Fig. 6.

COVID-19 cases and stock market returns. This figure presents the relation between stock market returns and the growth rate of COVID-19 cases using the cross-economy panel data during the weeks from January 3, 2020 through May 22, 2020. The x-axis denotes the weekly growth of COVID-19 cases, and the y-axis represents weekly stock market returns. We divide the x-axis into one hundred bins, with each bin having an equal width, so that the first bin has observations with 0 to 3% weekly growth of COVID-19 cases, the second bin has observations with 4 to 7% weekly case growth, and the one-hundredth bin has observations of between 396 and 399% weekly case growth. Each bin does not contain an equal number of observations. Each dot represents the average weekly stock market return across observations within each bin. The dashed line is the linear fitted line.