The purpose of this study was to dissect the impact of COVID-19 cases on stock price of the largest public companies by market capitalization in each of the 11 Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) sectors, from March 9th, 2020, until December 27th, 2021. This topic is so interesting considering the behavior of the S&P 500 index for example, which rose 58.50% while COVID-19 cases soared well over one hundred thousand new cases per week throughout the same period. Research done on a pandemic’s effect on stock markets have had the opposite response, at least for a year or so until the markets stabilize, including the Spanish Flu (1918-1920), Asian Flu (1957-1958), and more recently the SARS virus (2003). This study was conducted using panel regression analysis, and using observations gathered on a weekly occurrence. This study concluded that there is a highly significant positive relationship between the closing price of the 11 companies with new weekly COVID-19 cases, meaning that every time there was an increase in COVID-19 cases by 1%, the closing price of the 11 companies would increase by 1.9%. The outcome can be explained by an increased number of people having time to day trade due to layoffs or working from home, COVID-19-related stimulus packages offering the average American more funds to invest, or the most likely – investors looking past the catastrophic event to eventually return to normality as the reason to invest.

Ricardo’s Distribution theory (1817) proposes that, as the economy faces diminishing profits/returns on capital, there would be an increasing shortage of investments. Income inequality exacerbates this problem, by causing income not to be reinvested back in production timely. Therefore, the result is a stagnant economy, where economic growth is significantly slowed down. Literatures on the relationship between income inequality or overall inequality, and economic growth, which is usually measured by GDP growth, have revealed different and robust results. Forbes, 2000 and Partridge, 1997 found a significantly positive correlation between income inequality and GDP growth. However, Tabellini et al, 1994 produced a significant and negative correlation. Interestingly, Squire et al, 1998 found no significant relationship between aggregate inequality and GDP growth, but a significantly negative relationship between poverty and GDP growth. More recently, Brueckner and Lederman, 2017 found a significantly negative impact of income inequality on GDP transitional growth in countries with high initial incomes. Nonetheless, overall, recent literature has been leaning towards the hypothesis that the relationship between income inequality and GDP growth is non-linear. This paper is going to empirically study 146 countries in the world over 27 years from 1992 to 2018, to confirm that the relationship between income inequality and GDP growth is non-linear as suggested in recent literature. Moreover, this research will show that the effects of income inequality on GDP growth is heterogeneous; the impact of income inequality on economic growth is more positive on high income countries than on lower income countries. The method used is regression that aims to explain the GDP movements of countries, in terms of consumption, export, capital formation, poverty, and GINI coefficient. This research is at preliminary level; there can be further improvements to the model.

The primary goal of this study is to observe the relationship between the fluctuation of the oil price and the increasing number of sales of electric vehicles based on data from 20 developed and developing countries. As the number of electric vehicles on the market is growing, the demand in the world oil market is declining slightly and, as a result, oil prices are also declining due to several factors. Consumer theory tells us that oil prices could decline due to a rise in the number of electric vehicles sold. Electric vehicles can minimize carbon dioxide emissions and pollutants even when considering indirect emissions from power production and battery generation. Soon, the world may start banning regular gasoline vehicles as a part of the solution to climate change which has already started in Norway. The result shows us there is a slight negative relationship between the oil price and sales of electric vehicles. I can expect that the sales of electric vehicles will keep increasing and after a certain time, it will become a perfect substitute for regular gasoline vehicles.