COVID-19 pandemic, oil prices and Saudi stock market: empirical evidence from ARDL modeling and Bayer–Hanck cointegration approach

In 2020, the world experienced several significant events, including the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the collapse of international crude oil prices. The rapid spread of this pandemic has dramatic impacts on financial markets all over the world, thereby increasing market risk aversion in an unprecedented way since the subprime financial crisis. The decline in stock markets implied volatilities of equity and oil prices, thereby heightening turmoil in global financial markets despite comprehensive and substantial financial reforms. To this end, we investigated the likely effects of this pandemic on the Saudi stock market while controlling for oil prices based on daily data for a period from 1/1/2020 to 19/9/2022. To ascertain the existence of a long-run equilibrium relationship between the variables, we applied autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) modeling and the error correction model, with this ultimately revealing the existence of strong cointegration in the long run. The ARDL bounds test was found to be robust by combined cointegration tests, thus providing further evidence of a strong relationship in the long run. Granger causality tests also yielded evidence of causality between the variables in both directions. The total COVID-19 confirmed cases and oil prices also caused movements in stock returns in the short run. Our findings have some prominent implications for asset managers and policymakers to improve stock market efficiency and boost global economic activity. Saudi authorities can consequently remove the regulatory and legal obstacles to develop their stock market and better improve the risk management, which will allow to make quick decisions in response to any oil price volatilities. Policymakers should also adopt proactive strategies that can comfort stock investors’ anxieties over the increasing oil price volatilities. Finally, the findings should be treated with some cautions because of the limited sample size and the tests’ statistical inference. Nevertheless, they do open opportunities for further studies to look in more detail at how the COVID-19 pandemic affected, over the short and long run, monetary and fiscal policy coordination, financial stability, and various other macroeconomic indicators in Saudi Arabia.