Stock market reactions of maritime shipping industry in the time of COVID-19 pandemic crisis: an empirical investigation

ABSTRACT This study examines the stock markets’ response to the maritime shipping industry during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the daily data of the listed shipping companies in the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), this study adopted the event study methodology to find the short-term effects of this outbreak. We classified the four initial COVID-19 outbreak news events as pessimistic and four subsequent events as optimistic. We find that the maritime stocks reacted negatively in responses to the critical COVID-19 declarations during cynical events. The investors’ reactions reached the lowest minimum values (−20.73%) when the announcement of COVID-19 was a worldwide pandemic by the WHO and the travel ban by the US from 26 European countries. However, some initiatives such as extra-economic stimulus by the United States attained the highest positive reaction (12.45%). The event study’s findings are also primarily corroborated by in-depth financial performance analysis of individual companies. In general, our findings suggest that stock markets react quickly to news about the COVID-19 pandemic, and this response varies with the level of outbreak and hope of recovery.