On the effects of Covid-19 pandemic on stock prices: an imminent global threat

With the advent of the global COVID-19 pandemic, various world economies have been adversely affected. Occurrences such as plummeting equities, crippling global economic activities and surge in market volatility amongst others have become prevalent across the world. Assessing the economic impact of this crisis becomes expedient from a policy standpoint as the crisis unfolds with extreme speed. To this end, we employ the Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach to examine possible relationship between the pandemic and stock prices for global and some selected countries, namely China, France, Italy and the United States. We find evidence that the effect of COVID-19 observed cases on stock prices is rather varying across countries and limited, the spillover effects orchestrated through the recent oil and financial market volatility cannot be overlooked. Given the speed of occurrences, there is need for governments all over the world to be more proactive in striving for a breakthrough over the virus otherwise, in the coming weeks the global economy may receive a surge of the pandemic.