Is Ethereum's Price Return Determined by COVID-19, Macro-financial, and Crypto Market Factors?

Abstract

We investigated COVID-19 cases per country, macro-financial, and crypto market factors that might have affected Ethereum's price return in the top three countries of users, which were also affected by COVID-19 (United States, China, and Germany). Feasible Generalized Least Square (FGLS) was used as the methodology and the generalized method of moments (GMM) was tested for a robustness check. The findings revealed that Ethereum price returns were greatly affected by COVID-19 factors. Meanwhile, macro-financial factors (stock indices and gold) had stronger effects on the return of Ethereum price rather than the crypto market.