Macroeconomic variables, COVID-19 and the Indian stock market performance

The selection of financing is a top priority for businesses, particularly in short- and long-term investment decisions. Mixing debt and equity leads to decisions on the financial structure for businesses. This research analyzes the moderate position of company size and the interest rate in the capital structure over six years (2013–2018) for 29 listed Pakistani enterprises operating in the sugar market. This research employed static panel analysis and dynamic panel analysis on linear and nonlinear regression methods. The capital structure included debt to capital ratio, non-current liabilities, plus current liabilities to capital as a dependent variable. Independent variables were profitability, firm size, tangibility, Non-Debt Tax Shield, liquidity, and macroeconomic variables were exchange rates and interest rates. The investigation reported that profitability, firm size, and Non-Debt Tax Shield were significant and negative, while tangibility and interest rates significantly and positively affected debt to capital ratio. This means the sugar sector has greater financial leverage to manage the funding obligations for the better performance of firms. Therefore, the outcomes revealed that the moderators have an important influence on capital structure.

The banking industry is one of the major industries in the Vietnamese stock market, so understanding how the industry index reacts to unusual events such as COVID-19’s impact is very important for the development of the Vietnamese stock market. This study examines the response of the banking sector index to three lockdown/blockage announcements to prevent the COVID-19 epidemic in Vietnam in 2020. Three times of lockdown/blockage: On February 13, 2020, blockade of Son Loi commune, Vinh Phuc province; on March 30, 2020, Vietnam announced the nationwide epidemic of COVID-19 and then nationwide lockdown, and on July 28, 2020, blockade in Da Nang. In the first case, the abnormal returns changed the sign around the notification date indicating that the stock price deviated from its fair value, but accumulating abnormal returns CAR (0;3] and CAR (0; 2] are both positive and statistically significant, which means that investors are more secure when the epidemic area is tightly controlled. The nationwide lockdown was the event that had the strongest impact on the stock price when both AR and CAR were negative and statistically significant before and after the date of the event’s announcement. Nationwide lockdown was the event that had the strongest impact on stock prices as both AR and CAR were negative in the days before and days after the event. This result supports the theory of imperfect substitution. Only AR [2] was positive and statistically significant, showing that the blockade event in Da Nang had a slight impact on the banking sector’s stock price.

This paper examines whether a causal relationship exists between waste tonnage and employment when the waste collection is entrusted to a private operator in France (i.e. waste management policy by delegation of service). The empirical investigation is based on weekly data for four waste streams for the period from January 2015 to June 2017. Using nonstationary time series techniques including cointegration, VECM (Vector Error Correction Model) and long-run causality test of Toda and Yamamoto (1995) within a bivariate framework, the results demonstrate potential causal negative relationship between waste tonnage and employment. For three waste streams (i.e. household waste, outdoor garbage waste and miscellaneous waste), the results suggest that waste management practices that aim at entrusting the collection and treatment to a private operator (i.e. waste management by delegation of service) are not economically beneficial to society, because this policy does not favor environmental jobs creation. The paper calls for the adoption of other waste management practices to preserve employment in the waste collection sector.