The impact of COVID-19 on tourism firm value in an emerging market during various pandemic prevention periods

ABSTRACT

The tourism industry is one of the hardest hit by Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). A growing number of studies have examined the negative impact of COVID-19 on the tourism industry, but what remains less explored is the underlying mechanism of such a negative impact of the pandemic on tourism firm value. This study focuses on three COVID-19 prevention and control periods to test the impact of COVID-19 on stock returns and the mediating effect of investors’ attention over the COVID-19 prevention and control periods. The results show that the impact of COVID-19 on stock returns varies among the lockdown and travel ban, open-up, and travel ban lifting periods. Our findings suggest that investors’ attention to COVID-19 is a critical underlying mechanism between the pandemic and the value of tourism firms.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• tourism
• firm value
• investors’ attention
• prevention and control periods

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Data available on: http://www.swsresearch.com/EN/Default.aspx

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China: [Grant Number 71902093]; Shandong Humanities and Social Sciences of University Fund: [Grant Number J16YF28].