ABSTRACT
In this study, the stock market performance of the travel and leisure industry during the COVID-19 pandemic is investigated by use of the three-regime Markov switching model. The analysis employs daily data for six subsectors (airlines, gambling, hotels, leisure services, restaurants and bars, as well as travel and tourism) for the US from January 2018 to November 2021. Estimation results provide strong evidence of regime switching behavior with wide differences across subsectors during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. A longer duration of high volatility characterizes the airline and leisure services indices. These sectors exhibit the most pronounced downturn that was not fully recovered in November 2021. In contrast, the period of high volatility in the restaurant, gaming, and hotel industries is relatively short, and stock market performance recovers almost to the general trend. Of all subsectors, restaurants and bars experience the shortest duration of high volatility, limited to the second quarter of 2020. The stock market indices for the travel and tourism industry (mainly car rentals) are also highly volatile, but this pattern was observed already before the pandemic.