The Mental Health Effects of the First Two Months of Lockdown during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the UK*

In this paper, we estimate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health in the UK. We use longitudinal micro data for the UK over the period 2009–20 to control for pre-existing trends in mental health and construct individual-specific counterfactual predictions for April 2020, against which the COVID-19 mental health outcomes can be assessed. Our analysis reveals substantial effects at the population level, approximately equal in magnitude to the pre-pandemic differences between the top and bottom quintiles of the income distribution. This overall effect was not distributed equally in the population – the pandemic had much bigger effects for young adults and for women, which are groups that already had lower levels of mental health before COVID-19. Hence inequalities in mental health have been increased by the pandemic. Even larger effects are observed for measures of mental health that capture the number of problems reported or the fraction of the population reporting any frequent or severe problems, which more than doubled. Pre-existing health vulnerabilities had no predictive power for subsequent changes in mental health.     

Economic policy uncertainty and environmental governance company volatility: Evidence from China

This study primarily investigates whether China’s economic policy uncertainty (EPU) can predict the environmental governance index volatility, which selects companies regarding environmental protection such as sewage treatment, solid waste treatment, air treatment, and energy saving. Empirical results reveal that China’s EPU index can predict the environmental governance index volatility. Furthermore, even during periods of fluctuating volatility and the COVID-19 pandemic, China’s EPU index can reliably forecast the environmental governance index volatility. This paper tries to provide new evidence regarding the connection between EPU and environmental governance companies’ stock volatility.     

Gold and US sectoral stocks during COVID-19 pandemic

In this study, we examine the hedging relationship between gold and US sectoral stocks during the COVID-19 pandemic. We employ a multivariate volatility framework, which accounts for salient features of the series in the computation of optimal weights and optimal hedging ratios. We find evidence of hedging effectiveness between gold and sectoral stocks, albeit with lower performance, during the pandemic. Overall, including gold in a stock portfolio could provide a valuable asset class that can improve the risk-adjusted performance of stocks during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, we find that the estimated portfolio weights and hedge ratios are sensitive to structural breaks, and ignoring the breaks can lead to overestimation of the hedging effectiveness of gold for US sectoral stocks. Since the analysis involves sectoral stock data, we believe that any investor in the US stock market that seeks to maximize risk-adjusted returns is likely to find the results useful when making investment decisions during the pandemic.     

The Challenges for Labour Market Policy during the COVID-19 Pandemic*

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a dramatic economic impact in most countries. In the UK, it has led to sharp falls in labour demand in many sectors of the economy and to initial acute labour shortages in other sectors. Much more than in a typical downturn, the current crisis is not simply a general slowdown in economic activity but also a radical short-term shift in the mix of economic activities – of which an unknown, but possibly significant, amount will be persistent. The initial policy response has focused on cushioning the blow to families’ finances and allowing the majority of workers and firms to resume their original activities once the crisis subsides. These are crucial priorities. But there should also be a focus on reallocating some workers, either temporarily if working in shut-down sectors or permanently by facilitating transitions to sectors and jobs offering better prospects and facing labour shortages. The phasing-out of the furlough subsidies, which is projected to happen in Autumn 2020, brings this into even sharper focus since the alternative for many workers will be unemployment. Active labour market policy will need to be front and centre.     

Inequalities in Children's Experiences of Home Learning during the COVID-19 Lockdown in England*

This paper combines novel data on the time use, home-learning practices and economic circumstances of families with children during the COVID-19 lockdown with pre-lockdown data from the UK Time Use Survey to characterise the time use of children and how it changed during lockdown, and to gauge the extent to which changes in time use and learning practices during this period are likely to reinforce the already large gaps in educational attainment between children from poorer and better-off families. We find considerable heterogeneity in children's learning experiences – amount of time spent learning, activities undertaken during this time and availability of resources to support learning. Concerningly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, this heterogeneity is strongly associated with family income and in some instances more so than before lockdown. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that any impacts of inequalities in time spent learning between poorer and richer children are likely to be compounded by inequalities not only in learning resources available at home, but also in those provided by schools.     

Static and dynamic liquidity spillovers in the Eurozone: The role of financial contagion and the Covid-19 pandemic

This paper investigates static and dynamic liquidity spillovers for a pool of ten Eurozone countries for the period 2000–2021. We estimate a generalised vector autoregressive (VAR) model based on Diebold and Yilmaz (2009, 2012). We find evidence for static and dynamic transmission of shocks through the liquidity channel. We propose a static measure of liquidity spillovers which captures total and pairwise average spillovers across Eurozone countries. Our measure shows strong evidence of interconnection within the Eurozone through the liquidity channel. We investigate the dynamic intensity and direction of liquidity spillovers, finding significant evidence of contagion during crisis periods. Our results indicate that most of the shocks during periods of financial uncertainty arise from leading economies within the Euro area.     

Network based evidence of the financial impact of Covid-19 pandemic

How much the largest worldwide companies, belonging to different sectors of the economy, are suffering from the pandemic? Are economic relations among them changing? In this paper, we address such issues by analyzing the top 50 S&P companies by means of market and textual data. Our work proposes a network analysis model that combines such two types of information to highlight the connections among companies with the purpose of investigating the relationships before and during the pandemic crisis. In doing so, we leverage a large amount of textual data through the employment of a sentiment score which is coupled with standard market data. Our results show that the COVID-19 pandemic has largely affected the US productive system, however differently sector by sector and with more impact during the second wave compared to the first.     

The Income and Consumption Effects of COVID-19 and the Role of Public Policy*

We provide empirical evidence on the labour market impacts of COVID-19 in the UK and assess the effectiveness of mitigation policies. We estimate the relationship between employment outcomes and occupational and industrial characteristics and assess the effects on consumption. Seventy per cent of households in the bottom fifth of the earnings distribution hold insufficient assets to maintain current spending for more than one week. We compare the effectiveness of the UK's Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme and of Economic Impact Payments in the US. The EIPs are more effective at mitigating consumption reductions as they have full coverage, depend on household structure and are higher for low-income workers.     

Comparing COVID-19 with the GFC: A shockwave analysis of currency markets

I analyze the shockwave effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on currency markets, with a comparison to the global financial crisis (GFC), employing Kapetanios m-break unit root test, investigations of standalone risk measures—downside variance, upside risk, volatility skewness, Gaussian Value at Risk (VaR), historical VaR, modified VaR—and Diebold–Yilmaz volatility spillover analysis. Standalone risk analysis shows that the turmoil in the initial months of COVID-19 was not as severe as that in the GFC. However, examination of co-movements and volatility spillovers illustrates a different scenario. According to the results of the static connectedness measure of Diebold–Yilmaz, the shockwave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the total volatility spillover is about eight times greater than that of the GFC. Among standalone risk measures, the results closest to this finding are obtained from volatility skewness analysis. Additionally, of six foreign exchange rates, the Brazilian real and Turkish lira are the currencies experiencing the greatest increase in received volatility during the GFC and the COVID-19 pandemic, respectively. These findings suggest the severe effect of crises on emerging financial markets.     

COVID-19 social distancing and the US service sector: What do we learn?

This study investigates the impact of COVID-19 social distancing on the US service sector. Results from four industry indexes (hotels, entertainment, restaurants and airlines) indicate that conditional correlations among index pairs exhibited substantial increases. Iterated Cumulative Sums of Squares (ICSS) tests in dynamic conditional correlations show that while the relationship between airlines and entertainment venues is unstable, restaurants and hotels demonstrate stable co-movement. Markov regime-switching regression analysis suggests the pandemic is affecting mainly the entertainment and airline industries, with gradual deterioration in the hotel industry, led by small-market-cap companies. However, we see no evidence of a negative impact on the restaurant industry from the pandemic in our analysis period. This may be related to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Based on our results, we recommend employment of effective working capital and supply chain management methods in the service sector to streamline the operations of affected companies. In addition, all other sectors should utilize appropriate methods of risk measurement and should take 'Black Swans' into account to incorporate a more accurate probability of unexpected events.     

新冠肺炎疫情、金融市场震荡与金融危机

新型冠状病毒感染肺炎疫情在全球快速蔓延后,美国等国家金融市场出现大幅度震荡,历史罕见。金融市场震荡是疫情影响投资者信心,金融市场本身的风险需要释放,以及经济基本面悲观预期等因素共同作用的结果。目前来看,疫情对实体经济造成冲击,疫情应对情况也在很大程度上决定了金融市场震荡是否演化为全球金融危机,国外金融市场震荡对国内金融市场的传导需要审慎理性处理。     

Systemic risk measures and regulatory challenges

This paper discusses different definitions of systemic risk and identifies the challenges, which regulators face in addressing this phenomenon. We conducted a systematic literature review of 4859 abstracts to categorize the various methodologies developed to measure systemic risk. In total, 60 systemic risk measures proposed post-2000 have been critically appraised to inform academics and regulators of their practical applications and model vulnerabilities. This review suggests that most of these methods focus on individual financial institutions rather than on system stability. Those methodologies directly reflect the current regulations, which aim to ensure individual institutions’ soundness. As macro-prudential regulation evolves, policy-makers face the issues of understanding contagion and how regulations should be implemented. This paper also discusses new systemic risk and regulatory challenges resulting from the current COVID-19 pandemic.     

Covid-19, corporate survival and public policy: The role of accounting information and regulation in the wake of a systemic crisis

The economic crisis triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic prompted governments to issue several relief mechanisms to hold up companies and workers. This study analyzes how accounting information and regulation can support policymakers in the wake of a systemic crisis. Based on an accounting-based framework and readily available data from financial statements, it forecasts the impact of the crisis in terms of losses, equity depletion, and corporate defaults, absent government intervention. Next, it quantifies the costs and effects of five relief mechanisms in alleviating the risk of generalized corporate bankruptcies. The effects of the health pandemic and relief mechanisms on profitability and equity shortfalls are estimated for a sample of 586,076 privately held Italian firms. The findings indicate that the number of companies facing bankruptcy risk would increase from 65,463 (11% of the population) in 2019 to 153,681 (26%) in 2020, absent any government intervention. Altogether, these firms employ 1.4 million employees and have a total exposure to the financial industry equal to €68 billion in loans. Next, we assess the effects of relief mechanisms introduced by the Italian government to support corporations, whose aggregate costs reach €49.33 billion in 2020, and find that the interventions ‘rescue’ about 43,000 firms otherwise in default. Finally, the study adds to the debate on the role of accounting regulation in the wake of a systemic crisis by (a) discussing the effects of temporary changes to accounting rules on the informativeness and transparency of financial statements, and (b) suggesting alternative ways to modify accounting rules to safeguard corporate survival without compromising the informativeness of financial statements once the crisis reaches a halt.     

Recessions and Health: The Long-Term Health Consequences of Responses to the Coronavirus*

The lockdown measures that were implemented in the spring of 2020 to stop the spread of COVID-19 are having a huge impact on economies in the UK and around the world. In addition to the direct impact of COVID-19 on health, the following recession will have an impact on people's health outcomes. This paper reviews economic literature on the longer-run health impacts of business-cycle fluctuations and recessions. Previous studies show that an economic downturn, which affects people through increased unemployment, lower incomes and increased uncertainty, will have significant consequences on people's health outcomes both in the short and longer term. The health effects caused by these adverse macroeconomic conditions will be complex and will differ across generations, regions and socio-economic groups. Groups that are vulnerable to poor health are likely to be hit hardest even if the crisis hit all individuals equally, and we already see that some groups such as young workers and women are worse hit by the recession than others. Government policies during and after the pandemic will play an important role in determining the eventual health consequences.     

The Impact of COVID-19 on Share Prices in the UK*

The spread of COVID-19, and international measures to contain it, are having a major impact on economic activity in the UK. In this paper, we describe how this impact has varied across industries, using data on share prices of firms listed on the London Stock Exchange, and how well targeted government support for workers and companies is in light of this.     

Machine learning sentiment analysis,COVID-19 news and stock market reactions

The recent COVID-19 pandemic represents an unprecedented worldwide event to study the influence of related news on the financial markets, especially during the early stage of the pandemic when information on the new threat came rapidly and was complex for investors to process. In this paper, we investigate whether the flow of news on COVID-19 had an impact on forming market expectations. We analyze 203,886 online articles dealing with COVID-19 and published on three news platforms (MarketWatch.com, NYTimes.com, and Reuters.com) in the period from January to June 2020. Using machine learning techniques, we extract the news sentiment through a financial market-adapted BERT model that enables recognizing the context of each word in a given item. Our results show that there is a statistically significant and positive relationship between sentiment scores and S&P 500 market. Furthermore, we provide evidence that sentiment components and news categories on NYTimes.com were differently related to market returns.     

Short-selling activities in the time of COVID-19

This study examines the daily short-selling activities in the U.S. market during the early 2020 outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Our findings indicate firms that are more sensitive to the shock (i.e., with high foreign exposure, low financial or operating flexibility, or high supply-chain exposure) were shorted more heavily. Moreover, short-selling activities during the COVID-19 pandemic, blamed for triggering stock market crashes, were primarily concentrated around overpriced stocks. This finding supports the argument that short selling plays a prominent role in improving price discoveries. Our research provides timely empirical evidence supporting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) non-intervention approach in banning short selling in the U.S. market.     

The historic oil price fluctuation during the Covid-19 pandemic: What are the causes?

On 20 April 2020, the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil price dropped to negative levels for the first time in history. This study examines the factors underlying the historic oil price fluctuation during the Covid-19 pandemic. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach incorporating a structural break is applied to the daily series from 17 January to 14 September 2020 to analyze long-run relationships and short-run dynamics. The results reveal that increases in Covid-19 pandemic cases, US economic policy uncertainty, and expected stock market volatility contributed to the fall in the WTI crude oil price, whereas the fall in the global stock markets appears to significantly reduce the fall. Furthermore, the Russia–Saudi Arabia oil price war and speculation on oil futures are shown to play a critical part in the collapse of the oil markets. The findings are consistent with our expectations. Although it is reasonable to assume that the solution to this oil crisis is a pick-up in global oil demand, which will occur only when the novel coronavirus is defeated, this study proposes policy recommendations to cope with the current oil price crash.     

Could COVID-19 Infect the Consumer Prices Index?*

The spread of COVID-19 has led to sweeping changes in the way households work, spend their time and shop, resulting in different shopping patterns and rapid price changes in some goods. How will changes such as these be reflected in headline inflation measures such as the Consumer Prices Index (CPI)? This paper discusses problems in interpreting the CPI as a measure of how the cost of living is changing during the lockdown.     

新冠肺炎疫情对居民消费的影响及对策

2020年春节期间,湖北省武汉市爆发的由新型冠状病毒感染引起的肺炎疫情正在对中国经济和消费带来负向冲击。从逻辑上看,除了直接限制消费外,疫情还会通过收入效应、财富效应、实际购买力效应对消费形成不利影响。从历史上看,十七年前的非典疫情对经济和消费的影响是短期的,但此次疫情影响更大,持续期存在不确定性。稳定消费的关键是稳定居民收入,要稳定居民收入就需要稳定非农产业就业。基于分析,本文提出了一揽子政策建议。