Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to identify econometric models likely to highlight the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the financial markets. The Markov-switching “GARCH and EGARCH” models are suitable for analyzing and forecasting the series of daily returns of the major global stock indices (i.e., SSE, S&P500, FTSE100, DAX, CAC40, and NIKKEI225) during the pre-COVID-19 period, from 1 June to 30 November 2019, and the post-COVID-19 period, from 31 December 2019, to 1 June 2020. The Markov-switching “GARCH and EGARCH” models allow good modeling of the conditional variance. The estimated conditional variance values by these models highlight the increase in volatility for the stock markets in our sample, during the post-COVID-19 period compared to that pre-COVID-19, with a peak in volatility in “early January 2020” for the Chinese stock market and in “March 2020” for the other five stock markets (i.e., New York, Paris, Frankfurt, London, and Tokyo). The stock exchange of Frankfurt has shown great resilience compared to other international stock exchanges (i.e., the stock exchanges in Paris, London, and New York). The modeling of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the financial markets by the Markov-switching “GARCH and EGARCH” models makes it possible to simultaneously take into consideration the nonlinearity at the level of the mean and the variance, and to obtain the results of the transition probabilities, the unconditional probabilities and the conditional anticipated durations during the pre-COVID-19 period and the post-COVID-19 period.
1. Introduction
The prices of the main international
financial market portfolios experienced a plunge in March 2020 due to the COVID-19
pandemic. Pandemics can also have a substantial impact on financial systems due
to their enormous economic costs []. It is
true that the previous literature remains limited as to how pandemics affect
financial markets. However, some research has advanced the impact of the COVID-19
pandemic on financial volatility [,,]. It
should be noted that other forms of natural disasters, such as earthquakes and
volcanoes; air disasters; as well as acts of terrorism, have a negative impact
on financial markets [,,,,,]. Since the
appearance of the first case of COVID-19 in Wuhan in December 2019, the virus
has quickly spread to all corners of the world. On 11 March 2020, when it has
already affected more than 100,000 people and killed thousands of people in
over 100 countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the
coronavirus epidemic (COVID-19) as a global pandemic. The global spread of COVID-19,
which has saturated healthcare systems, has forced societies and economies to
shut down, causing social and economic disruption. The negative repercussions
of the COVID-19 pandemic on foreign trade, tourism, transport, and industry
were evident []. Its economic consequences
are likely to exceed those of the global financial crisis of 2007–2009. In
fact, in its April 2020 report, the International Monetary Fund forecasts a
global growth rate of −3% in 2020, which is lower than the lowest rate of −1.7%
recorded in 2009 during the global financial crisis of 2007–2009 []. The negative, substantial, and sudden impact
of the COVID-19 pandemic on major stock markets was evident in March 2020 [,,,]. Indeed, the price of the S&P 500
stock index, which reached a high value of 3386.15 points on 19 February 2020,
experienced, after almost a month, a decline of around 34% and recorded a low
value of 2237.40 points on 23 March 2020. The price of FTSE 100 also registered
a decline of about 30% for a single month and fell from 7403.9 points on 16
February 2020 to 5190.8 points on 15 March 2020. Likewise, the price of CAC 40
fell from 6111.24 points on 19 February 2020 to 3754.84 points on 18 March 2020,
a drop of around 39% for a single month. The literature explains financial
volatility through factors related to economic conditions, institutional
problems, market uncertainty, good or bad announcements, and economic policy
uncertainty [,,,,,,,,,,]. There is a fair amount
of research that has focused on estimating and forecasting the economic and
financial costs of pandemics []. For example,
the study of the economic costs of the HIV pandemic [],
the impact of the HIV pandemic on development [],
the costs of growing global obesity and diabetes [],
the work on forecasting the economic costs for possible future pandemics which
has highlighted the importance of good health system management to address the
people affected and tackling outbreaks as well as the negative impact of social
distancing on economic activity [], with the
study indicating the need to prepare for pandemics and estimating the value of
the annual losses due to a possible pandemic at around 500 billion US dollars,
or 0.6% of global income []-currently
considered to be underestimated []-the work
highlighting the need for economic risk management versus potential probability
future pandemics [,]. The objective of
this paper is, therefore, to identify econometric models likely to model the
processes of the series of daily returns of the main world stock market
indices: SSE, S&P500, FTSE 100, DAX, CAC40, and NIKKEI 225, during the pre-COVID-19
period, from 1 June to 30 November 2019, and the post-COVID-19 period, from 31
December 2019 to 1 June 2020, in order to highlight the substantial impact of
the COVID-19 pandemic on the financial markets. Since these series experience
phases of calm or low volatility and phases of crisis or high volatility, the
Markov-switching “GARCH and EGARCH” models constitute the econometric methods
adequate to model their volatility during the period pre-COVID-19 and the post-COVID-19
one [,,,,,].
2. Results and Concluding Remarks
Both the graphical examination of our
variables of interest and the unit root tests, i.e., the increased Dickey–Fuller,
Phillips–Perron, and KPSS (Kwiatkovski, Phillips, Schmidt and Shin), show that
the daily prices of the main world stock indices: SSE, S&P500, FTSE 100,
DAX, CAC40, NIKKEI 225 are not stationary, while the series of daily returns of
the same indices: RSSE, RS&P500, RFTSE 100, RDAX, RCAC40 and RNIKKEI 225,
are stationary, during the pre-COVID-19 period and the post-COVID-19 one.
Table 1, Table 2, Table 3 and Table 4
below present the results of the estimation of the Markov-switching “GARCH and
EGARCH” models during the pre-COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 periods.
Table 1.
Estimation of Markov-switching GARCH models during the pre-COVID-19 period from 1 June to 30 November 2019. Where is the independent state of the past conditional variance; , with i .
Table 2.
Estimation of Markov-switching GARCH models during the post-COVID-19 period from 31 December 2019 to 1 June 2020. . Where is the independent state of the past conditional variance; , with i .
Table 3.
Estimation of Markov-switching EGARCH models during the pre-COVID-19 period from 1 June to 30 November 2019. Where and is the independent state of the past conditional variance.
Table 4.
Estimate of EGARCH regime change models during the post-COVID-19 period from 31 December 2019 to 1 June 2020. . Where and is the independent state of the past conditional variance.
Given the results of the individual significance test of the coefficients, the information criteria (i.e., Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC)), and the Log-likelihood (Log(L)), the models suitable for modeling conditional volatility are, on the one hand, the Markov-switching EGARCH model, with normal distribution, for the RS&P500, RSSE, RDAX, RFTSE, and RNIKKEI series, the Markov-switching EGARCH model, with a generalized distribution of errors, for the RCAC series, during the pre-COVID-19 period; and, on the other hand, the Markov-switching EGARCH models, with normal distribution, for the RS&P500, RCAC, RFTSE, and RNIKKEI series, the Markov-switching EGARCH model, with a Student distribution, for the RDAX series, and the Markov-switching GARCH model, with normal distribution, for the RSSE series, during the post-COVID-19 period. Figure 1 below illustrates the graphical representations of the conditional volatilities estimated by the models indicated above, during the pre-COVID-19 period and the post-COVID-19 one, for the six series of our interest: RS&P500, RSSE, RDAX, RCAC, RFTSE, and RNIKKEI.
Figure 1.
Conditional volatility during the pre-COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 period. (A) Pre-COVID-19 period from 1 June to 30 November 2019. (B) Post-COVID-19 period from 31 December 2019 to 1 June 2020.
From this figure, we see that the extent (maximum-minimum) is very large during the post-COVID-19 period compared to the pre-COVID-19 period. Apart from the stock market of the epicenter country of the COVID-19 pandemic (the Chinese stock market), for which conditional volatility (denoted “volsse”) reached its peak in “late December-early January” during the post-COVID-19 period, volatilities conditions of the other five stock markets (the New York, Paris, Frankfurt, London, and Tokyo stock exchanges) reached their climax in March 2020. This finding clearly illustrates the increase in volatility in the main stock markets due to the pandemic of COVID-19.
The indicators of central tendency and position (the first quartile, the median, the third quartile, the arithmetic mean), the minimum value, the maximum value, and the dispersion indicators (the standard deviation, the coefficient of variation, and the interquartile range) of conditional volatility (Table 5 and Table 6) increased during the post-COVID-19 period compared to the pre-COVID-19 period. This increase clearly illustrates the increase in volatility in major stock markets due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Table 5.
Statistical indicators of conditional volatility during the pre-COVID-19 period.
Table 6.
Statistical indicators of conditional volatility during the post-COVID-19 period.
According to the values of the transition probability , we see that the chances of passing from the state of crisis at t-1 to the state of stability at t have greatly decreased, during the post-COVID-19 period compared to that pre-COVID-19, for all stock markets in our sample (Table 7 and Table 8). For example, this probability goes, between the pre-COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 period, from 0.355 to 0.0004 for the stock exchange of London, from 0.4064 to 0.0404 for the stock exchange of Tokyo, and from 0.0826 to 0.0004 for the stock exchange of Paris. It should be noted that the stock exchange of Frankfurt recorded the smallest decrease in this probability between the pre-COVID-19 and the post-COVID-19 period, a drop from 0.0865 to 0.0285. Based on the values of the unconditional probability in the stable state and the unconditional probability in the crisis state , we see that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a negative impact on the stock exchanges of New York, Paris, and London. In other words, the proportion of observations that should be in a state of crisis () increased significantly, during the post-COVID-19 period compared to the pre-COVID-19 period, for these three stock exchanges. Between the pre-COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 period, this proportion rose from 19.35% to 98.57% for the stock exchange of London, from 38.59% to 98.57% for the stock exchange of Paris, and from 26.84% to 58.43% for the stock exchange of New York. In return, the stock exchange of Frankfurt showed great resilience, compared to other international stock exchanges, with the recording of a very low value of the unconditional probability of the state of crisis and a very high value of the unconditional probability of the state of stability , during the post-COVID-19 period compared to the pre-COVID-19 period. In fact, the proportion of observations that should be in the state of crisis increased from 38.59%, during the pre-COVID-19 period, to 2.73%, during the post-COVID-19 period, for this stock exchange. It should also be noted that, to a lesser extent, the stock exchange of Tokyo has also shown a certain resilience, with a decrease in the proportion of observations that should be in the state of crisis during the post-COVID-19 period compared to the pre-COVID-19, or 31.64% against 55.16%. These latest results are supported by the variations in the values of the expected duration conditional on the state of crisis and the expected duration conditional on the state of stability, namely: the significant increase in the expected period of high volatility () during the post-COVID-19 period compared to that pre-COVID-19 for the stock exchanges of Paris, London, and New York, as well as the significant increase in the expected period of low volatility () during the post-COVID-19 period compared to that pre-COVID-19 for the stock exchange of Frankfurt. On the one hand, we can expect a period of high volatility equal to 2500 days, or 1.6 years, during the post-COVID-19 period against a period of high volatility equal, respectively, to almost 12 days and 3 days during the pre-COVID-19 period for stock exchanges in Paris and London. On the other hand, we can expect a period of high volatility equal to only 35 days during the post-COVID-19 period against a period of high volatility equal to almost 11 days during the pre-COVID-19 period for the stock exchange of Frankfurt. The resilience of this stock exchange in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic is illustrated by the expected period of low volatility equal to 1250 days, or 0.8 years, during the post-COVID-19 period, against an expected period of low volatility equal to 27 days, during the pre-COVID-19 period, for the German stock market.
Table 7.
Transition probabilities, unconditional probabilities, and conditional anticipated duration (the pre-COVID-19 period).
Table 8.
Transition probabilities, unconditional probabilities, and conditional anticipated duration (the post-COVID-19 period).
Funding
This research received no external funding.
Institutional Review Board Statement
Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement
Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement
Data available on request from the author.
Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no conflict of interest.
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