An Empirical Assessment of COVID-19 Pandemic on Asset Market Responses in India

Abstract

The study investigates the financial market’s response during the period of last nine months starting from the day when first COVID-19 case was confirmed in India. This paper attempts to gauge the impact of rise in COVID-19 confirmed number of cases on stock market as well as commodities market returns. A multi-model approach is used in the current research to assess the relationship between daily number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 and movement of asset returns from January 2020 to September 2020. The findings reveal that though financial markets exhibited asymmetric volatility clustering, it could not be traced to COVID-19 pandemic for the period under study in India.