Collusive behaviour, risk and performance of tourism firms

This paper aims to enrich social network and managerial powers theories by examining the effects of board-CEO friendship ties in tourism firms. Specifically, we focus on the association between the board-CEO social network ties (e.g. serving external boards together or sharing memberships at social organisations) and performance and risk-taking behaviour among tourism firms. The findings show that friendship ties between CEO and board members result in higher risk-taking, lower profitability and market values. In addition, professional ties (i.e. current and past employment) significantly impact tourism firms’ outcomes, whereas non-professional ties (i.e. education and other social organisations) do not. The findings prevail after controlling for the Covid-19 pandemic. However, friendship ties lead to better information sharing, resulting in more effective decision-making by board members. © The Author(s) 2022.

Financial stability: a 'vaccine' for tail risk of the global banking sector in the shadow of the pandemic

This study examines the association between bank tail risk and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We use a sample of 868 listed banks across 98 countries from 2002 to 2020, yielding a cross-country panel sample of 15,791 bank-year observations. We find that different components of bank tail risk (i.e. systematic and idiosyncratic) have increased during the health crisis but less so for stronger banks (i.e. more profitable, higher market valuation, lower stock volatility). The result implies that the pandemic results in a higher possibility of suffering extremely large losses in the stock prices of the global banking sector. However, banks with higher profitability and financial stability levels can better prepare themselves to tackle the crisis more effectively and hence are less likely to suffer extreme equity devaluations. Therefore, we contend that financial stability acts as a 'vaccine' for the bank tail risk in the shadow of the pandemic. We finally confine the results to some specific geographic settings;typically, they are more intensified in countries with more financial freedom, middle income-generating, and large banks.