Firm-Level Exposure to Epidemic Diseases: Covid-19, SARS, and H1N1

By Tarek A. Hassan, Stephan Hollander, Laurence van Lent, Tahoun Tahoun. Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series, 2020

471 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using tools described in our earlier work (Hassan et al., 2019, 2020), we develop text- based measures of the costs, benefits, and risks listed firms in the US and over 80 other countries associate with the spread of Covid-19 and other epidemic diseases. We identify which firms expect to gain or lose from an epidemic disease and which are most affected by the associated uncertainty as a disease spreads in a region or around the world. As Covid-19 spreads globally in the first quarter of 2020, we find that firms’ primary concerns relate to the collapse of demand, increased uncertainty, and disruption in supply chains. Other important concerns relate to capacity reductions, closures, and employee welfare. By contrast, financing concerns are mentioned relatively rarely. We also identify some firms that foresee opportunities in new or disrupted markets due to the spread of the disease. Finally, we find some evidence that firms that have experience with SARS or H1N1 have more positive expectations about their ability to deal with the coronavirus outbreak.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Finance

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/764b02f027a997fdb3ea7e7be1746dfdc7d27f17

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Citations in the corpus

A First Look at the Impact of COVID-19 on Commercial Real Estate Prices: Asset-Level Evidence (2020, unknown): “location of the firm’s underlying assets (e.g., Ramelli and Wagner 2020; Ding et al. 2020; Hassan et al. 2020; Gerding, Martin, and Nagler 2020).”
The Role of Corporate Culture in Bad Times: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, unknown): “Using international data, Hassan et al. (2020) show that firms that have experienced SARS or H1N1 are better at dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak.”
Economic uncertainty before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020, methodology): “We adopt a Cholesky 15 This pattern is broadly consistent with the Covid-related risk measure extracted from quarterly earnings conference calls in Hassan et al. (2020) decomposition with the following ordering: an uncertainty measure, the log of the S&P 500 index, the federal funds rate, log…”
The Unprecedented Stock Market Reaction to COVID-19 (2020, background): “Hassan et al. (2020),Ramelli andWagner (2020), andDavis, Hansen, and Seminario (2020) trace the COVID-induced heterogeneity in firm-level stock returns to specific risk exposure categories, such as reliance on global supply chains, exports toChina, demand uncertainty, and various regulations.”
Consumer Spending Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Assessment of Great Britain (2020, background): “Hassan et al (2020) develop text-based measures of the costs, benefits, and risks to listed firms in over 80 countries affected by COVID- 9 Jorda et al (2020) provide a useful discussion of the long-run economic consequences of pandemics from the Black Death of 1347 to the present day.”
Which Firm-specific Characteristics Affect the Market Reaction of Chinese Listed Companies to the COVID-19 Pandemic? (2020, result): “This result lends support to arguments that the firms in the transportation, food and beverage retail, hotel and tourism, postal warehouse, real estate, video entertainment, and construction industries are vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic (Hassan et al. 2020).”
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business expectations (2021, result): “Importantly, our results, like Hassan et al. (2020), take a more holistic and direct approach to uncovering firms’ perceptions of the pandemic.”
ESG Ratings and Stock Performance during the COVID-19 Crisis (2021, background): “Further, firms which face a lower exposure to the pandemic [55,56] as well as firms which are more immune to social distancing policies [57], exhibit better financial performance.”
Supply chain disruptions and resilience: a major review and future research agenda (2021, background): “(31) Pandemic—Mixed Methods Measuring how the Covid-19 or other pandemics affect firms, employees, consumers, and markets for formulating effective policy responses to the challenges posed by the crisis (Hassan et al. 2020).”
Banking sector reactions to COVID-19: The role of bank-specific factors and government policy responses (2021, unknown): “Hassan et al. (2020) constructed measures of firms’ exposure to epidemic diseases using earnings conference call transcripts; companies that have experienced previous pandemics such as SARS or H1N1 have more optimistic expectations of their abilities to cope with COVID-19.”
Suffering in silence: How COVID-19 school closures inhibit the reporting of child maltreatment (2020, unknown): “…on outcomes such as mortality (Dave et al., 2020; Friedson et al., 2020), pollution (Almond et al., 2020), economic activity (Bartik et al., 2020; Hassan et al., 2020; Lewis et al., 2020), and inequalities by health access (Schmitt-Grohé et al., 2020), internet access (Chiou and Tucker, 2020),…”
Unmasking the Impact of COVID-19 on Businesses : Firm Level Evidence from across the World (2020, background): “2 demic’s impact in real time, including text data from earnings reports (Hassan et al., 2020), unemployment claims, and transaction data from credit or debit card purchases (Chetty et al., 2020).”
Firm-level Climate Change Exposure (2020, methodology): “Finally, we study the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on our measures of climate change exposure.”
Does CSR matter in times of crisis? Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic (2021, unknown): “…significance at the 1% level is indicated by *. 12 In unreported tests, we interact state-level COVID exposure and the strictness of containment policies (Hale, Hallas, Hatible, Majumdar, and Pyarali 2020) as well as firm-level COVID exposure and risk (Hassan et al., 2020) with CSR ratings.”
COVID-19 Is Also a Reallocation Shock (2020, background): “Hassan et al. (2020) characterize and quantify the concerns that senior executives express in corporate earnings conference calls. As the pandemic spread from January to March, executives voiced growing concerns about negative demand shifts, rising uncertainty, supply chain disruptions, capacity cur”