Government responses to COVID-19 and industry stock returns

Elie Bouri, Muhammad Abubakr Naeem, Safwan Mohd Nor, Imen Mbarki and Tareq Saeed

Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja, 2022, vol. 35, issue 1, 1967-1990

Abstract: Governments around the world have responded to the COVID-19 outbreak with a mix of policies. The strictest responses of the New Zealand government are notable, given their abilities to contain and limit the spread of the virus. However, their impacts on stock returns remain unclear. This paper investigates the impact of three policies, namely lockdown, the stimulus package, and the travel ban, on the returns of 14 New Zealand industry stock indices. Using daily data from 1 January 2019 to 25 August 2020, evidence points to a heightened level of integration among the various industry stock indices during the early stages of the pandemic. Only lockdown has had a positive impact on aggregate stock returns, suggesting its ability to raise investors’ confidence in the overall stock market. At the industry level, the impact of the three response policies is generally positive but heterogeneous across industry stock indices. Notably, none of the three adopted policies significantly impact technology, healthcare, and real estate returns.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/1331677X.2021.1929374 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:reroxx:v:35:y:2022:i:1:p:1967-1990

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rero20

DOI: 10.1080/1331677X.2021.1929374

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja is currently edited by Marinko Skare

More articles in Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().