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COVID-19 and the stock market: evidence from Twitter

Author

Listed:
  • Rahul Goel
  • Lucas Javier Ford
  • Maksym Obrizan
  • Rajesh Sharma

Abstract

COVID-19 has had a much larger impact on the financial markets compared to previous epidemics because the news information is transferred over the social networks at a speed of light. Using Twitter's API, we compiled a unique dataset with more than 26 million COVID-19 related Tweets collected from February 2nd until May 1st, 2020. We find that more frequent use of the word "stock" in daily Tweets is associated with a substantial decline in log returns of three key US indices - Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P500, and NASDAQ. The results remain virtually unchanged in multiple robustness checks.

Suggested Citation

  • Rahul Goel & Lucas Javier Ford & Maksym Obrizan & Rajesh Sharma, 2020. "COVID-19 and the stock market: evidence from Twitter," Papers 2011.08717, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2011.08717
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Scott R Baker & Nicholas Bloom & Steven J Davis & Kyle Kost & Marco Sammon & Tasaneeya Viratyosin & Jeffrey Pontiff, 0. "The Unprecedented Stock Market Reaction to COVID-19," The Review of Asset Pricing Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 10(4), pages 742-758.
    2. Shen, Dehua & Liu, Lanbiao & Zhang, Yongjie, 2018. "Quantifying the cross-sectional relationship between online sentiment and the skewness of stock returns," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 490(C), pages 928-934.
    3. Zhang, Dayong & Hu, Min & Ji, Qiang, 2020. "Financial markets under the global pandemic of COVID-19," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 36(C).
    4. Gabriele Ranco & Darko Aleksovski & Guido Caldarelli & Miha Grčar & Igor Mozetič, 2015. "The Effects of Twitter Sentiment on Stock Price Returns," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(9), pages 1-21, September.
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