wise analysis reveals the presence of positive returns in the Information Technology, Media and Telecommunication sector. However, the rest of the results are in line with the previous analysis. The findings suggest that before making such announcements, the companies should wait for the market to recover;else, the positively impacting dividend announcement will fail to influence the stock prices when the market is already under pandemic stress. We conduct the first-ever study to examine the impacts of dividend announcements during a pandemic stress period with also comparing the impacts during the pre-pandemic period. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of College of Management, National Cheng Kung University.

Sentiment analysis of students' Facebook comments toward university announcements

Students' opinions are among the critical indicators to evaluate the university teaching process. However, due to the absence of an official online system in most universities that provides a mechanism for obtaining students' opinions on several university announcements, most students use various social networks to express their feelings and provide their opinions toward these announcements. We present, through this paper, sentiment analysis of Facebook comments written in the Moroccan Arabic dialect. These comments reflect the opinions of students about university announcements during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially those related to teaching mode and ex-am planning. Then, the comments collected were cleaned, preprocessed, and manually classified into four categories, namely positive, neutral, negative, and bipolar. Further, data dimensionality reduction is applied using TF-IDF and Chi-square test. Finally, we evaluated the performance of three standard classifiers, i.e., Naïve Bayesian (NB), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Random Forests (RF) using k-fold cross-validation. The results showed that the SVM-based classifier performs as well as the RF-based classifier regarding the classification's accuracy and F1-score, while the NB-based classifier lags behind them. © 2022 IEEE.

Speculation and clarification announcements on stock price fluctuations: Why are rumours plausible and hard to clarify?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, stock markets were fragile and sensitive to downside news regardless of whether the news was true. In China, stock rumours are increasingly rampant, affecting the sound development of the capital market. By manually gathering a sample of rumours about Chinese A-share firms, this paper studies the effects of stock market rumours and the corresponding rumour clarifications on stock returns. The study suggests that rumours rely on the information environment to persuade the market through the media effect. In terms of information disclosure, for firms that previously disclosed "negative news”, stock prices would experience abnormal drops when negative rumours appear. In terms of the media effect, rumours released by leading media cause even more significant abnormal fluctuations in stock prices. Further study shows that positive rumours significantly cause an abnormal rise in state-owned enterprises' stock prices, while negative rumours significantly cause an abnormal decline in small and medium enterprise board (SME) and growth enterprise market board (GEM) stock prices. From the perspective of the effect of clarification announcements in restraining stock price fluctuations, clear and timely clarifications are recommended. © 2023 Elsevier Inc.

Do changes in earnings signal future prospects after the global financial crisis and emergence of COVID-19? Evidence from Kazakhstan

This study presents an attempt to examine the reaction of stock prices of selected Kazakhstani firms to the announcement of quarterly earnings increase or decrease between 2012 and 2020 which includes the year of the post-global financial crisis as well as the year marked by the emergence of the virus which hit economies around the world. The event study methodology was applied to seven firms listed on KASE, with estimation and post-estimation windows of 200 and 40 days, respectively between 2012 and 2020. OLS regression was utilised to test the relationship between earnings announcements and stock returns. The findings of this study demonstrate a positive statistically significant price reaction on the next day following the announcement event when considering aggregate returns for a total of 50 earnings events of the sample period. Though, the magnitude and direction of average abnormal returns (AARs) vary when each year is considered separately. Copyright © 2023 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Do Vaccines' Announcements Cure Stock Market Volatility? Evidence From the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Markets

COVID-19 has been impacting stock markets worldwide. Yet, a scant amount of research has been done on the stock markets of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) markets. In this work, we aim to investigate whether and to what extent local and international events linked to the COVID-19 outbreak have impacted stock market volatility of the GCC countries. We model stocks' returns of these countries between January and December 2020, decomposing the errors' heteroskedasticity to account for main international and local events related to COVID-19. These events have been included as structural breaks and measured using dichotomous variables. Both local and international events were found to be associated with significant variations in volatility;however, local events seem to have impacted volatility to a lesser extent compared to international events. The announcement of the status of pandemic by the WHO had the greatest impact on volatility across the GCC markets, even greater than the impact associated to the drop in oil prices. The announcement of local approval of vaccine led to a reduction in volatility in UAE (ADX), Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain © International Journal of Economics and Management

Speculation and clarification announcements on stock price fluctuations: Why are rumours plausible and hard to clarify?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, stock markets were fragile and sensitive to downside news regardless of whether the news was true. In China, stock rumours are increasingly rampant, affecting the sound development of the capital market. By manually gathering a sample of rumours about Chinese A-share firms, this paper studies the effects of stock market rumours and the corresponding rumour clarifications on stock returns. The study suggests that rumours rely on the information environment to persuade the market through the media effect. In terms of information disclosure, for firms that previously disclosed "negative news”, stock prices would experience abnormal drops when negative rumours appear. In terms of the media effect, rumours released by leading media cause even more significant abnormal fluctuations in stock prices. Further study shows that positive rumours significantly cause an abnormal rise in state-owned enterprises' stock prices, while negative rumours significantly cause an abnormal decline in small and medium enterprise board (SME) and growth enterprise market board (GEM) stock prices. From the perspective of the effect of clarification announcements in restraining stock price fluctuations, clear and timely clarifications are recommended.

The link Between Stock Exchange Sectors and Indices: Implications During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The paper investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, using the event study approach for the Bucharest Stock Exchange, by which Bucharest Stock Indices and listed firms grouped by sectors were analyzed. The paper uses three important event days, 20 January 2020, 11 March 2020, and 15 March 2020. The findings demonstrate that initially investors were not concerned about the pandemic, showing that they did not realize the extent of globalization and transmission of events on financial markets. Both after 11 March and after 15 March 2020, stock indices have declined, investors becoming worried about the prospects of their dividends and the stock liquidity. The most affected sectors were those related to metallurgical industry, IT&C. After the lockdown, there was a reversal for some sectors like pharmaceutical and biotechnology, electricity production, transportation and distribution, and IT&C. Understanding the intensity and direction of the link between some sectors and indices may influence investment strategies and help in hedging, especially in times of pandemics.

Assessment of the Effectiveness of Identity-Based Public Health Announcements in Increasing the Likelihood of Complying With COVID-19 Guidelines: Randomized Controlled Cross-sectional Web-Based Study.

BACKGROUND: Public health campaigns aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19 are important in reducing disease transmission, but traditional information-based campaigns have received unexpectedly extreme backlash. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to investigate whether customizing of public service announcements (PSAs) providing health guidelines to match individuals' identities increases their compliance. METHODS: We conducted a within- and between-subjects, randomized controlled cross-sectional, web-based study in July 2020. Participants viewed two PSAs: one advocating wearing a mask in public settings and one advocating staying at home. The control PSA only provided information, and the treatment PSAs were designed to appeal to the identities held by individuals; that is, either a Christian identity or an economically motivated identity. Participants were asked about their identity and then provided a control PSA and treatment PSA matching their identity, in random order. The PSAs were of approximately 100 words. RESULTS: We recruited 300 social media users from Amazon Mechanical Turk in accordance with usual protocols to ensure data quality. In total, 8 failed the data quality checks, and the remaining 292 were included in the analysis. In the identity-based PSA, the source of the PSA was changed, and a phrase of approximately 12 words relevant to the individual's identity was inserted. A PSA tailored for Christians, when matched with a Christian identity, increased the likelihood of compliance by 12 percentage points. A PSA that focused on economic values, when shown to individuals who identified as economically motivated, increased the likelihood of compliance by 6 points. CONCLUSIONS: Using social media to deliver COVID-19 public health announcements customized to individuals' identities is a promising measure to increase compliance with public health guidelines. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN Registry 22331899; https://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN22331899.

Cyclical and Non-Cyclical Industry Stock Price Reaction towards Movement Control Order (MCO), Economic Stimulus Package and Vaccine Agreement Announcements: The Case of Covid-19

This study carries out empirical analyses using a market-model event study from 26 March 2020 to 20 November 2020. There are three major events highlighted in this article that explain the cyclical and noncyclical stock performance during the COVID-19 outbreak: (a) the implementation of the nationwide Movement control order series (MCOs);(b) the announcement of the economic stimulus package;and (c) the signing of the vaccine agreements. Empirical results are summarized into three main insights: (a) the 10-day event window (CAR -9,0), which entailed the first MCO, was marked by the closure of both public and private non-essential entities, further suspension of events and recreational activities, which negatively affected nationwide economics activities;(b) the 3-day event window (CAR -1,1), which entailed the announcement of the economic stimulus package, resulted in most industries reacting with positive returns except for the oil equipment and services industry;and (c) event window day-293 (CAR +131, +161), which entailed the announcement of the distribution and implementation of COVID-19 vaccines, whereby industries related to the healthcare segments such as equipment and services (+0.0694) and pharmaceuticals and biotechnology (+0.0671) showed positively significant returns at least at the 10% level. Finally, future research could enlighten ownership patterns in Malaysia due to Malaysian companies exhibiting a concentrated ownership structure.

Determining how effective radio public service announcements are at driving call volumes within the

Background: In New Mexico from 2013 to 2017, Native Americans had the highest number of poison-related deaths (26.6/100,000 population) when compared to other ethnic groups: Hispanics (26.5/100,000), Black/African Americans (24.4/ 100,000), Whites (21.2/100,000), and Asian/Pacific Islanders (4.7/ 100,000). In addition, the poison center has traditionally experienced low call volumes from tribal communities. A survey conducted in 2018 revealed that community health representatives of the Navajo Nation reported that their respective communities preferred printed materials and radio public service announcements (PSAs) as platforms to receive educational messages. Method(s): In 2021, a radio public service announcement (PSA) was developed in English and translated into Dine by a college of pharmacy student and a medical doctor, both fluent in their native tongue. The PSAs provide examples of poisoning scenarios and advises to call the poison hotline at the end. Thirty second versions of both the English and Dine PSAs were run on the Navajo Nation internet radio station, KTNN, for the month of September 2021, and then again for the month of March 2022. Both interventions had an equal amount of radio spots. Result(s): Data were retrieved from Toxicall for zip codes that corresponded to the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. COVID calls were excluded from the data. Calls stemming from a poisoning outbreak that occurred on the Navajo Nation during the summer of 2020 were also eliminated to account for atypical patterns in call volume. There was a 48.3% increase in calls when comparing September 2021, intervention month, to September 2020. The March 2022 intervention showed a 54.5% uptick in calls when compared to March 2021. Both the September and March interventions resulted in an increase of 30 calls. To control for March also being poison prevention month in New Mexico, Navajo Nation zip codes were excluded, and then the total calls for the rest of the state were calculated. This resulted in 2147 calls in 2021 and 2073 in 2022. Conclusion(s): The significant increase in call volumes when comparing the intervention months to the preceding years, strongly suggests that radio PSAs increase poison hotline traffic. Both intervention months showing an increase of 30 calls was also striking. In addition, total calls for the state without including the Navajo Nation zip codes dropped from March 2021 to March 2022, further eliminating poison prevention month as a cofactor in the increase in calls during the March intervention. Due to the consistent decrease in calls to poison centers across the nation, it is imperative to continue investigating how certain dynamics influence call volume, such as increasing internet consumption and, perhaps, the COVID 19 pandemic. It is equally necessary to research other at-risk communities to refine the components of effective communication and to define relevant platforms for delivering those educational messages.

Impacts of corporate announcements on stock returns during the global pandemic: evidence from the Indian stock market

Purpose>The authors examine the impacts of corporate announcements on stock returns during the pandemic stress.Design/methodology/approach>The authors employ the event study methodology with the market model on a sample of 90 events (announcement and ex-date).Findings>The authors find that all the corporate announcements do not impact the stock returns in a similar pattern. While the bonus announcement, ex-bonus and ex-split events led to positive significant abnormal returns on the event date, the rights issue and stock-split announcements failed to influence the stock returns. The findings suggest that before making such announcements, the corporates should wait until the market recovers because even the positively impacting events result in negative market responses during pandemic stress.Practical implications>This study will guide the policymakers to stimulate share prices during such pandemics with the help of various corporate announcements. The investors will be assisted in understanding the stock market mechanism and making wise decisions before reacting to corporate actions during a pandemic or emergency period. While the policymakers are concerned with influencing the share prices, the investors are concerned with the composition of the risk-return parameters in their portfolio. This study will act as an essential investment tool for both.Originality/value>To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the authors conduct the first-ever study to examine the impacts of corporate announcements during a pandemic stress period that significantly contributes to the literature. The authors examine the announcement effects in India and accurately anticipate that this study will be a pioneer in this field. This study also paves the way for future researches in this area.

Impacts of corporate announcements on stock returns during the global pandemic: evidence from the Indian stock market

Purpose: The authors examine the impacts of corporate announcements on stock returns during the pandemic stress. Design/methodology/approach: The authors employ the event study methodology with the market model on a sample of 90 events (announcement and ex-date). Findings: The authors find that all the corporate announcements do not impact the stock returns in a similar pattern. While the bonus announcement, ex-bonus and ex-split events led to positive significant abnormal returns on the event date, the rights issue and stock-split announcements failed to influence the stock returns. The findings suggest that before making such announcements, the corporates should wait until the market recovers because even the positively impacting events result in negative market responses during pandemic stress. Practical implications: This study will guide the policymakers to stimulate share prices during such pandemics with the help of various corporate announcements. The investors will be assisted in understanding the stock market mechanism and making wise decisions before reacting to corporate actions during a pandemic or emergency period. While the policymakers are concerned with influencing the share prices, the investors are concerned with the composition of the risk-return parameters in their portfolio. This study will act as an essential investment tool for both. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the authors conduct the first-ever study to examine the impacts of corporate announcements during a pandemic stress period that significantly contributes to the literature. The authors examine the announcement effects in India and accurately anticipate that this study will be a pioneer in this field. This study also paves the way for future researches in this area. © 2022, Dharen Kumar Pandey, Vineeta Kumari and Brajesh Kumar Tiwari.

INVESTORS AND INDIAN STOCK INDICES REACTION TO NEWS ANNOUNCEMENTS DURING COVID-19

Using Mahalanobis distance process we identify 31 extreme values in daily return series of study variables span between February 2020 and June 2021. These extreme values represent 10 percent of total observations (N = 304). We gather news announcements around those 31 trading days and quantified into four groups. We examine investors (clients, FIIs, DIIs and proprietary) and stock indices (BSE Sensex, and BSE S&P 500) reaction to these news announcements. In addition, using non-parametric statistical tests, we investigate randomness, equality of distribution and day of the week effect of study variables. Results are mixed. We find statistically significant difference between two groups of news announcements in stock indices. On the other side, there is no such difference in investor categories. We find the returns series of Sensex, BSE S&P 500, FIIs, DIIs to be random and clients, proprietary to be non-random. We also find that the daily returns of all variables are not statistically significant from their median return. Finally, we do not find any evidence of day of the week effect on investors' investment pattern. We conclude that impact of negative news surrounding Covid-19 is succumbing by Government of India (GoI) interventions. The stock market movements are random and there is no day of the week effect in net flow of investments. There is a visible trend in clients and proprietary investors' net flow into the market.

Communication Strategy Analysis of COVID-19 Pandemic's Public Service Announcement (PSA) Production

Communication through media is one of the most important aspects if a country faces a health crisis such as a pandemic. One of the mediums that are often used is via the production of public service announcements or PSA. PSA is a short video lasting between 30 to 120 seconds, communicating to large-scale audiences for social behaviour changes. However, certain PSA will be considered a failure if the audience ignores or does not understand the message. When Malaysia faces a health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the PSA barely emphasises the aspects of behavioural balance, message recall, and the aesthetic of message presentation. Thus, this paper aims to discuss the mode of presentation and styles in 30 public service announcements related to COVID-19 in MyHealth's YouTube channel under the Ministry of Health Malaysia (MOH) from January to June 2020. The preliminary finding shows that most PSAs used 2D animation production techniques by representing the real scenarios and situations faced by the Malaysian to facilitate the audience's understanding of the message. Overall, PSA's presentation style on COVID-19 in Malaysia emphasises the balance between the importance of message and communication strategy with five phases in the theory of audience behavioural change.

Do dividend announcements override the pandemic impacts? Evidence from the BSE 500 constituent firms

With a sample of 332 dividend announcements from January 2019 to December 2020, using the event study methodology with the market model, we provide evidence that the dividend announcements failed to influence the stock prices under the pandemic stress. Although the pre-pandemic period announcements significantly impacted the stock returns, the pandemic period dividend announcements failed to generate significant abnormal returns even for an increase in dividend over the previous year. The pre-pandemic period results are consistent with previous literature with significant returns for constant, increase, and decrease in dividends. During the pre-pandemic period, we also find the possibility of information leakage in the Indian stock market as the pre-announcement period is marked with positive significant abnormal returns while the post-announcement period seems to be profit booking. The industry-wise analysis reveals the presence of positive returns in the Information Technology, Media and Telecommunication sector. However, the rest of the results are in line with the previous analysis. The findings suggest that before making such announcements, the companies should wait for the market to recover;else, the positively impacting dividend announcement will fail to influence the stock prices when the market is already under pandemic stress. We conduct the first-ever study to examine the impacts of dividend announcements during a pandemic stress period with also comparing the impacts during the pre-pandemic period. © 2021 The Authors

Changes of the Public Attitudes of China to Domestic COVID-19 Vaccination After the Vaccines Were Approved: A Semantic Network and Sentiment Analysis Based on Sina Weibo Texts.

Introduction: On December 31, 2020, the Chinese government announced that the domestic coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) vaccines have obtained approval for conditional marketing and are free for vaccination. This release drove the attention of the public and intense debates on social media, which reflected public attitudes to the domestic vaccine. This study examines whether the public concerns and public attitudes to domestic COVID-19 vaccines changed after the official announcement. Methods: This article used big data analytics in the research, including semantic network and sentiment analysis. The purpose of the semantic network is to obtain the public concerns about domestic vaccines. Sentiment analysis reflects the sentiments of the public to the domestic vaccines and the emotional changes by comparing the specific sentiments shown on the posts before and after the official announcement. Results: There exists a correlation between the public concerns about domestic vaccines before and after the official announcement. According to the semantic network analysis, the public concerns about vaccines have changed after the official announcement. The public focused on the performance issues of the vaccines before the official approval, but they cared more about the practical issues of vaccination after that. The sentiment analysis showed that both positive and negative emotions increased among the public after the official announcement. "Good" was the most increased positive emotion and indicated great public appreciation for the production capacity and free vaccination. "Fear" was the significantly increased negative emotion and reflected the public concern about the safety of the vaccines. Conclusion: The official announcement of the approval for marketing improved the Chinese public acceptance of the domestic COVID-19 vaccines. In addition, safety and effectiveness are vital factors influencing public vaccine hesitancy.

Product line transformation, foreign sales, and firm value: Evidence from COVID-19 pandemic governance in urban China.

Using a sample of Chinese firms, we examine stock market reaction to firms that announce a change in their product lines to those related to COVID-19 management (medical masks and ventilators, among others). We find the market reacts positively to the announcements. In addition, when a firm ordinarily has a large share of export sales, the stock market reaction is more salient, indicating that export sales provide a certification effect that positively signals investors. Additional analysis on moderating effects suggest that, conditional on foreign sales, prior experience with medical product lines or less uncertainty about supply availability enhances the cumulative announcement returns (CARs), while the adverse impact of firm size on CAR magnifies.

[Quality of "crisis communication" media during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Great Maghreb countries]. / Qualité des supports de communication de crise lors de la pandémie de la COVID-19 au Grand Maghreb.

OBJECTIVE: To objectively assess the quality of "crisis communication" media, during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the three Greater Maghreb countries (Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco). METHODS: A compliance audit for press releases and epidemiological bulletins was analyzed against a quality benchmark, which had been specifically designed by the authors. This framework, made up of five dimensions and 50 items, graded (0/1), was applied by two researchers in preventive medicine. Multiplying the scores by a coefficient of two resulted in a partial score of 20 points for each dimension and a total score of 100 points for the checklist taken as a whole. The quality of the communication media was considered to be good when exceeding the thresholds of 15/20 for the different dimensions and 75/100 for the entire grid. RESULTS: A total of 141 information media were included in this audit (Tunisia: 60; Algeria: 60; Morocco: 21). The overall median quality score for these media was only 56/100 (IIQ: [46-58]), without major variability between countries. The most appreciated dimension was "maintaining the confidence of the population", with an overall median score of 14/20 (12/20 for epidemiological bulletins and 16/20 for press releases). The most poorly rated dimension was "strengthening community participation", with a median score of only 4/20 (6/20 for epidemiological bulletins and 4/20 for press releases). CONCLUSION: The quality of the Maghreb crisis communication media during COVID-19 was insufficient in most of its dimensions and items, particularly from a psychosocial standpoint. Reinforcement of the capacities of communication officers to develop information material and supports during health crises is indispensable and should be considered as an urgent matter.

COVID-19 and the United States financial markets' volatility.

We empirically investigate the effect of the official announcements regarding the COVID-19 new cases of infection and fatality ratio, on the financial markets volatility in the United States (US). We consider both COVID-19 global and US figures and show that the sanitary crisis enhances the S&P 500 realized volatility. Our findings are robust to different model specifications and suggest that the prolongation of the coronavirus pandemic is an important source of financial volatility, challenging the risk management activity.