The impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak on faith-based investments: An original analysis

Abstract

This paper examines the rapid spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) and its short-term impact on the Shariah-compliant UK Dow Jones market index to capture the dynamic behavior of stock returns at economy and industry levels. Using daily data over the period January 20 to May 20 and ten UK industrial sector groupings, the findings suggest a strong and statistically significant relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and the performance of the conventional stock market index. The findings also suggest that the disease interacts negatively but insignificantly with the Dow Jones faith-based ethical (Islamic) index compared to its UK counterpart. In addition, through an analysis of sector groupings, the paper shows that the stock returns of the information technology sector performed significantly better than the market, while stock returns of consumer discretionary sector, which includes transportation, beverages, tourism and leisure, consumer services performed significantly worse than the market during the COVID-19 outbreak. Other sector groupings fail to yield significantly plausible parameter values.

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Elsevier has granted permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbef.2020.100403

Repository URI

https://researchportal.hw.ac.uk/en/publications/56fe271e-957b-4db7-867a-a72e103d9ccf