Vaccine Progress, Stock Prices, and the Value of Ending the Pandemic

The authors thank Dick Berner, Rob Engle, Lars Lochstoer, Stavros Panageas, Matt Richardson, Venky Venkateswaran, and Olivier Wang for their comments and suggestions. The authors also thank seminar participants at NYU Stern, NYU Stern Quantitative Finance and Econometrics, Advisory Board Meeting of NYU Stern Volatility and Risk Institute, UIUC Gies, IMF, Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance, UCLA Anderson, and JHU Carey Finance Conference for valuable comments and suggestions. The authors are grateful to the Vaccine Centre at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine for sharing publicly available data from their vaccine development tracker. Our VPI is available at giesbusiness.illinois.edu/tcj/data/VPI.xlsx. An earlier version of this paper circulated under the title “The Value of a Cure: An Asset-Pricing Perspective.”