COVID-19 fear and volatility index movements: empirical insights from ASEAN stock markets

This research aims to look into the effect of COVID-19 on emerging stock markets in seven of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN-7) member countries from March 21, 2020 to April 31, 2020. This paper uses a ST-HAR-type Bayesian posterior model and it highlights the stock market of this ongoing crisis, such as, COVID-19 outbreak in all countries and related industries. The empirical results shown a clear evidence of a transition during COVID-19 crisis regime, also crisis intensity and timing differences. The most negatively impacted industries were health care and consumer services due to the Covid-19 drug-race and international travel restrictions. More so, study results estimated that only a small number of sectors are affected by COVID-19 fear including  health care, consumer services, utilities, and technology, significance at the 1%, 5%, and 10%, that measure current volatility’s reliance on weekly and monthly variables. Secondly, it is found that there is almost no chance that the COVID-19 pandemic would positively affect the stock market performance in all the countries, mainly Indonesia and Singapore were the countries most affected. Thirdly, results shown that Thailand’s stock market output has dropped by 15%. Results shows that COVID-19 fear causes an eventual reason of public attention towards stock market volatility. The study presented comprehensive way forwards to stabilize movement of ASEAN equity market’s volatility index and guided the policy implications to key stakeholders that can better help to mitigate drastic impacts of COVID-19 fear on the performance of equity markets.