An Event Study Analysis of Political Events, Disasters, and Accidents for Chinese Tourists to Taiwan

The number of Chinese tourists visiting Taiwan has been closely related to the political relationship across the Taiwan Strait. The occurrence of political events and disasters or accidents have had, and will continue to have, a huge impact on the Taiwan tourism market. To date, there has been relatively little empirical research conducted on this issue. Tourists are characterized as being involved in one of three types of tourism: group tourism (group-type), individual tourism (individual-type), and medical cosmetology (medical-type). We use the fundamental equation in tourism finance to examine the correlation that exists between the rate of change in the number of tourists and the rate of return on tourism. Second, we use the event study method to observe whether the numbers of tourists have changed abnormally before and after the occurrence of major events on both sides of the Strait. Three different types of conditional variance models, namely, the Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity, GARCH (1,1), Glosten, Jagannathan and Runkle, GJR (1,1) and Exponential GARCH, EGARCH (1,1), are used to estimate the abnormal rate of change in the number of tourists. The empirical results concerning the major events affecting the changes in the numbers of tourists from China to Taiwan are economically significant, and confirm the types of tourists that are most likely to be affected by such major events.

Response Asymmetries in Asian Stock Markets

This paper examines autocorrelation and cross-autocorrelation patterns for selected Asian stock returns. Special attention is given to examination of Asian stock returns and the impact on them of the past information. By employing a class of asymmetric specification of conditional mean and conditional variance models, we find the autocorrelation coefficient to be negative for the Japanese market and positive for the rest of the Asian markets studied. Our findings suggest that the Asian markets respond sensitively to the US market, especially on the down side. The asymmetric effects are found to be present in both mean and variance equations. The evidence is consistent with behavior in which investors in Asian markets tend to react more significantly to negative stock news originating from US sources than they do to positive news.