The Impact of Pandemic Crises on the Synchronization of the World Capital Markets

Purpose - The main purpose of this study is to widely investigate the impact of recent pandemic crises on the synchronization of the world capital markets through 25 stock indices from major developed countries. Design/methodology/approach - This study collects 25 stock indices from major developed countries and the time period is between January 5, 2001 and February 24, 2022. The data sets used in the study include finance.yahoo.com and Investing.com.. The Granger causality analysis, unit-root test, VAR analysis, and forecasting error variance decomposition were hired in order to analyze the data. Findings - First, there are significant inter-relations among 25 countries around recent major pandemic crises(such as SARS, A(H1N1), MERS, and COVID19), which is consistent result with previous literature. Second, COVID19 shows much stronger impact on the world-wide synchronization than other pandemics. Third, the return volatility of each stock market varies, unit root tests show that daily stock index data are unstable while daily stock index returns are stable, and VAR(Vector Auto Regression) analyses presents significant inter-relations among 25 capital markets. Fourth, from the impulse response function analyses, we find that each market affects the other markets for short term periods, about 2~4 days, and no long term effect was not found. Fifth, Granger causality tests show one-side or two-sides synchronization between capital markets and we estimate, through forecasting error variance decomposition method, that the explanatory portions of each capital market on other markets vary from 10 to 80%. Research implications or Originality - The above results all together show that pandemic crises have strong effects on the synchronization of world capital markets and imply that these synchronizations should be carefully considered both in the investment decisions by individual investors and in the financial and economic policies by governments.