This paper examines the presence of herd behavior in the Vietnamese stock market using the cross-sectional absolute deviation (CSAD) method and by applying quantile regression (QR). We detect herd behavior in the Vietnamese stock market from January 2016 to May 2022. Herd behavior is less pronounced for bullish markets, yet more prominent under other market conditions. Importantly, the paper provides insight into the herd phenomenon during COVID-19's fourth wave outbreak in Vietnam. We discover that during the fourth wave outbreak, investors on the Hanoi Stock Exchange (HNX) do not engage in herding. However, herd behavior does manifest on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange (HOSE) with falling stock prices engendering pessimistic herd selling. Knowledge of this empirical evidence of herd behavior in the Vietnamese stock market should prove useful to investors in determining the intrinsic value of stocks, and to policymakers wishing to enhance the efficiency of the equity market.

The Coronavirus crisis has led to unprecedented economic shocks to the corporate world and challenged how corporate management contributes to business resilience amid the pandemic. Employing a novel measure of managerial ability constructed for a large sample of U.S. publicly listed firms, we document that firms led by higher managerial ability exhibit lower stock return volatility, higher operating performance, and lower levels of default risk amid the pandemic. A difference-in-differences analysis suggests that the impact of managerial ability on firm performance is stronger during the pandemic than during the pre-pandemic period. The effect of managerial competency on corporate resiliency is more pronounced among firms that have high exposure to COVID-19. In addition, firms led by high managerial competency management are associated with higher stock liquidity and are less likely to exhibit employment, healthcare, safety, and consumer protection related violations amid the pandemic.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the popularity of online behavioral experiments grew steadily. Due to lockdowns, online studies often became the only available option for behavioral economists, sociologists, and political scientists. The use of the most well-known platforms, such as mTurk, was so intensive that the quality of data was harmed. However, even before the pandemic-induced quality crisis, online studies were limited in scope; real-time interactions between participants were hard to achieve due to the large proportion of drop-outs and issues with creating stable groups. Using the relatively unknown crowdsourcing platform, Toloka, we successfully ran several multi-round interactive experiments. Toloka's sizeable online population, fairly low exposure of participants to sociological surveys and behavioral studies, and convenient application programming interface can make it a useful addition to the toolbox of an experimentalist who needs to run behavioral studies that require real-time interactions between participants.

The paper examines how various COVID-19 COVID-19 news sentiments differentially impact the behaviour of cryptocurrency returns. We used a nonlinear technique of transfer entropy to investigate the relationship between the top 30 cryptocurrencies by market capitalisation and COVID-19 COVID-19 news sentiment. Results show that COVID-19 COVID-19 news sentiment influences cryptocurrency returns. The nexus is unidirectional from news sentiment to cryptocurrency returns, in contrast to past findings. These results have practical implications for policymakers and market participants in understanding cryptocurrency market dynamics under extremely stressful market conditions. .

We investigate herding in ten equity markets during the COVID-19 pandemic using a methodology that considers movements in assets due to changes in fundamentals. We find heterogeneous patterns in herding across the ten countries during the pandemic, but overall, there is limited evidence of herding during this period, with only Italy, Sweden, and the United States displaying signs of herding. A cross-sectional analysis reveals that herding measures during the pandemic are negatively associated with stricter governmental actions that restrict mobility, and positively associated with economic support measures.

This paper explores changes in social behavior since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which are characterized by reduction in relocation, mobility, and community engagement, and how the correlations between regional housing markets are affected by these changes. Because changes in mobility and engagement are the most apparent in large cities, the present study calculates the independence indicator of regional housing markets in the 50 largest metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States and determines their relationship with Mobility and Engagement Index values. The empirical results show that as mobility and community engagement decline in a certain area, housing market fluctuations become more independent, indicating correlations between regional housing markets in the US might decrease after the COVID-19 outbreak. This paper also finds that there are more MSAs having significantly decreased in volatility since the outbreak of the pandemic. This paper provides evidence indicating that housing markets may be impacted differently by the COVID-19 pandemic than other asset markets, particularly stock markets. Changes in mobility and engagement can be used as an indicator to assess whether the correlation between regional housing markets would decline, which means that, compared with financial instruments, more factors from real aspects need to be considered when determining the changes in real estate affected by the epidemic.

The COVID-19 Pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on how employees and employers operate. Employees, directly affected by workplace changes, may provide information regarding future efficiencies. As a result, crowdsourced employee satisfaction ( ) reviews mentioning the COVID-19 Pandemic may contain useful information regarding the future profitability of these firms. We utilize crowdsourced COVID-19 Pandemic specific obtained from Glassdoor.com to determine the impact on abnormal stock returns for public firms from March-December 2020. We find evidence that higher COVID-19 is related to higher abnormal stock returns. While non-COVID is found not to be related to abnormal stock returns.

We examine whether the ESOP (employee stock ownership program) has a significant effect on a company's stock volatility during the Covid-19 lockdown. We find that although banks' stock prices were more volatile in response to the rise of covid-19 confirmed cases, banks with ESOP showed significantly lower volatility than banks without ESOP. To identify the causal effect of the ESOP implementation, we use the ESOP-culture-index of each country as an instrumental variable.

Organizations, such as the World Health Organization, encouraged consumers to use contactless payment methods instead of payment methods such as cash, which can be carriers of the SARS-2 virus. This study aims to evaluate factors that influence Hungarian Generation X's behavioral intentions to use mobile payment services during the pandemic. We conducted an electronic questionnaire-based survey among 1120 Generation X individuals. Using structural equation modeling to analyze the study's conceptual model, our results confirm that perceived COVID-19 risk, perceived usefulness, and subjective norms significantly influence Hungarian Generation X's behavioral intentions to use mobile payment services. Moreover, perceived usefulness mediates the relationship between perceived ease of use and behavioral intention to use mobile payment systems. Overall, our results show that the model of perceived COVID-19 risk, perceived usefulness, subjective norms, and perceived ease of use explains 62.9% of the variance in intention to use mobile payment systems. Our study contributes to the technology acceptance model and highlights its effectiveness in explaining the behavioral intention to adopt mobile payments during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study examines how appointing a chief health officer (CHO) at the corporate-board level during the COVID-19 outbreak affects the stock returns of US firms. As the COVID-19 progressed, the negative abnormal return (CAR) is -7.5%. In contrast, shares of firms that had appointed a CHO before or during the window surrounding the date of the first reported COVID-19 case (the WHO declaration) exhibited positive CAR of ＋6.29% (＋0.136%). CARs surrounding the exact CHO appointment date once the COVID-19 had already broken out the effect was even stronger, ＋6.91%. Size, leverage, growth, and R&D intensity influence significantly returns during the outbreak.

This article aims to assess the loss of financial well-being in the COVID-19 pandemic. The developed theoretical model identifies the impacts of the perception of financial risk and financial anxiety on financial well-being. It also seeks, through a comparative analysis, to assess whether public servants, due to their status of job stability in Brazil, are less likely to have the effects of the pandemic than private employees. A survey was carried out on 1222 Brazilians with structural equation modeling and multi-group invariance tests. The results indicate that lower financial well-being is influenced by the level of financial anxiety and financial risk. Public servants perceive fewer losses in financial well-being, anxiety and risks than other professions. In the pandemic context, where the risks of unemployment and loss of income are increased, job stability works like an insurance, allowing public servants greater financial security and then minor losses of financial well-being. Evidence indicates that in countries where a large percentage of workers have temporary or informal jobs, the challenge of reducing the financial impacts of the pandemic will be great. Interventions to alleviating anxiety and public policies of income transfer and reduction of unemployment are instruments to reduce the loss of financial well-being.

This study explores the impact of COVID-19 on financial markets controlled by macroeconomic and administrative factors. As natural experimentation, we employ panel data analysis to test 50 stock market indices from January 01 to August 20, 2020. The findings suggest daily growth of COVID-19 confirmed cases have considerable adverse effects on stock returns and positive impacts on investment risks across markets. The government prompt interventions offset adverse impacts of the pandemic. Market reactions to the outbreak and authority responses information are more momentous in more developed economies due to their better information efficiency. The country-specific features of globalisation, uncertainty, healthcare system readiness, and economic development levels appear to have substantial impacts on equity market reactions. Financial markets in countries with higher levels of globalisation, economic policy and financial uncertainty experience more chaos during the pandemic. While those hostile effects are less significant in countries with robust healthcare systems.

We examine COVID-19 related topics discussed in the printed edition of the . Using text analytics and topic modeling algorithms, we discover 15 distinct topics and present differences in their sentiment (polarity) and hype (intensity of coverage) trends throughout 2020. Importantly, the hype of the topic, not the sentiment, relates to stock market returns. In particular, the hype scores for and have the strongest positive relation to the stock market performance.

This article presents the first study of Russian individual investors' aggregate equity trading behavior using novel data from Moscow Exchange, with a focus on the COVID-19 episode. Aggregate Russian individual bought the dip during the COVID crash in March-April 2020. While this can be accounted for by their regular contrarian trading traits, they remained as net buyers until the market fully recovered, a sign of sophistication in striking contrast to views that characterized individual investors as noise traders. Our analysis suggests that this outcome was driven by a combination of regular contrarian traits and a unique positive shock to individual investor demand for equities, with weaker evidence of exploiting a negative bubble.

We investigate the antecedents of subjective financial well-being and general well-being during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In an online survey conducted in the midst of COVID-19 pandemic with over 1000 Swedish participants we found that distrust in the government to cope with financial (but not healthcare) challenges of the pandemic was negatively related to the feeling of financial security. In a structural equation model, we also show that trust in government to deal with financial challenges of COVID-19 pandemic has a significant impact on general well-being through the mediating channel of financial well-being. In addition, trust in government to deal with healthcare challenges of COVID-19 pandemic has a significant direct impact on individuals' general well-being. Our findings have important implications for public policy as they highlight the importance of citizens' trust in well-functioning governmental institutions to help cope with not only healthcare, but also financial challenges of an ongoing pandemic.

The closure of borders and traditional commerce due to the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to have a lasting financial impact. We determine whether the growth in COVID-19 affected index prices by examining equity markets in five regional epicentres, along with a 'global' index. We also investigate the impact of COVID-19 after controlling for investor sentiment, credit risk, liquidity risk, safe-haven asset demand and the price of oil. Despite controlling for these traditional market drivers, the daily totals of COVID-19 cases nevertheless explained index price changes in Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States. Similar results were not observed in China, the origin of the virus, nor in the 'global' index (MSCI World). Our results suggest that early interventions (China) and the spatiotemporal nature of pandemic epicentres (World) should be considered by governments, regulators and relevant stakeholders in the event of future COVID-19 'waves' or further extreme societal disruptions.

We report new evidence that speculation in energy and precious metal futures are more prevalent in crisis periods and even more so during the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast, agricultural futures attract more hedging pressure. Post-GFC patterns mirror the 1980s' recessions. Using quantile regression on a long-horizon sample we also find that speculative pressure generally coincides with abnormal returns in normal circumstances but not in the current pandemic. Instead, volatility is strongly and often non-linearly associated with speculation across instruments.

We investigate the impact of governments' social distancing measures against the novel coronavirus disease 2019 () as this was reflected on 45 major stock market indices. We find evidence of negative direct and indirect (spillover) effects for the initial period of containment measures (lockdown).

National culture has been shown to impact the way investors, firm managers, and other financial market participants respond to crisis. To date, however, none has looked at the impact of culture on market responses to disasters. This paper is the first to address the effect of national culture on stock market responses to a global health disaster. We find larger declines and greater volatilities for stock markets in countries with lower individualism and higher uncertainty avoidance during the first three weeks after a country's first COVID-19 case announcement. Our results are robust after controlling for investor fear, cumulative infected cases, the stringency of government response policies, the level of democracy, political corruption, and the 2003 SARS experience, among others.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1016/j.jbef.2020.100411.].

We examine whether the social capital index of the county where the bank is headquartered is associated with the ambiguity of tone measures constructed from the textual analysis of banks' 10-K filings. We hypothesize and find that banks located in high social capital areas exhibit lower ambiguous tone in their 10-K filings. Furthermore, the impact of social capital on management's 10-K disclosure for banks located in high social capital areas is not mitigated during recessionary periods when management may have more unfavorable news to report. Unlike other studies that suggest that social norms can be forsaken when motive and opportunity exist, our results suggest that social capital is reasonably entrenched in banks' reporting. In contrast, we find that banks located in low social capital areas report more ambiguously during recessionary periods when management may have to report unfavorable news.