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The importance of workers in labour-intensive industries, such as tourism, is undeniable. In this sense, it has been investigated for decades from various methodological approaches. However, in the academic literature on tourism, the partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) technique has hardly been used.

Therefore, this work uses that technique to contrast which factors define the employees' wages in the Spanish tourism industry. Additionally, an importance-performance map analysis (IPMA) analysis is carried out, which provides informed decision-making.

Thus, the main results obtained are the verification and measurement of the relationships of Human Capital, Labour Conditions and Market with Wages, and the relation between Human Capital and Labour Conditions. Besides, the improvement points in each variable are identified. Especial emphasis is given to those related to Human Capital and, partially, to the Market.

However, there are certain limitations to this study. Mainly, as the indicators used are given by the 2018 Salary Structure Survey, they are stiff and so the design of the model turns to be more difficult.

Considering the turning point that the temporary cessation of the tourism industry activity due to the COVID-19 pandemic has been, it is essential to take advantage of it to identify and correct existing deficiencies. Therefore, this work aims to be a base document for the identification of these problems.

La importancia de los trabajadores de industrias intensivas en mano de obra, como el turismo, es innegable. En este sentido, se ha investigado durante décadas desde diferentes metodologías. Sin embargo, en la literatura académica en turismo, la técnica PLS-SEM path modelling apenas ha sido utilizada.

Por ello, este trabajo emplea esta técnica para contrastar los factores que definen los salarios de los empleados en la industria turística española. Además, se lleva a cabo un análisis IPMA, que permite la toma de decisiones informada.

Así, los principales resultados obtenidos son la verificación y medida de las relaciones del Capital Humano, Condiciones Laborales y Mercado con los Salarios, y la relación entre Capital Humano y Condiciones Laborales. Además, se identifican los puntos de mejora de cada variable. Se presta un interés especial a aquellos relacionados con el Capital Humano y, parcialmente, el Mercado.

Considerando el punto de inflexión que el cese de actividad temporal de la actividad de la industria turística ha supuesto a causa de la pandemia COVID-19, es esencial aprovechar para identificar y corregir las deficiencias existentes. Además, este trabajo pretende ser un documento base para la identificación de estos problemas.

No obstante, existen algunas limitaciones en este estudio. Principalmente los indicadores utilizados proceden de la Encuesta de Estructura Salarial de 2018, son fijos y, por ende, el diseño del modelo se torna más difícil.

This study examines the influence of economic policy uncertainty on financial flexibility before and during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Few prior studies have examined this association specifically for debt and cash flexibility.

Using quarterly data from 2016 to 2022, 1014 observations were collected from the S&P Capital IQ database for listed tourism companies in India. The pre-pandemic period is defined as 2016 Q1 to 2020 Q1, whereas the pandemic period is from 2020 Q2 to 2022 Q3. The data are analysed using ordinary least squares, probit, logit and difference-in-difference (DID) estimation.

The evidence of this study suggests a negative association of economic policy uncertainty with debt flexibility during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings also suggest that COVID-19 induced economic policy uncertainty results in high cash flexibility. This meets the expectations for the crisis period, as firms are likely to hold more cash and less debt capacity to manage their operations. The results are robust for various estimation techniques.

This study is limited to one emerging country and is specific to one non-financial sector. Future research could extend to more emerging countries and include other non-financial sector companies.

The findings of this research are useful for tourism sector managers as they can effectively manage their cash and debt flexibility during crisis periods. They will need to prioritise cash flexibility over debt flexibility to manage operations effectively. Policymakers need to provide clear and stable economic policies to help firms manage their debt levels during a crisis.

To the best of the author's knowledge, no existing studies have investigated the influence of economic policy uncertainty on the financial flexibility of tourism companies before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, this study establishes a novel set of critical determinants, such as economic policy uncertainty.

As digital technologies expand access to new forms of legalized gambling, including sports betting and online gaming, it is important to assess the impact of macroeconomic and equity market outcomes on fund flows into gambling. The authors’ findings will be of interest to policymakers and the gambling industry, as various forms of gambling, including day trading, gain broad public acceptance.

The authors examine the impact of macroeconomic forces, business cycles, and financial market wealth on gambling. The authors propose a nonlinear model linking aggregate gambling expenditures to macroeconomic, stock market, and gambling industry variables. The authors estimate the proposed model using nonlinear estimation procedures.

The authors find that price of wagering, incomes, and supply of gambling opportunities are the primary determinants of wagering demand. Aggregate wagering is negatively impacted by realized stock returns and market volatility, but rises during recessions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the questions posed and addressed in this manuscript have not been addressed in prior literature.

This study aims to investigate the knowledge domain and development trends that appear in the scholarly corpus on religious tourism.

The most common themes evolving in the religious tourism research field are figured out by conducting keyword and trend analyses using the bibliographic data collected from 988 research articles published in Social Science Citation-indexed journals listed in the Web of Science database between 1992 and 2022.

It has been found that the number of publications has increased exponentially. European countries are the major contributors to religious tourism research. Research has mainly clustered around the areas of spiritual experience, identity, cultural heritage, pilgrimage, tourist attitude, behavior and satisfaction. Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism are religions that have received relatively little research attention.

Future research should focus on the sustainability of religious tourism sites, mitigating the adverse impact of the commercialization of religious tourism products and recovering religious tourism activities from the COVID-19 impact.

The findings are useful for corporate practitioners, site managers and entrepreneurs to take advantage of the valuable opportunities this segment offers. These findings are useful for scholars and policymakers in acquiring the latest knowledge of developments in this field.

The insights obtained by using a holistic approach are valuable for religious tourists who want to understand the importance of visiting religious sites.

This study identifies key themes that have evolved in religious tourism. In so doing, it presents an agenda for pushing this research corpus forward.

This article examines dynamic volatility spillovers between stock index returns of four main hospitality sub-sectors in US during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. These are tourism and travel, hotel and lodging, recreational services and food and beverages. Volatility spillovers are explicitly used as accurate and informative proxies for risk contagion between sectors during turbulent times.

The authors employ dynamic conditional correlation-generalized autoregression heteroskedasticity (DCC-GARCH) and wavelet coherence analysis (WCA) to analyze the phenomenon. The authors’ timeframe is divided into three main sub-periods, namely the pre-pandemic, the first wave and the second wave periods.

This study’s results reveal immense negative shocks in returns of all four sub-sectors on the Black Monday (8th March 2020). Moreover, high volatility persistence was observed during both waves with an exception of tourism and travel which exhibited lower volatility persistence during the second wave. The authors discovered magnified contagion effects between tourism and travel, hotel and lodgment and recreational services during the first wave of the pandemic with tourism and travel being the main volatility transmitter. Lower magnitudes of spillovers were observed between food and beverages and other sub-sectors with a decoupling effect being evident during the second wave.

This study’s findings contribute to the contagion theory by providing evidence of disproportional volatility spillover among hospitality sub-sectors despite being exposed to similar turbulent economic conditions.

Crucial implications can be drawn from this study’s findings to assist in risk management, asset valuation and portfolio management. The importance of close monitoring, safety measures, international diversification and adequacy of liquid assets during health crises cannot be stresses enough for hospitality firms. Retail investors, speculators and asset managers can take advantage of this study’s findings to design trading strategies and hedge against risk.

A body of knowledge pertaining to effects of crises such as COVID-19 on hospitality stocks has been proliferating. Nonetheless, there is still a relative dearth of empirical literature on volatility spillover between hospitality sub-sectors especially during periods of rising economic uncertainties.

In baseball, a run scored on offense carries the same on-field (win) value as does a run prevented on defense. Both outcomes bear the same score margin implication. This presumption of unit equality is implicit in the Wins Above Replacement (WAR) measure, which treats units of offensive WAR (oWAR) and units of defensive WAR (dWAR) as perfectly substitutable toward win production. The purpose of this paper is to ask whether the salaries of Major League Baseball (MLB) players reveal such an equal valuation among MLB teams.

The authors examine the relationship between offensive output, defensive output and subsequent salary from free agency in MLB using a set of log-linear OLS, fixed effects regression specifications.

In general, estimated annual salary from free agency increases significantly and substantially with unit increases in a player's (prior season) wins above replacement WAR. Across specifications, the authors estimate a 42.5–43.4% increase in salary for year t for each additional unit of WAR in year t−1. The authors disaggregate WAR into offensive and defensive components (oWAR and dWAR) and estimate a 52.4–53.3 (4.8–7.2)% increase in salary for each additional unit of oWAR (dWAR).

The efficiency of the baseball labor market has been studied previously with mixed results. The novelty of the present study is its treatment of inputs not as positions or individual players but as the underlying offensive and defensive win production of players. The authors estimate free agency salary returns to (contract season) oWAR and dWAR in MLB to establish whether (to what extent) a salary premium for offensive output exists within MLB.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new methodology to estimate the migration of grades of top rated restaurant and the default rate over time.

To demonstrate how to develop migration matrices the empirical results are based on the real number of top-rated French restaurants in Gault-Millau in a specific year and how they migrate from one grade to another over the period 1974–2010.

The purpose of the empirical analysis is only to illustrate the methodology. It is shown that migration rates are relatively stable over time.

Results are presented only to illustrate the methodology. Further analysis could provide a sound basis to compare the rating systems from one guide to another.

This research note explores the notion of migration rate by developing an alternative way of measuring how restaurants survive over time.

This paper aims to investigate the determinants of international bilateral tourism demand in countries of Southern Common Market (specifically, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay) and Chile.

In this study, an augmented gravity model is used to investigate the determinants of international bilateral tourism demand in countries of Southern Common Market. The novel aspect of the analysis is that three models of tourism are defined, depending on the spatial distribution of tourist arrivals and departures. An intra-regional model, an extra-regional model and a general model are estimated using a dynamic panel data model.

The results indicate that traditional gravity variables are significant in explaining bilateral inbound arrivals, but the characteristics and the behavior of the demand of tourism vary on whether the country belongs to the sub-regional bloc.

The differences found in this paper might have some impacts on the desired design and direction of the touristic policies of each country.

This study analyzes the determinants of international tourism demand through different bilateral relationships, differentiating between intra- and extra-block tourisms.

This paper aims to examine market inefficiencies in the National Football League (NFL) betting market from the 2003 season to the 2016 season.

The author examines the impact that division rivals and previously known determinants of inefficiencies have on the current NFL gambling market.

The results show that games against division rivals have a lower chance of the home team covering the spread and the chance the game will result in an over. This result demonstrates that the sportsbooks underestimate the familiarity that teams have with each other’s players, coaches and tendencies from playing each other twice per year. Moreover, using this result in conjunction with previous known inefficiencies, the author puts forth a model to test out of sample predictions. The results from these tests show profitable strategies in the point spread and totals market with a win rate of nearly 57 per cent.

Overall, this paper demonstrates inefficiencies in the NFL betting market that future bettors may be able to take advantage of.

In this paper, the authors investigate the inbound tourism demand elasticities of the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries. The authors emphasize the role of external and internal conflicts, world gross domestic product and relative prices over the period 1995–2017.

This study applies the heterogeneous panel data estimators based on the fully modified-OLS (FM-OLS), dynamic-OLS (DOLS) and the recently developed method of moments quantile regression (MMQR).

The empirical results indicate that the effect of external and internal conflicts on inbound tourism demand is negative and inelastic with external conflict having a stronger effect. The effect of both classifications of conflicts diminishes as the market share of the tourist destination increases. In addition, the role of the world GDP on tourism demand is positive and elastic, suggesting that tourism is a luxury good while an increase in relative prices diminishes inbound tourism demand.

The paper, therefore, concludes that if policy measures are not put in place to curtail incidences of conflicts, economic growth in these countries may suffer setbacks. This by implications could affect the attainment of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) targets.