CURRENT COVID-19 IMPACT ON SAUDI STOCK MARKET: EVIDENCE FROM AN ARDL MODEL

This paper investigates the effect of COVID-19 pandemic on stock market in KSA applying an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) cointegration approach. More especially, we analyze the relationship between the natural logarithm of trading volume of Tadawull All shares index (TASI) and the natural logarithm of daily COVID-19 confirmed cases both in the short-run and the long-run. The bounds test for cointegration is carried out for daily series over the period from March 02, 2020 till May 20, 2020.Toda-Yamamoto causality test is implemented between variables. Our findings indicate that there is a negative impact of COVID-19 on stock market only in the long-run. Causality test reveals a unidirectional causality from COVID-19 prevalence’s measure to stock market. Robustness check seems to be conclusive.