Chapter 15 Stock Market Volatility Following Uncertainty of COVID-19 Outbreak: News Impact Curve Analysis Approach

This study examines whether the current virus pandemic (COVID-19) has any significant negative effect on returns series of selected stock markets in the developed, Asian and GCC countries. For this purpose, the EGARCH (1, 1) model and the News Impact Curve (NIC) are applied to examine the persistence of symmetric volatility, leverage-effect and inducing volatility by preceding bad or good news. The findings suggest that the volatility is persistent in all stock markets, but it is under unity for many stock markets, which means the volatility will persist for the short term in most cases. Furthermore, the findings of asymmetric volatility analysis indicate the presence of leverage-effect over the study period in all the selected stock markets except Japan, Indonesia and Hong Kong. However, NIC plots provide evidence that the negative shock (news) of the COVID-19 outbreak would put forward a higher volatility on all selected stock market returns in the near future, except for the stock markets in Thailand, Japan and Singapore, where the shocks (positive) suggest a higher subsequent period of conditional variance compared to the current shocks (negative) of the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, understanding the volatility structure of stock market returns is imperative for policy guidance among the policymakers and potential investors. For policymakers, as the volatility caused by the COVID-19 outbreak is persistent for the short term, this may encourage governments and central banks to implement effective measures to stimulate fiscal and monetary policies to counter the distraction caused by the pandemic, support the economic activities and cushion the local firms from the pandemic effect. For investors, the findings suggest that long-term investment decision should be taken to invest in all stock markets that are negatively affected by the COVID-19 outbreak to achieve capital gain in the future, while short-term investment decisions may be undertaken to take advantage from the short-term market volatility.