The Impact of COVID-19 on Individual Industry Sectors: Evidence from Vietnam Stock Exchange

The paper examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the stock market prices. The vector autoregression model (VAR) has been used in this analysis to survey 341 stocks on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange (HOSE) for the period from January 23, 2020 to December 31, 2020. The empirical results obtained from the analysis of 11 economic sectors suggest that there is a statistically significant impact relationship between COVID-19 and the healthcare and utility industries. Additional findings show a statistically significant negative impact of COVID-19 on the utility share price at lag 1. Analysis of impulse response function (IRF) and forecast error variance decomposition (FEVD) show an inverse reaction of utility stock prices to the impact of COVID-19 and a gradual disappearing shock after two steps. Major findings show that there is a clear negative effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on share prices, and the daily increase in the number of confirmed cases, indicate that, in future disease outbreaks, early containment measures and positive responses are necessary conditions for governments and nations to protect stock markets from excessive depreciation. Utility stocks are among the most severely impacted shares on financial exchanges during a pandemic due to the high risk of immediate or irreversible closure of manufacturing lines and poor demand for basic amenities.