Survival Analysis of Thai Micro and Small Enterprises during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Micro and small enterprises (MSEs) are important to the local economy and are the most crucial source of employment in Thailand. Using the three-round survey data, we assess the impact of COVID-19 on the survival probability of MSEs in the tourism and manufacturing sectors. Enter-prise characteristics such as owner characteristics, employment and business strategies are examined as potential factors to mitigate or stimulate business failures. The Cox proportional hazards model and Kaplan-Meier estimator are employed. Our findings reveal that the survival probability paths from the three rounds of survey show a gradual decrease of survival probability from the first week of interview and approximately 50% of MSEs could not survive longer than 52 weeks during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also find that the survival of MSEs mainly depends on location, number of employees, and business model adjustment, namely operation with social distancing and online marketing. Particularly, retaining employees and not reducing the working hours are one of the key factors increasing the survivability of MSEs. However, the longer length of the crisis reduces the contribution of these key factors. The longer the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, the lower the chance of MSEs survivability.

How the Exchange Rate Reacts to Google Trends During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study investigates the nonlinear impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the exchange rates of Great Britain Pound, European Euro, and Chinese Yuan against the US$ (USD) which become the most tradeable currency pairs in recent years. Various COVID-19 indicators, namely the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths and Google Trends are considered in our analysis. Google Trends is relevant as it allows us to evaluate the panic and fear of investors during this pandemic. We utilize the Markov Switching regression model to divide the foreign exchange markets into the depreciation and the appreciation regimes. The results show that although there exists a similar sign of the COVID-19’s impact on the foreign exchange markets under two different regimes, the magnitude of the impact of COVID-19 in the depreciation regime is greater than the appreciation regime. Moreover, we found that the number of COVID-19 cases and that of COVID-19 deaths can positively affect the exchange rates(depreciation), while Google Trends is likely to exert a negative effect on the foreign exchange markets(appreciation). © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Developed and Emerging Stock Markets Volatility During the Global Pandemic of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19): Dynamic Correlation Approach

This paper examines the dynamic volatility relationship following the COVID-19 impacts in three developed stock markets (DM) and three emerging stock markets (EM) using the DCC-GARCH-type models with various distributions. The finding indicates that the DCC-GARCH-X model with student-t distribution outperforms those with Gaussian and Skew student-t distributions for our dataset. Volatilities were found to be high during the COVID-19 pandemic and they were higher in the emerging markets than in the developed markets. The result on the volatility of each country confirms the high persistence of volatility in all stock market returns except for Italy. Our empirical results highlight the weak positive impact of COVID-19 pandemic on some developed and emerging stock volatilities. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.