Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/226296 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 8594
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
Firm-level stock returns differ enormously in reaction to COVID-19 news. We characterize these reactions using the Risk Factors discussions in pre-pandemic 10-K filings and two text-analytic approaches: expert-curated dictionaries and supervised machine learning (ML). Bad COVID-19 news lowers returns for firms with high exposures to travel, traditional retail, aircraft production and energy supply — directly and via downstream demand linkages — and raises them for firms with high exposures to healthcare policy, e-commerce, web services, drug trials and materials that feed into supply chains for semiconductors, cloud computing and telecommunications. Monetary and fiscal policy responses to the pandemic strongly impact firm-level returns as well, but differently than pandemic news. Despite methodological differences, dictionary and ML approaches yield remarkably congruent return predictions. Importantly though, ML operates on a vastly larger feature space, yielding richer characterizations of risk exposures and outperforming the dictionary approach in goodness-of-fit. By integrating elements of both approaches, we uncover new risk factors and sharpen our explanations for firm-level returns. To illustrate the broader utility of our methods, we also apply them to explain firm-level returns in reaction to the March 2020 Super Tuesday election results.
Document Type: 
Working Paper
Appears in Collections:

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.