Analysing the impact of COVID-19 outbreak and economic policy uncertainty on stock markets in major affected economies

The covid-19 pandemic and Economic Policy Uncertainty resulting from the shutdown of production, withdrawal of investments, enforcement of lockdowns and quarantines globally, have been directly affecting stock markets worldwide. This study is thus an attempt to analyse the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on stock market behaviour in major affected economies. Moreover, the time frame was extended by using current data which investigate the impact of the virus during the boom and the blast phase in the country's most hit by the pandemic crisis such as China, Italy, UK and US. The frequency of the data is daily, and it dates from 3 January 2020 up to 10 February 2021. The considered time framework will give a deep insight into how stock markets behave in the case of an exogenous shock. The Dickey-Fuller Augmented Unit Root Test indicates that all the variables are stationary at first difference, which is one of the main conditions to have robust result, and the ARCH-LM test for the heteroskedasticity of the residuals, which show that all the probability values are significant, rejecting the null hypothesis of no ARCH effect. Based on the results of GARCH (1,1), we conclude that the change in stock markets volatility is positive and significant in China, Italy, UK and USA. This suggests that the impacts of COVID-19 outbreak and economic policy uncertainty on Stock Markets are a significant and Homogeneous across the studied countries, and the shock on FTSE Italia All Share has the longest time to vanish which makes it the riskiest to invest during this period, while the shock on SP500 USA has the shortest time to disappear meaning that it is safest Stock Market in this study. These findings have significant implications for policymakers, institutional and individual investors and Financial Markets analysts.