Financial Network Connectedness and Systemic Risk During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic causes a huge number of infections. The outbreak of COVID-19 has not only caused substantial healthcare impacts, but also affected the world economy and financial markets. In this paper, we study the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on financial market connectedness and systemic risk. Specifically, we test dynamically whether the network density of pandemic networks constructed by the number of COVID-19 confirmed cases is a leading indicator of the financial network density and portfolio risk. Using rolling-window Granger-causality tests, we find strong evidence that the pandemic network density leads the financial network density and portfolio risk from February to April 2020. The findings suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic may exert significant impact on the systemic risk in financial markets.