Heterogenous responses of stock markets to covid related news and sentiments: Evidence from the 1st year of pandemic

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we study the impact of news and sentiments related to covid-19 on United Kingdom (UK)'s stock returns from February 4, 2020 to December 7, 2020. Our results show that covid-19 daily cases exert a significant negative effect on stock returns whereas covid-19 daily deaths have a significant positive impact. These findings hold when covid-related news and sentiments indices are controlled with the 2nd wave data, and when the US policies and equity market volatilities from infectious diseases are used as controls. The magnitude of the effect of covid cases and deaths indicates that the pandemic is not very harmful to the UK stock market. © 2022 CEPII (Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales), a center for research and expertise on the world economy