Robustness and resilience of supply chains during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using a unique firm-level data set from Asia, this study examines what determined the robustness and resilience of supply chain links, that is, the ability of maintaining links and recovering disrupted links by substitution, respectively, when firms faced economic shocks due to the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). We find that a supply chain link was likely to be robust if the link was between a foreign-owned firm and a firm located in the foreign-owned firm's home country, implying that homophily on a certain dimension generates strong ties and thus supply chain robustness. We also find that firms with geographic diversity of customers and suppliers tended to increase their transaction volume with one partner while decreasing the volume with others. This evidence shows that firms with diversified customers and suppliers are resilient, mitigating the damage from supply chain disruption through the substitution of partners. Furthermore, the robustness and resilience of supply chains are found to have led to higher performance.

Can e-commerce mitigate the negative impact of COVID-19 on international trade?

This study aims to empirically investigate the role of E-commerce (EC) on the trade impacts of COVID-19. To this end, we estimate gravity equations for bilateral trade among 34 reporting countries and their 145 partner countries during January-August in 2019 and 2020. Our major findings can be summarized as follows. A larger number of confirmed cases or deaths in both importing and exporting countries significantly decrease international trade. However, we found that EC development in importing countries contributes to mitigating this negative effect of COVID-19 on trade while that in exporting countries does not. These results are robust for our use of multiple measures of EC development.

How effective was the restaurant restraining order against COVID-19? A nighttime light study in Japan.

In this study, we examined the effect of the order of shortening business hours of the restaurants, which are considered a major source of spreading the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Specifically, we empirically investigated how this order changed the nighttime light (NTL) in regions with restaurants in the Greater Tokyo area from January to June 2020. Several local governments in Japan had implemented the order to combat COVID-19. Our investigation found evidence that the order significantly decreased the NTL in regions with many restaurants, indicating the effectiveness of the order and its negative economic/business impacts on restaurants. Interestingly, this order increased the NTL in other areas, such as in residential areas. In contrast to previous studies focused on demand-side factors, our study revealed the importance of supply-side factors in explaining the impact of Japanese government policy against COVID-19 in the first half of 2020.