Epidemics, Public Sentiment, and Infectious Disease Equity Market Volatility

Abstract

Background: This article studies the relationship between the COVID-19 epidemic, public sentiment, and the volatility of infectious disease equities from the perspective of the United States. We use weekly data from January 3, 2020 to March 7, 2021. This provides a sufficient dataset for empirical analysis. Granger causality test results prove the two-way relationship between the fluctuation of infectious disease equities and confirmed cases. In addition, confirmed cases will cause the public to search for COVID-19 tests, and COVID-19 tests will also cause fluctuations in infectious disease equities, but there is no reverse correlation. The results of this research are useful to investors and policy makers. Investors can use the number of confirmed cases to predict the volatility of infectious disease equities. Similarly, policy makers can use the intervention of retrieved information to stabilize public sentiment and equity market fluctuations, and integrate a variety of information to make more scientific judgments on the trends of the epidemic.

Appeal of word of mouth: Influences of public opinions and sentiment on ports in corporate choice of import and export trade in the post-COVID-19 era

“…Public opinion is a vane expressing people's emotions, which reflects public views on events ( Krittanawong et al, 2021 ), shows the consumers' cognition of products ( Ramsingh and Bhuvaneswari, 2018 ; Liu et al, 2022 ), and determines the managers' preference for decision making ( Tan and Guan, 2021 ; Meng et al, 2021 ; Chen et al, 2022 ). Public opinions exist in every aspect of people's life and affects people's public behavior, which is an important issue that needs to be addressed in social development.…”

Infectious Disease and Asymmetric Industrial Volatility

“…To better capture the impact of infectious diseases on industrial sectors, we use the newly developed Infectious Disease Equity Market Volatility Index (EMV-ID hereafter) constructed by Baker et al (2020), which tracks US equity market volatility caused by infectious diseases. EMV-ID has been widely employed in recent empirical studies to explore the impact of equity market volatility due to infectious diseases on numerous factors, such as commodity returns (Long and Guo, 2022), stock market returns (Ozkan et al, 2022;Gohar et al, 2022), Islamic stocks (Salisu and Sikiru, 2020), energy market (Salisu and Adediran, 2020), sports economy (Guo et al, 2022), public sentiment (Meng et al, 2021), corporate activities (Suleman and Yaghoubi, 2022) and others.…”