Quantifying the effect of ESG-related news on Chinese stock movements.

Current Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) rating systems encounter challenges due to their subjectivity, time lag, and inconsistent coverage, which present significant obstacles for investors in the stock market. In contrast, news reporting data, characterized by its objectivity, timeliness, publicity, and sociality, has been a crucial source of quality market information for investors. The potential of ESG-related news as a robust complement to the data sources used in existing ESG rating systems merits further exploration. This study investigates the impact of ESG-related news on the Chinese stock market, with the goal of providing compelling evidence for integrating news media into ESG assessments. By analyzing 32,296 ESG-related news articles covering 3643 companies in the Chinese market from 2015 to 2021, we utilize event study methodology to assess the market's abnormal returns in response to ESG-related news. Our findings suggest a significant market impact from ESG-related news, indicating that investors are increasingly attentive to information pertaining to ESG issues. The study also reveals that different attributes of ESG-related news have diverse effects on the market. Specifically, news with negative sentiments has the most significant impact, and investors demonstrate a stronger reaction to ESG-related news disseminated through unofficial media. Furthermore, the study highlights that enterprise heterogeneity affects the impact of ESG-related news, with companies in the secondary and tertiary industries showing higher sensitivity. Privately-owned enterprises are found to be more influenced by such news compared to state-owned enterprises. This study offers a novel perspective in evaluating corporate ESG performance using news media, proposing a more effective and objective method to assess and manage corporate sustainability in a dynamic market landscape.

Impacts of COVID-19 and anti-pandemic policies on urban transport-an empirical study in China.

The COVID-19 pandemic that began in the last quarter of 2019 seriously impacted the transportation industry. Countries around the world adopted various restrictions and policies to prevent the spread of the pandemic, which resulted in a sharp drop in the demand for transportation. China was the first country to detect the pandemic and the fastest to recover. Existing policies and impacts were reviewed to analyze the impact of the pandemic on China's urban transportation sector and propose measures that may be taken to reduce the impact of COVID-19. This study reviews the impact on urban transportation system operations and how government should respond to a viral pandemic. The recovery measures during and after the pandemic and their hierarchical response system are analyzed. Furthermore, to empirically explore the effect of the recovery measures, this study adopted the Event Study Methodology (ESM) to quantitatively analyze the impact of the epidemic as well as anti-pandemic policies on the traffic flow sequence in the resurgence of COVID-19 in Beijing. The research findings provided solid policy implications and experiences for constructing sustainable urban transportation system and improve flexibility, reliability, and resilience of traffic governance in post-pandemic era.

A study of impact of climate change on the U.S. stock market as exemplified by the NASDAQ 100 index constituents.

This paper employs an innovative event study methodology to demonstrate the impact of climate change on the NASDAQ index from the unique perspective of extreme weather events. This is achieved through the application of the event study methodology to a total of 526 biological, climatic, geological, hydrological, and meteorological disasters of climate change occurring in the U.S. during the period of 2000-2019. The results of the study demonstrate that: ① it can be generally observed that the five dimensions of climate change have a significant impact on stock returns. ② Empirical evidence indicates that the impact of different climate change dimensions on the return rate of stocks from NASDAQ stocks varies. In contrast, the biological and hydrological dimensions have a significantly negative impact on the return rate of stocks from the NASDAQ index, while the climate dimension has a significantly positive impact on the return rate of stocks from the NASDAQ index. ③ From the perspective of time, the impact of the five dimensions of climate change on the stock yield exhibits certain non-linear characteristics. This can be observed in the phenomenon of shock reversal, which occurs before and after the event.

Dividend announcement effect analysis before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Indonesia Stock Exchange.

The emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 pandemic has become a challenge for the global society, including the investors in the capital market, due to the uncertainty it has caused. In relation to the phenomenon, this research aimed to examine the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the dividend announcement effect in Indonesia Stock Exchange by comparing the market volatility around the dividend announcement date of the selected stocks in 2019 and 2020. Implication of dividend increase and decrease as well as stock-risk profiling is also added for further learning. This research used event study methodology as a tool to analyze the data of the 23 sample companies taken from the LQ45 index. The period of analysis is ranged from 10 days before the dividend announcement to 10 days after the dividend announcement date. The study discovered that in 2019, the capital market presented a weak response toward the event, indicated by the inexistence of abnormal return. Moreover, in 2020, the dividend announcement effect caused negative insignificant abnormal returns and the number of companies with low volatility increased, which implies that the stock market is more pessimistic during the pandemic period. Even when the dividend amount increased from the previous period, the market still shows a negative reaction to it in 2020.

Action for Action: Mad COVID-19, Falling Markets and Rising Volatility of SAARC Region.

The Southern Region has reported a large number of contagious pandemic outbreaks. These epidemics brought threats to human health and resulted in serious economic losses. The COVID-19 is a global virus and has weakened the global financial markets with significant effect on stock returns and market volatilities. The study obtained a dataset about the financial market structure of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Countries. The purpose of the study is to determine the effect of 2019-nCov on stock market performance of SAARC member states. The study considered indexes of the National Stock Exchanges of each country and applied an event study approach for estimating the impact of Mad COVID-19 on the stock returns and market volatilities with an event window of 25 days of severe pandemic hits. The CAR approach proved the declining effect of Mad COVID-19 on the stock returns of SAARC countries. Asymmetric GJR-GARCH Model estimated the changeable volatility and proved the increase in volatility with COVID-19 as a negative shock. SAARC Region significantly reacts to Mad COVID-19 with falling markets and rising volatility.