Market Reaction to COVID-19 and the Variants of Concern in BRICS-T Countries

This thesis investigates the market reaction effect of the announcements of the initial surge of COVID-19 and the subsequent variants of concern, namely Delta and Omicron, on the stock market of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and Turkey (BRICS-T). To this aim, we employ the event study methodology to measure the abnormal return of the relevant stock market index during the event windows of each variant’s first case announcement in each country. The results of this investigation suggest a late market reaction to first case announcement, and in most cases, new variants do not have statistically significant negative market reactions with the exception of South Africa for the case of delta variant, Russia and Turkey for the case of omicron variant.