Stock Market Reactions of UK Banks During the COVID-19 Crisis

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Business economics - Banking, Stock Exchanges, Insurance, Accounting, grade: 1,3, University of Applied Sciences Ludwigshafen, language: English, abstract: This thesis aims to determine whether bad-news events resulted in a negative reaction and good-news in a positive reaction in the United Kingdom banking sector, or if there was no significant abnormal reaction at all. To address this research question, an event study was conducted for four events investigating 11 banks in the United Kingdom as securities and the FTSE 350 as a market index. The results showed an overall significant abnormal reaction; however only bad-news events result in significantly negative abnormal returns, while good-news events did not show consistent results. COVID-19 hit the world economy very hard in nearly every sector. As financial intermediaries, banks face the difficult task dealing with a shrinking economy. Previous studies have shown that events during the COVID-19 pandemic have significantly influenced the stock market. In the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009, bad-news events resulted in a negative abnormal return and good-news events resulted in positive abnormal returns in the banking sector in the United Kingdom.