PurposeThe authors examine the impacts of corporate announcements on stock returns during the pandemic stress.Design/methodology/approachThe authors employ the event study methodology with the market model on a sample of 90 events (announcement and ex-date).FindingsThe authors find that all the corporate announcements do not impact the stock returns in a similar pattern. While the bonus announcement, ex-bonus and ex-split events led to positive significant abnormal returns on the event date, the rights issue and stock-split announcements failed to influence the stock returns. The findings suggest that before making such announcements, the corporates should wait until the market recovers because even the positively impacting events result in negative market responses during pandemic stress.Practical implicationsThis study will guide the policymakers to stimulate share prices during such pandemics with the help of various corporate announcements. The investors will be assisted in understanding the stock market mechanism and making wise decisions before reacting to corporate actions during a pandemic or emergency period. While the policymakers are concerned with influencing the share prices, the investors are concerned with the composition of the risk-return parameters in their portfolio. This study will act as an essential investment tool for both.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, the authors conduct the first-ever study to examine the impacts of corporate announcements during a pandemic stress period that significantly contributes to the literature. The authors examine the announcement effects in India and accurately anticipate that this study will be a pioneer in this field. This study also paves the way for future researches in this area.

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The goal of a bank merger is to increase the bank's value in one way or another. The days of liberalization and globalization are in and there is a spate of mergers and acquisition which is sweeping the corporate world. Consolidation in the banking sector should largely be synergy-driven to acquire a quantum jump in the performance of the combined entity (2 + 2 ≥ 5). It can be achieved by combining complementary strengths , giving a better geographical spread, serving a larger number of customers in a better way with more diversified products and skills, realizing the opportunities for cross-selling, containing the cost of the merged entity, reduced competition, better utilization of available resources and deriving economies of scale. Over the last one and a half decade, the banking sector in India has not only grown in terms of size but also matured, diversified and consolidated to contribute towards building a robust financial system. In this paper, five cases of bank merger have been taken and Null Hypothesis, i.e. there is no difference in mean value of selected variables before merger and after the merger, is set and found rejected (in most of the variables). On the basis of the overall analysis, merger of Bank of Karad Ltd. (BOK) with Bank of India (BOI) was more effective in most of the variables as compared to merger