Positions Available: One Student

The world has experienced an unprecedented heath crisis as the novel coronavirus disease, first reported in Wuhan China in December 2019, swept through the world. The pandemic has also inflicted a severe economic shock in the World Economy. Both Canada and US have been substantially affected by COVID-19, like other countries. Initially there was a swift fallout effect on the stock markets in both these countries. While the stock markets have since then recovered much of the lost ground, the negative impact on some other sectors of the economy has been more severe and long term.

Canada and US are two countries that are highly integrated in pursuing regional security, international trade and investment, and global politics. In fact, these two countries share the largest trading relationship in the world. However, these two countries have taken somewhat independent approaches to deal with COVID-19. Further, to limit the spread of the virus, the two countries mutually decided to close the border for usual traffic flows. In this connection, we would like to examine the effect of COVID-19 on financial and economic situations in both countries and the similarities and differences in their responses to the pandemic.

More specifically, we would like to investigate the following questions:

· How did COVID-19 affect the Stock Market Closing rate in both countries [TSX, S&P 500, DOW, NASDAQ]?

· How did COVID-19 affect exchange rate between two currencies?

· How did COVID-19 affect interest rates, unemployment rates and inflation rates?

· Did the two countries respond differently in some cases? If yes, which countries response seem to have been more successful.

· What are the sectors that were most affected and least affected by the pandemic? Are these sectors the same in both the countries?

· What was the effect on the Oil and Natural Gas sector, given its prime importance in these two countries?

· What was the effect on the Trans-National Corporations in Canada and United States due to the closing of the border due to the pandemic? What was the effect on the Foreign Direct investment in the two countries?

This project will be executed using secondary data and as such the two major works needed for the project at the initial stage are: collecting secondary data and gathering relevant literature. The secondary data will be collected from various sources and transform those in a spreadsheet [preferably MS Excel] to make those available for statistical analysis. Some of the sources of the secondary data will be Statistics Canada, Global Affairs Canada, Export Development Canada, The Canadian Trade Commission Service, USA Trade Online, The World Bank and the OECD.

Literature on the effect of COVID-19 on various aspects are burgeoning and an extensive search from the library resources will be required for comprehensive literature review. These are the two major tasks the student is to perform.

Possible time commitment required from the student are (hours):

Data gathering – 20 hours

Data processing and manipulation – 15 hours

Literature Search – 15 hours

Preparation of an annotated bibliography – 30 hours

Computing simple statistics and developing graphs – 20 hours

Qualifications of Student Research Assistant: preferably an advanced undergraduate student in Business, Economics or Statistics with sufficient understanding of (1) internet search and finding relevant resources, (2) data downloading from internet sites, (3) data conversion, manipulation, and processing using Excel, (4) developing graphs, pivot tables and other visual data summary, (5) library search and literature review, and (6) simple statistical analysis using Excel and / other statistical software.

The student will be working under the guidance of Subhadip Ghosh, Assistant Professor, Department of Decision Sciences, School of Business, MacEwan University.