Global Health Crises and Financial Resilience

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed several critical vulnerabilities in global financial systems, emphasising the need for a thorough investigation into both immediate and long-term effects on financial markets. This publication examines these impacts across a spectrum of financial areas, from traditional markets to emerging sectors, exploring how the pandemic accelerated transformations like fintech adoption, digital finance, and green finance, while exposing new risk dynamics. It assesses shifts in market stability, risk appetite, and investment behaviours, offering a detailed analysis of sectoral disruptions in industries such as tourism, sports, banking, and retail. A thorough assessment of asset performance, including safe-haven assets, highlights the limitations of traditional diversification strategies during crises. The publication concludes with insights into the resilience of financial frameworks and proposes a series of critical adjustments to avert future market crises.

This book is an essential guide for researchers, finance professionals, and policymakers looking to better understand and manage systemic risks in the evolving post-pandemic financial world.

• Highlights novel vulnerabilities within our financial system as exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Examines the performance and risk of asset classes during the pandemic.
• Provides a critical assessment of the response of regulators and policymakers to the crisis.

Thomas Conlon is Professor of Finance in the School of Business at University College Dublin. Previously, he worked within asset management and as a consultant in the area of financial services. He obtained his PhD and MSc from Dublin City University and undergraduate degree from Trinity College Dublin. His main research interests are in asset pricing, risk management and FinTech. Recent Research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Banking & Finance, Journal of Financial Econometrics, European Journal of Operational Research, the Journal of Empirical Finance and the Journal of Financial Stability. He is Associate Editor for the European Journal of Finance and International Review of Financial Analysis.

Thomas has held visiting positions at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford and Simon Fraser University. He is a funded investigator with the Financial Mathematics and Computation Cluster and has received funding from SFI as a principal investigator in the area of FinTech. He was also the recipient of a prestigious New Horizons Research Grant from the Irish Research Council and a Dobbin Scholarship. He teaches graduate finance courses to MSc, MBA and executive audiences and received a UCD School of Business award for Excellence in Teaching (2017, 2019).

Shaen Corbet is Professor of Finance at Dublin City University (DCU), Ireland, and visiting Professor at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Prof Corbet's main research interests include financial economics, financial econometrics, the study of financial crises, and FinTech. Shaen is also working on several funded projects investigating the role of finance in combatting climate change. Alongside achieving several prestigious awards in categories such as best researcher, best young researcher and various best paper categories, Shaen has been added to the Clarivate list of the Top 1% and Stanford University's list of the World's Top 2% of Scientists Worldwide. Shaen has acted as an expert witness in multiple high-profile international court cases and has provided expert reports to various international government departments and regulatory authorities.