“…The influence of COVID-19 on financial markets has been a topic of great academic interest. Several studies have analyzed the impact of COVID-19 on stock markets (Al-Awadhi et al, 2020;Baker et al, 2020;Gao et al, 2021;Rizvi, Yarovaya, et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2020), mutual funds Mirza, Hasnaoui, et al, 2020;Yarovaya et al, 2020bYarovaya et al, , 2021, the currency market (Ali et al, 2020;Aslam, Aziz, et al, 2020;Umar & Gubareva, 2020), commodity markets (Mensi et al, 2020), as well as on cryptocurrencies (Conlon et al, 2020;James et al, 2021;Umar & Gubareva, 2020). However, this effect has hardly been analyzed in the fixed-income market despite Grund (2020) noting that the emergence of COVID-19 caused countries' sovereign spreads to increase rapidly.…”