Abstract:
Stock markets are extremely sensitive to macroeconomic, financial, geopolitical, political, and pandemic events. The world recently suffered a severe COVID-19 pandemic that lasted more than two years. Global financial markets and economies have taken a major shock. Stock markets around the world experienced the greater falls during pandemic. But scholarly work showed that certain sector performed better during pandemic than non-pandemic period. This study was carried out to investigate the widespread impact of COVID-19 on the stock returns of Pakistan's banking, pharmaceutical, and telecommunications sectors. The daily closing prices of the KSE-100 Index and the daily share closing prices of 27 firms from three different sectors, banking, pharmaceuticals, and telecommunications, were considered. Prices were taken from one year before the pandemic, from March 1, 2019, to February 28, 2020, known as the Pre-COVID Era, and one year following the outbreak, from March 1, 2020 to February 28, 2021, known as the Post-COVID Era. The impact was determined using regression analysis. The findings compared the returns in both time periods, and it was observed that the stock returns in the post-COVID era were significantly higher than those in the pre-COVID era
