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International tourism is a major source of export receipts for many countries worldwide. Although it is not yet one of the most important industries in Taiwan (or the Republic of China), an island in East Asia off the coast of mainland China (or the People's Republic of China), the leading tourism source countries for Taiwan are Japan, followed by USA, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, UK, Germany and Australia. These countries reflect short, medium and long haul tourist destinations. Although the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong are large sources of tourism to Taiwan, the political situation is such that tourists from these two sources to Taiwan are reported as domestic tourists. Daily data from 1 January 1990 to 30 June 2007 are obtained from the National Immigration Agency of Taiwan. The heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) model is used to capture long memory properties in the data. In comparison with the HAR(1) model, the estimated asymmetry coefficients for GJR(1,1) are not statistically significant for the HAR(1,7) and HAR(1,7,28) models, so that their respective GARCH(1,1) counterparts are to be preferred. These empirical results show that the conditional volatility estimates are sensitive to the long memory nature of the conditional mean specifications. Although asymmetry is observed for the HAR(1) model, there is no evidence of leverage. The quasi-maximum likelihood estimators (QMLE) for the GARCH(1,1), GJR(1,1) and EGARCH(1,1) models for international tourist arrivals to Taiwan are statistically adequate and have sensible interpretations. However, asymmetry (though not leverage) was found only for the HAR(1) model and not for the HAR(1,7) and HAR(1,7,28) models.

Purpose: The purpose of the present study is to synthesize and organize existing literature on contagious diseases and tourism. This systematic mapping of the literature helps to identify various mature and emerging themes around the research domain in the literature.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The study uses systematic methodology along with bibliometric and content analysis. Using a combination of electronic database searching and forward and backward references searching, the study identifies 160 suitable published studies.

Findings: Initial bibliometric analysis reveals that Tourism Geographies and Tourism Management are most influential journals and Law and Lee are most influential authors working on this field. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Universiti Sains Malaysia are among the top contributing educational and research organizations. Further, the content analysis reveals that literature on contagious diseases and tourism industry revolves around three prominent themes namely SARS and other contagious diseases, crisis management and tourism forecasting.

Research Limitations/Implications: The study does not consider ‘grey literature’ and conference proceedings.

Originality and Value: Present study is one of the early attempts that analyzes the literature on contagious diseases and tourism using bibliometric analysis and contributes to the literature by identifying various mature and emerging on contagious diseases and tourism literature. These insights provide a robust map for future investigation in this field and also offer implications for practitioners.

This study takes advantage of abundant data from the Economics Department at National Tsing Hua University to empirically evaluate whether there exist academic performance differentials between undergraduate students from two entrance channels (exam-based and application-based methods) across courses and grades. We first evaluate the academic performance between the students based on two entrance channels, and then incorporate the General Scholastic Ability Test (GSAT) score (including five subjects of Chinese Literature, Mathematics, English, Science, and Society) into the independent variables to control for the students' ability. Our empirical results exhibit the students recruited through the application-based method outperform those admitted from the exam-based method in required courses after controlling for the students' individual characteristics. Nevertheless, we found that the advantage disappears for the elective courses. Furthermore, the academic gaps between the two groups of students tend to decline or disappear when students are seniors. The findings indicate that entrance exam scores (e.g., the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) scores in the United States) are good indicators for predict college academic performance, making the potential function of entrance exam in Taiwan relatively comparable to that in the United States. The findings also detail that individual GSAT scores on English, Math, and Society are positively and significantly associated with his/her performance on the core courses in Economics, supporting a significant learning progression from the curricula of senior high school to the undergraduate college education.