Persistence in Australian tourism employment industries

There are many studies that have focussed on the different dimensions of employment in several industries during COVID-19. However, the impact of the pandemic on employment in the tourism industries has been underexplored. Moreover, we are not aware of any study that has considered the impact of the pandemic on employment in different sub-sectors within the tourism industries. This paper analyzes the effect of COVID-19 on employment in Australian tourism industries using fractional integration. Using quarterly data (2004-2021) and disaggregating data by sectors, we examine two samples, one ending in December 2019 and the other one in December 2021. The novelty of this study is the consideration of the effect of this pandemic on employment in different sub-sectors that constitute the tourism industry. Our results indicate that the current pandemic has not produced significant changes in the persistence of the series. The only significant changes take place for the retail trade industry that moves from mean reversion to lack of it, and the cafes and restaurants in the opposite direction. One of the implications of the results is that interventions before the pandemic, such as concerted marketing efforts, are useful to reduce the impact of COVID-19 on tourism related industries. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Feverish sentiment, lockdown stringency, oil volatility, and clean energy stocks during COVID-19 pandemic

Purpose - This study seeks to investigate role of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on clean energy stocks for the United States for the period 21 January 2020-16 August 2021. Design/methodology/approach - At the empirical stage, the Fourier-augmented vector autoregression approach has been used. Findings - According to the empirical results, the response of the clean energy stocks to the feverish sentiment, lockdown stringency, oil volatility, dirty assets, and monetary policy dies out within a short period of time. In addition, the authors find that there is a unidirectional causality from the feverish sentiment index and the lockdown stringency index to the clean energy stock returns;and from the monetary policy to the clean energy stocks. At the same time, there is a bidirectional causality between the lockdown stringency index and the feverish sentiment index. The empirical findings can be helpful to both practitioners and policy-makers. Originality/value - Among the COVID-19 variables used in this study is a new feverish sentiment index, which has been constructed using principal component analysis. The importance of the feverish sentiment index is that it allows us to examine the impact of the aggregate level of fear in the economy on clean energy stocks.