Geographic Dispersion and Company Returns in the Era of the Pandemic

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze to what extent geographic dispersion has an impact on company returns, and if the previously discovered correlations of these two variables have changed since the last literature covering this topic was released. Historically there has been strong evidence that investors of all types have preferred to allocate their money into local firms (Garcia and Norli, 2021). However, it has been almost a decade since any significant research has been conducted on this concept, suggesting that there may now be an increase in variance of the results. Especially when taking into consideration that the world is in the midst of a global pandemic, it is unquestionably interesting to take another look at the data to see if there are any significant consistencies and/or inconsistencies. I plan to model a significant portion of my data collection, research, and analysis after academic researchers Diego Garcia and Oyvind Norli, as they have developed high quality variables, models, and results regarding company returns relative to geographic dispersion. Furthermore, this study specifically aims to fill the gap of data that currently exists, and to take a closer look at the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on company returns in general, and company returns relative to geographic dispersion.