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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.

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 paper develops a theoretical model that analyzes the decision problem the landowner has to face between the construction of second homes and hotels. The starting point implies verifying that for a given tourist destination, the land available for the construction of accommodation is limited. For this reason, when choosing between building second homes or building hotels, many factors influence the decision model. The theoretical mechanism generalizes the model introduced in Brida and Boffa (2010) and is based on a four-stage sequential game with four players. From the results of the model, the authors conclude that it is optimal from the social point of view both to build a hotel and to build a second home because both generate added value during the year. For this reason, the construction of second homes should be taken into account in the planning policy of the tourist destination. This arises from considering that second homes, as they remain occupied all year like hotels, in certain tourist destinations, do not generate seasonality.

The study aims to investigate the nexus between total factor productivity and tourism growth in Latin American countries for time series data from 1995 to 2017.

Using the extension of the Granger noncausality test in the nonlinear time-varying of Ajmi et al. (2015), the study points out the interconnectedness between the variables during the period.

The study found nonlinear causality between the variables. Particularly, studying the conclusions for the time-varying Granger causality fashion, it can be noticed that the one-way causality from total factor productivity to tourism growth is obtained for Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela, while the vice versa is confirmed for Chile, Ecuador and Nicaragua. Lastly, the study dissected the plots of the curve causality.

In view of the results, some crucial policy implications could be suggested, such as, under certain circumstances and as an exceptional case, the use of policy instruments such as targeted investment, marketing and the support of tourism organizations focused on driving a tourism-led-based productivity and/or tourism programs and projects.

The current work is distinguished from the existing body of understanding in several substantial directions. This work explores, for the first time, the linkages between the total factor productivity index and tourism growth for Latin American countries. No single attempt has been known to investigate this interaction by using nonlinear causality, and this study determines the shape of the curve between the total factor productivity index and tourism growth for each country.

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.

International tourism and FDI inflows have generated detectable beneficial impacts on the economy of Estonia in the last decades. However, recently, poor international market conditions mostly caused by the trade war and COVID-19 pandemic have been a potential threat to these two factors. Besides, the poor performance of investments in recent years is behind the stagnation of productivity in Estonia. This study examines the dynamics of the effects of these factors on the rate of economic growth in Estonia and provides policy implications in line with sustained recovery.

A nonlinear ARDL technique is employed in this study to investigate the long-run effects of FDI and the degree of tourism specialization on economic growth rate.

Our findings indicate that the economic growth rate of Estonia in the long run has been positively affected by both the rate of FDI inflows and international tourism.

This is the first study that employs a non-linear approach to investigate the dynamics of long-run effects of FDI and tourism specialization on the rate of economic growth in Estonia and provides policy implications in line with optimal growth strategy considering the economic structure, the current level of productivity and available potentials in this economy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between tourism and social media from a cross section of 138 countries with data for the year 2012.

The empirical evidence is based on Ordinary Least Squares, Negative Binomial and Quantile Regressions.

Two main findings are established. First, there is a positive relationship between Facebook penetration and the number of tourist arrivals. Second, Facebook penetration is more relevant in promoting tourist arrivals in countries where initial levels in tourist arrivals are the highest and low. The established positive relationship can be elucidated from four principal angles: the transformation of travel research, the rise in social sharing, improvements in customer service and the reshaping of travel agencies.

This study explores a new data set on social media. There are very few empirical studies on the relevance of social media in development outcomes.

This empirical study explores the role of tourism development (TD) in India's environmental degradation. Since sustainable eco-tourism is essential for India, whose long-term economic prosperity also depends on robust tourism growth. Hence, this study offers specific policy proposals for sustainable tourism based on the simulated outcomes.

The study employed the quarterly data from 1995Q1–2018Q4 for empirical validation. Moreover, the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach, Toda and Yamamoto (TY) causality model and wavelet coherence are also used to analyse the role of TD in India's environmental degradation.

The ARDL bounds test confirms the long-run relationship between the series. The long-run results from the ARDL model also indicate the driving role of TD in India's environmental degradation. In addition, the usage of the wavelet coherence method confirms the changes in TD that leads to changes in India's pollution level at different frequencies and periods, especially in the long run.

Since this analysis is India-specific, these findings may lack generalizability to other developing economies. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to examine the impact of tourism growth on the natural environment in other countries either in a panel or time-series framework.

This study suggests crucial implications for checking the pollution sands from TD without sacrificing tourism-led economic growth. This would be possible if the usage of green energy in India's transport sector is promoted.

This is the first study that analyzes the impact of TD on environmental degradation in the ARDL, wavelet coherence, TY frameworks for enabling the Indian economy for a sustainable tourism practice.

This research analyzes, for the first time, the linkage among the gathered dataset of globalization indicators, the total factor productivity index and tourism development in a panel of 25 European countries during the 1995–2016 period.

The Generalized Method of Moments estimator for panel Vector Autoregressive Regression model is implemented and as a robustness test, the panel Granger causality test is used.

The findings have divulged that globalization and total factor productivity increase tourism development. An increase in the economic globalization de factor indicator will cause an increase in tourism development in European countries. Moreover, an increase in the social globalization de jure indicator will lead to a higher level of tourism development in European countries.

Policy-makers should use the complementary association between globalization and international tourism to promote productivity in European countries. These countries can also utilize the tourism sector as a tool to enhance the connectivity of their economies and societies with other parts of the world.

We use for the first time the globalization index as proposed by Gygli et al. (2019) in the tourism discipline. We evaluate the total factor productivity index instead of the economic growth applied by the majority of the researchers and we employ for the first time in the tourism field the GMM–PVAR framework.

This study aims to investigate the roles of intellectual capital efficiency and institutional ownership on cash holdings and their speed of adjustment.

Using a sample of 432 firm-year observations of tourism-listed companies, three measures of cash holdings are used as dependent variables and intellectual capital efficiency and institutional ownership as independent variables. The financial data is collected from the S&P Capital IQ database for the period 2015–2020. Two system-generalized methods of moment estimation are used for the robustness checks of the results.

The study provides evidence that an increase in intellectual capital efficiency in tourism firms results in lower cash holdings. The research findings also report that characteristics such as firm size, age and market-to-book value ratio are associated with cash holdings. Furthermore, institutional ownership in these firms did not affect the cash holdings. The results also confirm the existence of a target cash holding level to which the tourism firms attempt to converge. These results are robust to the alternative proxy of cash holding and endogeneity tests.

The study uses intellectual capital efficiency measured by the model proposed by Pulic. Alternative measures of intellectual capital can be included in future studies. Future research can also investigate the impact on cash holdings before and during the pandemic for tourism companies. The study is limited to the impact of institutional ownership; thus, research can be extended to consider other types of ownership.

The findings of this study indicate that tourism companies should take into account the impact of intellectual capital efficiency on their cash holding decisions. The industry uses a specific financial management strategy in light of better efficiency and possibly values the opportunity cost of holding more cash. Additionally, regulators should re-examine the role of institutional ownership in tourism firms, as it was found to have no impact on cash holdings. The regulators may need to consider other factors, such as firm size and age, when developing policies and regulations to ensure that tourism firms have adequate cash holdings.

This study adds to the body of knowledge on the factors that influence cash management and ideal cash levels for the tourism industry. The examination of the effect of intellectual capital on cash holdings is a novel contribution, filling a gap in the existing literature. The findings on the speed of adjustment towards optimal cash holdings also provide support for the trade-off theory.