Abstract
Brand equity has played an important role in firms’ stock performance, especially during the stock market crash provoked by Covid-19. Our manuscript investigates how brand equity impacts stock performance during the Covid-19 crash. Firms with top brands should be a particularly attractive "safe harbor" in the crash to investors since consumer loyalty and demand advantages brought by brand equity enable firms to retain stable cash flows and mitigate the macroeconomic shock. Based on U.S. listed firms, we find that firms with top brands experience higher stock returns, lower systematic risk and lower idiosyncratic risk in the Covid-19 crash than other firms. Moreover, our findings are used to distinguish the brand equity effect from the corporate social responsibility (CSR) effect on stock performance during the Covid-19 crash.
1. Introduction
At the end of 2019, a new disease, Covid-19, broke out around the world. Covid-19 affected people’s health and caused a large number of deaths. Moreover, Covid-19 and the stay-at-home orders and lockdowns triggered by Covid-19 brought huge environmental uncertainty. Because of this epidemic, Erdem (2020) reveals that market indices of 75 countries dropped and Rizwan et al. (2020) find a significant increase in systemic risk for bank sector. In particular, from February 24 to March 23, 2020, the stock market experienced a dramatic crash in response to the Covid-19 outbreak. Over just 21 trading days, the Dow Jones Industrials dropped 33.5%, the Nasdaq Index dropped 25.6%, and the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 Index lost 30.6%. We call this crash the Covid-19 crash, which provides a window to reappraise the value of brand equity in an uncertain environment. At the time of this writing, Covid-19 is still spreading worldwide. In the context of this epidemic, it is of great practical significance to study investors’ reaction to brand equity. Our paper explores the role of brand equity when firms face that epidemic, which is embodied in investigating the impact of brand equity on stock performance, such as stock returns, systematic risk and idiosyncratic risk.
4. Conclusion
In this paper, we focus on the impact of brand equity on stock performance during the Covid-19 crash. Our empirical results reveal that firms with top brands experience higher stock returns, lower systematic risk and lower idiosyncratic risk during the Covid-19 crash. Meanwhile, after excluding potential endogeneity concerns, our empirical results are robust. Moreover, our empirical result reveals that the influence of brand equity is independent rather than dependent on corporate social responsibility. Overall, our study provides evidence on the effect of brand equity on stock performance during the Covid-19 crash. First, it makes a contribution to the literature on Covid-19 and business strategy. Second, we extend the literature on the value of brand equity during stock crashes.
