A Study on Impact of COVID 19 on Stock Market Indices

The emerging coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) outbreak in 2020 had a huge impact on world financial markets. It has developed unmatched risk, resulting in large losses for investors within a very short period of time. The purpose of this paper is to define the key drivers and their effect on the capital markets of the countries (China, India, Italy, Japan, Qatar, Singapore, the UK and the USA). In the framework of regression analysis, the impact of the COVID 19 cases was found to with dependent variables being the daily price closing return of each country's index, and the independent variable being the confirmed daily cases of COVID 19, the daily COVID 19 death cases and the Government of Stringency index. The analysis also analyses the effect on stock market returns for the countries chosen over the entire year of changing number of cases in the COVID 19 situations. The findings of this analysis show that the output of the financial markets of selected countries was substantially influenced by COVID 19 in the year 2020.