id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cord-265178-q7x7ec24	Lyócsa, Štefan	Fear of the coronavirus and the stock markets	2020-08-26		.txt	text/plain	3333	197	60	We show that during this period, fear of the coronavirus – manifested as excess search volume – represents a timely and valuable data source for forecasting stock price variation around the world. The idea of using sentiment or fear to explain stock market volatility is certainly not new; several recent studies have used news, VIX, Twitter posts and other proxies to measure investors' sentiment and fear about the future (e.g., Whaley, 2000; Zhang et al., 2011; Huerta et al., 2011; Smales, 2014 Smales, , 2017 . However, our study is the first to address the predictive power of Google searches on stock market volatility during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results show that high Google search volumes 35 for COVID-19 predict high stock market volatility in all markets in our sample. The ASV A t is positive for all markets and significant for all markets except South Korea, thus suggesting that when search activity related to corona information increased, price variation in stock markets increased the following day.	./cache/cord-265178-q7x7ec24.txt	./txt/cord-265178-q7x7ec24.txt