Author(s): Marwan Mohamed ABDELDAYEM, Saeed Hameed AL DULAIMI
The decline in global markets and oil prices on the rear of coronavirus (COVID 19) spread caused a decrease in the indices of all Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) securities exchanges. Therefore, the question that arises is the extent, if any, to which the pandemic-risk related has influenced the investors herding behavior in the GCC stock markets, but given the inherent difficulty of measuring investors herding behavior, it is clearly going to be difficult to obtain conclusive answers to this question. The study was undertaken in two stages, first, it was felt necessary to obtain a broad overview of the effect of the pandemic related to the risk of COVID-19 on investors' herding in the GCC. This was achieved by analyzing secondary data (i.e. daily historic prices of five GCC country market indices). In analyzing the secondary data, the study follows Christie and Huang (1995) and employs the cross-sectional standard deviation (CSSD) of returns to detect investors' herding behavior. Second, in an attempt to obtain a more precise understanding of the impact of pandemic related risk, a questionnaire survey was distributed and collected from 318 investors from the GCC stock markets. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was also used as the primary analysis between the two variables: i.e. expectations of pandemic risk and herding behavior. The findings reveal that expectations of pandemic risk have a significant positive impact on the herding behavior in the GCC stock markets during the coronavirus crisis in the first quarter of 2020. Finally, the results of this study are robust to a range of model specifications.