The impact of government response’s policy to COVID-19 on stock market volatility

Abstract

This research explores the effect of government's COVID-19 response policy on stock market volatility. We explain the stock market volatility dynamics via the index that measures the strict level of government response’s policy to COVID-19. Using EGARCH (1,1) model to identify stock market volatility from daily stock market return of 68 countries and apply the Arellano–Bond two-step system GMM estimator for dynamic panel data analysis, we found that the stock market volatility in the COVID-19 period can be reduced by the government policy response to COVID-19. Furthermore, after dividing the index into 3 types, all types of policy also reduce the stock market volatility and the economic support policy has the highest impact on the stock market volatility.