Essays in finance: the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on financial markets

Abstract

The unexpected and exogenous shock of the COVID-19 health crisis in the beginning of 2020 had dramatic consequences for financial markets. The world’s leading stock markets were on an all-time high until mid-February and collapsed by roughly 30% within a few days. This presents an opportunity to investigate reasons, which might have reinforced the stock market crash, and also those characteristics, which might have made specific firms more resilient to the crisis. The underlying thesis covers these two aspects and contributes to the evolving strand of literature. While the first two chapters investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on financial markets on country-level, the remaining three chapters contribute to the growing body of research on characteristics which make firms more immune to the COVID-19 crisis.