The chronic nature of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak and lack of success in treatment and cure is creating an environment that is crucial for mental wellbeing. Presently, we extracted and classified sentiments and emotions from 141,208 headlines of global English news sources regarding the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The headlines considered were those carrying keyword coronavirus between the time frame 15 Janaury, 2020 to 3 June, 2020 from top rated 25 English news sources. The headlines were classified into positive, negative and neutral sentiments after the calculation of text unbounded polarity at the sentence level score and incorporating the valence shifters. In addition, the National Research Council Canada (NRC) Word-Emotion Lexicon was used to calculate the presence of eight emotions at their emotional weight. The results reveal that the news headlines had high emotional scores with a negative polarity. More precisely, around 52% of the news headlines evoked negative sentiments and only 30% evoked positive sentiments while 18% were neutral. Fear, trust, anticipation, sadness, and anger were the main emotions evoked by the news headlines. Overall, the findings of this study can be weaved together into important implications for emotional wellbeing and economic perspective.

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has become one of the biggest threats to the global economy and financial markets. This study aims to analyze the effects of COVID-19 on 56 global stock indices from October 15, 2019 to August 7, 2020 by using a complex network method. Furthermore, the change of the network structure is analyzed in depth by dividing the stock markets into developed, emerging and frontier markets. The findings reveal a structural change in the form of node changes, reduced connectivity and significant differences in the topological characteristics of the network, due to COVID-19. A contagion effect is also identified in the network structure of emerging markets, with the nodes behaving synchronously. The findings also reveal substantial clustering and homogeneity in the world stock market network, based on geographic positioning. Besides, the number of positive correlations in the global stock indices increased during the outbreak. The stock markets of France and Germany seem to be the most relevant developed markets, while Taiwan and Slovenia have this relevance in emerging and frontier markets. The findings of this study help regulators and practitioners to design important strategies in the light of varying stock market dynamics during COVID-19.

This study assesses how the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) affects the intraday multifractal properties of eight European stock markets by using five-minute index data ranging from 1 January 2020 to 23 March 2020. The Hurst exponents are calculated by applying multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MFDFA). Overall, the results confirm the existence of multifractality in European stock markets during the COVID-19 outbreak. Furthermore, based on multifractal properties, efficiency varies among these markets. The Spanish stock market remains most efficient while the least efficient is that of Austria. Belgium, Italy and Germany remain somewhere in the middle. This far-reaching outbreak demands a comprehensive response from policy makers to improve market efficiency during such epidemics.