THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 SPREAD ON EGYPTIAN STOCK MARKET RETURN

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak is considered as one of the most severe infectious viruses experienced by the world during the 21st century. This pandemic has economic, social, and psychological consequences on all countries, so the main purpose of this paper is to determine the impact of COVID-19 on the Egyptian stock return specifically as Egypt has been one of the countries that were strongly affected. The impact of COVID-19 on the Egyptian Stock Exchange (EGX100) was investigated using a multiple regression model and historical data from 20 listed firms in the EGX100 index between February 2020 and March 2022. Additionally, we included inflation as a control variable in our model. The results indicated that COVID-19 significantly impacted the stock’s cumulative returns when used as an independent variable and measured using the cumulative coronavirus cases (CCC) and cumulative coronavirus deaths (CCD) collected for the time period of February 2020 through March 2022 from the World Health Organization (WHO) database. The findings also showed a negative correlation between these elements and the cumulative returns of the stock. Furthermore, The outcome of our model also showed that there was no significant relationship between inflation as measured by headline CPI and the stock’s cumulative returns.