This paper investigates the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) on the Chinese stock market. We show that the COVID‐19 outbreak not only hurts the stock returns but also affects the stock price sensitivity to firm‐specific information. We document heterogeneous effects of the epidemic infection scale and the public attention about the pandemic. The stock market response to firm‐specific information is decelerated (accelerated) by the public attention (infection scale). Moreover, the decreasing (increasing) effect of the public attention (infection scale) on such response is more intensive to positively toned (negatively toned) firm‐specific news articles. Finally, we observe price reversal (momentum) following the public attention (infection scale).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.