In this note, we show that the stock markets do not always incorporate all the available information because in many cases they slowly evaluate the news. Using simple statistical analysis, we show that the response of the markets to the available information in certain time periods is irrational and inefficient. The COVID-19 outbreak gives financial economists an example of health risk underestimation, and of an unexpectedly slow response during a stress period; issues that should be examined in the future under a behavioral view.

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Although the coronavirus pandemic hit Europe in the early days of 2020, European stock markets had signaled fluctuations in the days before. This paper assesses the observed volatility on European stock exchanges and searches for its sources during the first four months of 2020. To investigate the issue, a panel VAR model is adopted, and the generalized impulse response function and the variance decomposition methods are used. The estimations show that about 34% of the volatility in European stock markets is due to the Chinese stock market, while 7% is due to international uncertainty, as measured by VIX. The impact of pandemic cases and deaths on European stock markets is negligible, below 1%. This means that the European stock market faced two risk elements: the first is the transmission volatility from the Chinese stock market, and the second is the international uncertainty. The findings also support the view that COVID-19 is more like a systematic risk.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the link between banking crises and the subjective well-being of individuals. In addition, the authors examine the transmission of crises from the banking sector to well-being and show that negative financial shocks have significant adverse effects.Design/methodology/approachThe authors employ agent-based modeling to test for the direct and indirect welfare effects of banking crises. The model includes a support vector machine (SVM) optimized subjective well-being function. The existing literature suggests that this is influenced by both the negative psychological effects of recessions and the adverse economic effects of income loss and increased unemployment.FindingsThe authors show that the different choices of policy response to a banking crisis carry different opportunity costs in terms of welfare and that societal preferences should be taken into account. The authors demonstrate that these effects influence different population classes in an asymmetric manner. Finally, the results demonstrate that the welfare loss of a bank failure is much higher than the cost of a bailout.Practical implicationsThe authors are able to propose to the authorities the best policy mix in order to handle banking crises in the most adequate manner, according to society's preferences between financial stability and public goods.Social implicationsThe findings extend the existing literature on subjective well-being, by quantifying the welfare cost of banking crises and showing that authorities should reconsider bank bailouts as a policy solution to bank distress.Originality/valueThe originality of this article lies in the use of an agent-based model to model the relationship between societal well-being and financial stability. Also, the authors extend existing agent-based methodologies to include machine learning optimization techniques.

Purpose This paper aims to investigate two issues. First, the authors test the effect of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX) on audit quality after 10 years. Second, the authors test whether it was necessary to close all of the Arthur Andersen offices due to the misbehavior of a few (e.g. the Houston and Atlanta offices). Design/methodology/approach The authors have used conservatism (Basu) as a proxy for audit quality. Findings The authors find that, over the long run (10 years) after SOX adoption, there is a significant positive change in conservatism as compared to during the previous similar period. In addition, the authors find that only 6 of the 20 city-level offices of Arthur Andersen were less conservative than were their other Big 6 competitors in the same city. Furthermore, the results also suggest that some city-level offices of Arthur Andersen were engaged in more conservative accounting practices than were their competitors and the Houston Andersen offices. Originality/value This study documents, using empirical evidence, that the implementation of SOX is successful, and that one factor that helped lead to this success might be the harsh punishment on Arthur Andersen.