The Impact of the Corona Pandemic (COVID-19) on the Liquidity and Profitability on Listed Companies in the Palestine Stock Exchange

Abstract

The study deal with the subject of the profitability and liquidity of companies listed on the Palestine Stock Exchange in light of the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the study aimed to verify whether or not there is an impact of the pandemic on the profitability and liquidity of the companies under study by addressing the main problem about knowing the extent to which the various sectors listed in the market are affected by the pandemic. The descriptive approach was adopted for the theoretical aspect, while for the practical side, the earnings per share were adopted as an indicator of liquidity and profitability and were extracted from the financial statements of companies that have been published on the website of the Palestine Stock Exchange. The study was able to include (25) companies from different sectors for which data was available; after collecting and analyzing data and testing the two hypotheses of the study, the study reached a number of conclusions, the most important of which is that there is no statistically significant effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the liquidity and profitability of companies listed on the Palestine Stock Exchange, and a set of proposals were presented, including Investors in financial markets should not generalize the reaction and indices of developed markets to emerging markets. The study also recommended the need to rely on other financial indicators other than profitability and liquidity to evaluate financial performance. It is also possible to study the impact of the Corona epidemic crisis on the financial and non-financial performance of organizations in general.