Quantifying the impact of Covid-19 on the US stock market: An analysis from multi-source information

Dey, Asim Kumer; Haq, Toufiqul; Das, Kumer

We investigate the impact of Covid-19 cases and deaths, local spread spreads of Covid-19, and Google search activities on the US stock market. We develop a temporal complex network to quantify US county level spread dynamics of Covid-19. We conduct the analysis by using the following sequence of methods: Spearman's rank correlation, Granger causality, Random Forest (RF) model, and EGARCH (1,1) model. The results suggest that Covid-19 cases and deaths, its local spread spreads, and Google searches have impacts on the abnormal stock price between January 2020 to May 2020. However, although a few of Covid-19 variables, e.g., US total deaths and US new cases exhibit causal relationship on price volatility, EGARCH model suggests that Covid-19 cases and deaths, local spread spreads of Covid-19, and Google search activities do not have impacts on price volatility.