Anxiety about the pandemic and trust in financial markets

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a novel context of global financial distress. This paper enters the related scientific debate and focuses on the relationship between the anxiety felt by the population of a wide set of countries during the pandemic and the trust in the future performance of financial markets. Precisely, we move from the idea—grounded on some recent literature contributions—that the volume of Google searches about “coronavirus” can be considered as a proxy of anxiety and, jointly with the stock index prices, can be used to produce indicators of the population mood—in terms of pessimism and optimism—at country level. We analyse the “very high human developed countries” according to the Human Development Index plus China and the main stock market indexes associated with them. Namely, we propose both a time-dependent and a global indicator of pessimism and optimism and classify indexes and countries accordingly. The results show the existence of different clusters of countries and markets in terms of pessimism and optimism. Moreover, specific regimes emerge, with optimism increasing around the middle of June 2020. Furthermore, countries with different government responses to the pandemic have experienced different levels of mood indicators, so countries with less stringent lockdown measures had a higher level of optimism.