Effect of COVID-19 on stock prices

Abstract

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.