Journal of Risk and Financial Management Article COVID-19 Pandemic and Financial Contagion Julien Chevallier 1,2 1 Department of Economics & Management, IPAG Business School (IPAG Lab), 184 bd Saint-Germain, 75006 Paris, France;
[email protected] 2 Economics Department, Université Paris 8 (LED), 2 rue de la Liberté, CEDEX 93526 Saint-Denis, France Received: 15 October 2020; Accepted: 1 December 2020; Published: 3 December 2020 Abstract: The original contribution of this paper is to empirically document the contagion of the COVID-19 on financial markets. We merge databases from Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Center, Oxford-Man Institute Realized Library, NYU Volatility Lab, an d St-Louis Federal Reserve Board. We deploy three types of models throughout our experiments: (i) the Susceptible-Infective-Removed (SIR) that predicts the infections’ peak on 2020-03-27; (ii) volatility (GARCH), correlation (DCC), and risk-management (Value-at-Risk (VaR)) models that relate how bears painted Wall Street red; and, (iii) data-science trees algorithms with forward prunning, mosaic plots, and Pythagorean forests that crunch the data on confirmed, deaths, and recovered COVID-19 cases and then tie them to high-frequency data for 31 stock markets. Keywords: COVID-19; financial contagion; Johns Hopkins repository; Susceptible-Infective-Removed model; tree algorithm; data science 1. Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic hit the world economy, without anyone knowing, at light-speed, leading to partial unemployment and factories’ shutdown around the globe, leaving doctors, policymakers, businessmen, operational managers, data scientists, and citizens alike in disarray. The origin of the virus itself is not known with certainty, although most theories attach it to zoonotic transfer to the human species (Andersen et al.