research topic about business in pandemic

Surging business formation in the pandemic: Causes and consequences?

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Authors: ryan a. decker and ryan a. decker principal economist - federal reserve board john haltiwanger john haltiwanger professor of economics - university of maryland discussant: jorge a. guzman jorge a. guzman associate professor of business - columbia business school.

September 27, 2023

The paper summarized here is part of the Fall 2023 edition of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) , the leading conference series and journal in economics for timely, cutting-edge research about real-world policy issues. The conference draft of this paper was presented at the  Fall 2023 BPEA Conference (recordings and slides are available via the link). The final version was published in the Fall 2023 issue by Johns Hopkins University Press. Submit a proposal to present at a future BPEA conference  here .

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An unanticipated jump in business formation during the COVID-19 pandemic may be the start of a trend toward a more dynamic and productive U.S. economy, suggests a paper discussed at the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) conference on September 29.

“We find early hints of a revival of business dynamism; but in many respects it is too early to ascertain whether a durable reversal of pre-pandemic trends is occurring,” write the authors, Ryan A. Decker of the Federal Reserve Board and John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland.

According to their paper—”Surging Business Formation in the Pandemic: Causes and Consequences?”—applications to the Internal Revenue Service for new Employee Identification Numbers (EINs) briefly plunged early in the pandemic but then rose sharply during the second half of 2020 and remained elevated through mid-2023.

The applications were quickly followed by increases in new locations of existing businesses (establishment births) and new businesses (firm births), and, in turn, by “notable associated job creation,” the paper said, citing Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The authors analyzed business formation (both establishment and firm births) by sector, firm size and age, and geographic location. They found a shift in growth during the pandemic from large and mature firms to more dynamic young and small firms. This shift followed two decades dominated by larger firms and characterized by anemic business dynamism, which in turn followed a period of strong productivity growth powered by high-tech startups in the 1990s.

The question the authors pose is whether the pandemic business entry surge will drive a renewed and durable increase in innovation and productivity growth or whether it is largely a reshuffling of economic activity to accommodate more people working from home.

In support of the reshuffling hypothesis, they observed a “donut effect” with business applications increasing more in the suburbs of large metropolitan areas than in central business districts—particularly for service businesses such as restaurants and gyms, reflecting the shift in where people spent their time.

But, in support of the more optimistic interpretation, they note applications and establishment births increased strongly in high-tech sectors likely to fuel innovation, such as online retailing, software publishing, computer systems design, data processing, and research and development services such as artificial intelligence businesses.

They also noted a “tight connection” between surging business applications and employees voluntarily quitting their jobs and only a weak connection between applications and layoffs. They said that suggests workers were moving to new and higher-paying jobs rather than just scrambling for self-employment income to replace a lost paycheck.

“This looks to have been a genuine substantive phenomenon involving a lot of actual job creation,” Decker said in an interview with The Brookings Institution. “This was a real thing.”

However, the authors warn that young businesses started during the pandemic—and their potential economic benefits—may be at risk in the event of a broad slowdown.

“Start-ups are amongst the most fragile businesses,” Haltiwanger said in an interview. “If a significant economic contraction occurs because of monetary policy tightening … that will have some longer-lasting effects on innovation in the future.”

Decker, Ryan A. and John Haltiwanger. 2023. “Surging Business Formation in the Pandemic: Causes and Consequences?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity , Fall. 249-302.

Guzman, Jorge. 2023. “Comment on ‘Surging Business Formation in the Pandemic: Causes and Consequences?’.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity , Fall. 303-311.

The authors did not receive financial support from any firm or person for this article or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article. The authors are not currently an officer, director, or board member of any organization with a financial or political interest in this article.

David Skidmore authored the summary language for this paper. Chris Miller assisted with data visualization.

The Brookings Institution is committed to quality, independence, and impact. We are supported by a diverse array of funders . In line with our values and policies , each Brookings publication represents the sole views of its author(s).

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Economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship and small businesses

Maksim belitski, christina guenther, alexander s kritikos.

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Accepted 2021 Jul 27; Issue date 2022.

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The existential threat to small businesses, based on their crucial role in the economy, is behind the plethora of scholarly studies in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining the 15 contributions of the special issue on the “Economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship and small businesses,” the paper comprises four parts: a systematic review of the literature on the effect on entrepreneurship and small businesses; a discussion of four literature strands based on this review; an overview of the contributions in this special issue; and some ideas for post-pandemic economic research.

Keywords: Small businesses, Entrepreneurs, COVID-19 pandemic, Economic effects

Plain English Summary

Responding to COVID-19 involves not just shielding small business jobs, supporting entrepreneurship, and raising government debt but also creating productive entrepreneurship and resilient location-specific entrepreneurial ecosystems. The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented challenge for small businesses that also brings new market opportunities. The papers in this special issue of Small Business Economics Journal aim to shed light on the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic by looking at the macro- and microeconomic effects on entrepreneurship and small businesses as well as the role of financial support policies and well-being in both developed and developing countries. Future research should focus on the role of digitization and financial mechanisms supporting small businesses during crises.

Introduction

Epidemics and pandemics do not just come and go, they impact the economy and society. For example, the epidemic in the early 1830s, when France (and other parts of central Europe) was hit hard by cholera with hospitals overwhelmed by patients whose ailments doctors could not explain (O'Sullivan, 2021 ). While the epidemic wiped out at least 3% of Parisians in the first month, it would contribute to an industrial revolution in France. It also increased political instability and social disparity, with the city’s poor being hit hardest by the pandemic, while the wealthier used their savings and resources to relocate from pandemic-impacted cities and reduce their interactions with the community (Economist, 2021 ).

The Spanish flu affected most of Europe and the USA in 1918. While it infected 500 million people—about a third of the world’s population at the time—it killed between 20 and 50 million people across four successive waves, including some 675,000 Americans (History.com, 2020 ). The enforcement of various restrictions varied across the cities and countries: the New York City Health Commissioner, for example, ordered businesses to open and close on staggered shifts to avoid overcrowding on the subway (History.com, 2020 ). In the USA and Europe, businesses were forced to shut down because so many employees were sick. Several authors demonstrate that the Spanish flu pandemic gave way to new businesses, with start-ups booming from 1919 in the middle of the pandemic onward (Beach et al., 2020 ; Karlsson et al., 2014 ).

The COVID-19 pandemic presents an unprecedented challenge in many ways. First, it threatens millions of people’s lives all over the world. It has already taken a death toll of almost four million people worldwide, as of the end of June 2021 (Worldometers, 2021 ). At the same time, the social distancing guidelines, taken to contain the virus, affected the service sector in particular, an area where physical proximity often matters and a sector that depends more on micro and small businesses than the manufacturing sector.

Therefore, COVID-19 directly affected self-employed individuals more than employed individuals (Kritikos et al., 2020 ) and small businesses more than large businesses, both in Europe and the USA (Digitally Driven, 2020 , 2021 ).

A survey conducted by NBER of more than 5800 small businesses in the USA found that 43% of small firms were expected to be closed by December 2020 (Bartik et al., 2020 ). Small firms in hospitality, retail, personal services, entertainment, and the arts were most affected (Bartik et al., 2020 ). A survey conducted by the Connected Commerce Council of more than 5016 European small and medium-sized businesses carried out in November–December 2020 found that practically all SMEs were affected, with an average 20% decrease in sales and a 16% decrease in customer base (Digitally Driven, 2021 ).

Barrero et al., ( 2020 : 17) demonstrate for the USA that, “temporary layoffs and furloughs account for 77% of gross staffing reductions in the first months of crises in the United States,” while the Financial Times ( 2020 ) reports that, “more than 3 m Americans filed for first-time unemployment benefits during a first week of May 2020, taking the number of applications for the first three months of the lockdown to 33.5 million. The number of working business owners in the United States plummeted from 15.0 million in February 2020 to 11.7 million two months later in April” (Fairlie, 2020 ). In the UK, the unemployment rate surged to its highest level since 2017 as the pandemic continued to affect jobs (Thomas, 2020 ). In the long term, the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to become a cleansing process and a large reallocation shock (Caballero and Hammour, 1991 ) for firms of different sizes and industries.

Governments throughout the world responded with support initiatives. In the USA, the largest program providing funds to small businesses is the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) with a volume of $650 billion during the early stages of the pandemic (Bhutta et al., 2020 ). The Small Business Administration (SBA)–administered program provided loans to small businesses through banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions with the goal of keeping small businesses open and retaining employees on the payroll (Fairlie & Fossen, 2021 ). In the UK, the government implemented the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) (popularly known as “the Furlough” scheme) for waged workers. The CJRS covers 80% of employee salaries up to a maximum of £2500 per month. More than 8.7 million jobs were furloughed at an estimated total cost of around £60 billion (Yue & Cowling, 2021 ). After initially ignoring the 4.6 million self-employed, the UK government announced the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme, which awarded grants of 70% of average monthly trading profits calculated from tax returns for 2018 and 2019. This scheme only applied to those self-employed who earned less than £50,000 in profit for the relevant period (Yue & Cowling, 2021 ). The measures supported by the German government intended to protect businesses and start-ups affected by the COVID-19 crisis include taxation support, state-supported short-time work compensation schemes, improved measures at guarantee banks, loans and special programs provided by KfW (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau) (PWC, 2020 ), and an emergency aid that offers one-off lump sum payments to self-employed facing substantial revenue declines (Block et al., 2020 ).

In China, measures started in February 2020 when Chinese central bank unblocked extensions or renewals of loans to companies and announced a reduction in the banks’ mandatory reserve ratio. The government presented a package to support the digitalization of SMEs in the context of the crisis. A wide range of policy measures was announced for SMEs at the regional level in China, including deferred tax payments for SMEs, reducing rent costs, waiving administrative fees, subsidizing R&D costs for SMEs, social insurance subsidies, subsidies for training and purchasing teleworking services, and additional funding to spur SME loans (KPMG, 2020 ). The 2020 GEM report mentions that 54 national governments made emergency policy decisions and actions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (GEM 2020 ). Unprecedented amounts of state aid were channeled into propping up economies around the globe.

Despite the deployment of administrative, fiscal, and monetary tools to counter the fall in employment and demand, it seemed unlikely that these measures will be enough to attain a full offset. The response to COVID-19 requires both top-down and bottom-up approaches, e.g., government and private initiatives to support productive entrepreneurs, instead of dying industries and failing firms.

The shock of the pandemic may further increase inequality in at least two ways: First, female owners of small businesses faced a 35% higher probability of experiencing income losses than their male counterparts with the gender gap among the self-employed being largely explained by the fact that women disproportionately work in industries that are more severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic (Graeber et al., 2021 ). Second, the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic may be more pronounced for minorities in developed (Fairlie and Fossen, 2021 ) and developing countries (Maliszewska et al., 2020 ; Pereira & Patel, 2021 ).

More efficient and productive incumbents are likely to grow, with new businesses and industries emerging. The new “Never-Meet-in-Person Era” will change industries, impacting large and small firms in certain industries, such as transport, hospitality, arts and entertainment, and personal services. The weight of hybrid firms, platform-based firms, and platform-matchmakers in the global economy will grow rapidly (Kenney & Zysman, 2020 ).

The emergence of digital technologies has significantly reduced the economic costs of data—search, storage, computation, transmission—and enabled new economic activities during the COVID-19 pandemic and a change in lifestyle. Since the start of the pandemic, small and large firms, able to create a platform-based ecosystem, have become a force of “creative destruction,” value creation, and value appropriation (Acs et al., 2021 ).

The big issue is how the shock and the resulting recession will affect firms, large and small, young and mature, family and non-family firms, community-embedded small firms, and platform-based blitz-scalers not only in the short term but also the mid- and long terms. Will this be different than for any other exogeneous shock?

The potential consequences for businesses may include but are not limited to closed premises, reduced operating hours, job cuts, supply chain disruptions, jeopardizing the R&D processes, cessation of operations, business model changes, loss of key customers, and restrictions on products/services.

News stories highlight the millions of layoffs triggered by the pandemic and lockdown (Barrero et al., 2020 ), while they also relate to examples of large-scale hiring. For example, on April 18, 2020, Walmart reported that it had hired 150,000 new employees, with plans to hire 50,000 more (Nassauer, 2020 ). Fidelity Investments and Fifth Third Bancorp have also been on “hiring sprees,” and hires through Zoom eliminated the worry to be spotted during a job interview lunch by current employers. Will this be the beginning of a new revolution toward large multinational corporate structure, away from micro and small businesses? Businesses may have had different experiences from responding to the previous recessions and other pandemics but can these lessons be useful for small and large firms to respond to COVID-19?

Therefore, the objective of this special issue is to examine the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship and small businesses as well as help to promote research and economic implications relevant to understanding the nature of the pandemic shock, consequences, and opportunities for SMEs and large firms in the short- and long-term perspectives more broadly.

The present introduction to the special issue is organized as follows. It consists of four parts: a systematic review of the literature on the effect of COVID-19 on entrepreneurship and small businesses; a discussion of four literature strands based on this overview; an overview of the contributions in this special issue; and some ideas about the post-pandemic economic research, organized according to four avenues.

Systematic literature review

We start our analysis by performing a “systematic literature review” (Tranfield et al., 2003 ). It is a reliable and efficient method of identifying and evaluating a sizeable literature volume and is widely used in business research (Verma & Gustafsson, 2020 ). The advantage of this method is that it allows for capturing all existing studies on the topic, to incorporate quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method studies, as well as to identify the state of knowledge regarding theories, special entities, and fields of study.

Based on this systematic and comprehensive literature review, we investigate research gaps and identify areas that require further research using the Scopus and Web of Science database, taking our lead from prior systematic literature reviews of Rousseau et al. ( 2008 ) and Verma and Gustafsson ( 2020 ). Before moving to the systematic literature review on the effect of COVID-19 pandemic on small business and entrepreneurship, we wanted to find out whether there is prior research on the economic effects of historic pandemics, such as the Spanish flu. Therefore, we use the period of 50 years, which resulted in only 60 publications, related to the effect of Spanish flu on small businesses. Interestingly, most papers on the effect of the Spanish flu on small business were published during the COVID-19 pandemic (see Fig.  1 ). Researchers from the USA, UK, and Canada have led this field of research.

Timeline of publications on small business and the Spanish flu. Note: 2021 is an incomplete year since the research was done in May of that year

Our next, and main, step was to review the literature on the economic effects of COVID-19 on small businesses and entrepreneurship. We used the period from December 2019 to June 2021 because it corresponds to the pandemic period. We included all articles, data sets, early-access publications, and data studies in English, yielding 3607 published pieces. Once we applied the selection criteria, including only articles published in international peer-reviewed journals, in English and the area of study, the number of publications dropped to 1789. The distribution of articles by field of science is as follows: social sciences (29.3%), business management (22.6%), economics (12.9%), environmental sciences (10.9%), energy (8.8%), organizational studies (2.3%), arts and humanities (2.0%), psychology (1.9%), and other (9.30%).

In the third stage, we used the field of research exclusion criteria with the aim of retaining publications from relevant fields such as business economics, management, social sciences, and economics. Most of the publications come from the USA, China, and the UK (see Fig.  2 ).

The region of the publications on small business and COVID-19

We excluded the BIOSIS Citation Index, BIOSIS Previews, Medline, Zoological Record, and FSTA. This means that we just kept the Web of Science and Scopus databases, yielding to 285 papers. Based on the keywords, text, and abstracts from these 285 papers, we created the visualization network to identify the themes related to the impact of COVID-19 on small businesses using VOSviewer. Co-word analysis applies text-mining techniques to the papers’ titles, abstracts, keywords, and text. Co-word connections allow for identifying and combining multiple co-occurrences and keywords in the same paper, as well as determining the relationship between different keywords (Verma & Gustafsson, 2020 ).

The outcome of the systemic literature review resulted in a keywords network visualization that required (i) selecting the patterns of topics and (ii) clustering topics theories: digitization and open innovation, resilience and disaster, knowledge creation and learning (dynamic capabilities), including industry effects (e.g., healthcare, information technology, tourisms) (Fig.  3 ). The theories were identified by reading all the abstracts and keywords of the 285 papers. These four theories are further explained in the next section and will be matched to the papers that comprise this special issue. We note that a clear discrimination between these literatures is not always possible.

The keywords network visualization

Theories and contributions

Based on the systematic literature review, this section describes how four literatures can be used by scholars to better understand and explain the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on small business across different countries, firm sizes, and the severity of the crisis. First, there is disaster theory literature, which focuses on the financial and physical resources enabling small firms to be more resilient during crises. A body of literature stresses the importance of community-based networks and the role of social capital in helping small businesses to respond to disasters (Bin & Edwards, 2009 ; Torres et al., 2019 ).

Torres et al. ( 2019 ) investigate small business owners’ response to natural disasters and catastrophes through the lens of resources and social capital, drawing a line between resilient small businesses that not only remain operating but also thrive after a disaster and those exiting. Evidence focusing on small businesses shows that they widely engage in disaster relief for their community (Bin & Edwards, 2009 ), clarifying that in addition to governments, entrepreneurs and small businesses also become active (Markman et al., 2019 ). Post-disaster business resilience is the product of many complex decisions resulting from the interaction of individuals, families, businesses, and communities (Marshall & Schrank, 2014 ).

Second, responses to crises and exogeneous shocks is at the heart of resilience theory. The origins of the resilience concept in the business literature go back to Staw et al. ( 1981 ) and Meyer ( 1982 ). Both authors draw upon variation–selection–retention mechanisms posited by evolutionary theory (Campbell 1965) and develop very different propositions regarding how organizations respond to external shocks. Staw et al. ( 1981 ) introduce a theory on how negatively framed situations lead to risk avoidance in the form of “threat-rigidity effects.” Meyer ( 1982 ) extends the resilience framework by studying hospital responses to an unexpected doctors’ strike or “environmental jolt,” contradicting the proposition by Staw et al. ( 1981 ) that an external threat automatically places an organization at risk.

Resilience takes place over time and is related to the recovery of individuals, businesses, communities, and institutions. Most studies consider post-disaster business resilience as a binary stage of open or closed businesses (Marshall & Schrank, 2014 ). By capturing measures and processes that contribute to small business resilience as a disaster response, Tugade and Fredrickson ( 2004 ) provide real world examples, while Torres et al. ( 2019 ) emphasize the role of community and support to entrepreneurs in a post-shock period.

Research on resilience and post-disaster management literature began to comment that there are few avenues to detect whether or not an entrepreneur had “resilience potential,” prior to demonstrating a resilient or non-resilient response (Linnenluecke et al., 2012 ). Furthermore, researchers argue that more attention should be devoted to the period of detecting a threat and activating firm’s response. Conceptualization of organizational resilience broadly fall in three categories: (1) resilience as an outcome, (2) resilience as a process, and (3) resilience capabilities (Bullough et al., 2014 ; Duchek, 2020 ).

In the post-COVID world, agile and resilient new businesses will be able to take advantage of their entrepreneurial orientation and find opportunities in the upheaval that the pandemic has caused globally (Zahra, 2020 ). In an environment characterized by high volatility and uncertainty, the importance of the firms’ dynamic capabilities (DC) to integrate resources in recognizing new opportunities is also further heightened (Battisti & Deakins, 2017 ). The role of DCs and the role of resilience (Bergami et. al, 2021 ; Bullough & Renko, 2013 ; Bullough et al., 2014 ) are differentiators between not just the survival and failure of small businesses and entrepreneurs and also the speed with which new ventures are able to learn, both determining their growth and survival in the long term (Zahra, 2020 ).

Third, there is a literature on the role of knowledge creation and absorptive capacity in addressing the negative effects of disasters and crises. Dynamic capabilities (DC) are the key concept underlying absorptive capacity as the antecedent organizational and strategic routines by which managers alter their resource base—acquire and shed resources, integrate them together, and recombine them—to generate new value-creating strategies (Eisenhardt & Martin, 2000 ; Grant, 1996 ). Teece et al., ( 1997 : 516) defines DCs as “the firm’s ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competences to address rapidly changing environments. Dynamic capabilities thus reflect an organization’s ability to achieve new and innovative forms of competitive advantage given path dependencies and market positions.”

Managing uncertainty tends to be the new normal for many companies around the world (i.e., climate change, COVID-19), thus stressing the importance of creating competitive advantage and improving dynamic capabilities that are so important for small business (Arend, 2013 ) and that seem to be the only antidotes to uncertainty during the COVID-19 pandemic (Flammer & Ioannou, 2020 ).

The role of dynamic capabilities was brought forward by Priyono et al. ( 2020 ) in their analysis of how small businesses cope with environmental changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic by pursuing the business model transformation with the change in dynamic capabilities related to adaptation of digital technologies and digital skills.

Dynamic capabilities, which became even more relevant in the digital era (Li et al., 2016 ), enable small businesses to adopt digital tools more quickly and efficiently. This enables stronger response to the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Audretsch and Belitski ( 2021 ) demonstrate how European small businesses adopt digital technologies and develop strategic, managerial, and digital skills to increase their efficiency.

The DC theory could be relevant in the response to the volatility, velocity, and criticality of COVID-19 effects (Obal & Gao, 2020 ), for instance, by redeploying salespeople to virtual rather than physical sales calls. The literature on dynamic capabilities could draw on prior research in times of high turbulence but is sparse and focuses mainly on financial crises. For example, Fainshmidt and Frazier ( 2017 ) and Makkonen et al. ( 2014 ) find a disconnect between pre-crisis settings and the types of DCs most useful during crisis.

Bartik et al. ( 2020 ) and Kuckertz et al. ( 2020 ) suggest how government initiatives help businesses cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. A further cluster of papers use information gathering surveys (e.g., Bartik et al., 2020 ; Fairlie, 2020 ; Kritikos, et al., 2020 ) and case studies (Kuckertz et al., 2020 ; Robinson & Kengatharan, 2020 ). There is a lack of research on the intersection of the pandemic and DCs.

It is important to understand the boundary conditions explaining whether DCs can benefit small businesses compared to larger firms. Prior research suggests the existence of a positive feedback loop that results in firms with the largest initial capability endowments generating more new capabilities. Taken together, despite prior research on DC in small businesses (Arend, 2013 ; Fainshmidt & Frazier, 2017 ), only a few studies deal with the role of firm size in determining DCs and in response to the COVID-19 shock.

The fourth strand of literature is related to digitization and the role of digital capabilities in adopting new business models, responding to uncertainty, and developing resilience. Behavior of rapidly growing small businesses depends on their business models (Hennart, 2014 ; Kuratko et al., 2020 ), and the role of digitally enabled firms and business models is important in times of volatility (Li et al., 2016 ; Vadana et al., 2019 ). The role of digital capabilities is expected to grow in importance for entrepreneurship and small business research and practice during and after the COVID-19 crisis. Digital capabilities will be able to change business models and introduce business model innovation (Clauss et al., 2019 ). In the entrepreneurship literature, entrepreneurial growth remains an oft-neglected topic of research, as only a few studies (Asemokha et al., 2019 ; Child et al., 2017 ) shed light on the dynamics of business models and growth or performance in entrepreneurship.

There is still a gap with respect to understanding which DCs need to be developed for firms to respond to opportunities of COVID-19, such as digitalization and business model change (Seetharaman, 2020 ).

Works on digitization in small businesses analyze the implementation of business intelligence as part of their efforts to increase competitiveness in a highly dynamic business environment. A better understanding of the adoption levels of innovation by small businesses is relevant due to the important contribution of small businesses to both employment generation and economic growth (Audretsch et al. 2021b ).

Studies commissioned by Google in the USA in 2020 and in Europe in 2021 demonstrate that the so-called Digital Safety Net has empowered millions of small businesses to shift resources, modify business plans, and continually evolve throughout the pandemic (Digitally Driven, 2021 ). The COVID-19 pandemic threatened small businesses globally, but their use of digital tools has acted as a “Digital Safety Net” and saved many of them (Digitally Driven, 2020 , 2021 ).

Papers in the present special issue

The papers in this special issue can be divided into four strands by the unit of analysis, policy implications, and the literature used. These strands can be connected to the four literatures distinguished in the previous section. The first strand reveals the macro-economic effects of Covid-19 on entrepreneurship, small businesses, and the role of digital technologies in changing work routines of entrepreneurs, which relates to the literature on disaster management and the role of digital tools and capabilities. The second strand touches upon the economic and socio-psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship building on resilience literature and literature on the role of dynamic capabilities, in addition raising the issues of inequality and the effects of COVID-19 in developing and developed economies. The third strand deals with financial support to small businesses and entrepreneurship, building on the literature that addresses the negative effects of disasters and crises as well as macroeconomic responses to shocks. Finally, the fourth strand discusses the effect of various policy and well-being issues for small businesses during COVID-19 drawing on resilience and disaster theory literature.

The first strand contains three papers. Addressing the macroeconomic effects of COVID-19 on the way of living and working, a study of Zhang et al. ( 2021 ) “Working from Home: Small Business Performance and the COVID-19 Pandemic” focuses on working from home as an opportunity rather than an activity that leads to frustration, loneliness, and worries about the future (Banerjee & Rai, 2020 ). In this paper, working from home appears to be an opportunity to improve small businesses’ performance in the COVID-19 crisis. The authors built a theoretical framework based on firm profit maximization using daily and weekly data to demonstrate that working from home impacts the industrial structure and peoples’ work behavior.

A study by Meurer et al. ( 2021 ) demonstrates how entrepreneurs can use alternative support sources of communication and business, such as online communities, raising the question of how support is created in such spaces. Drawing on an affordances perspective, the authors investigate how entrepreneurs interact with online communities and base their qualitative analysis on conversation data (76,365 posts) from an online community of entrepreneurs on Reddit during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings draw out four affordances that online communities offer to entrepreneurs (resolving problems, reframing problems, reflecting on situations, refocusing thinking and efforts), resulting in a framework of entrepreneurial support creation in online communities.

Altogether these two papers demonstrate how small businesses and individual entrepreneurs can adjust to new business conditions by working from home, developing new business models, and seeking social support to leverage the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study of Pedauga et al. ( 2021 ), “Macroeconomic Lockdown and SMEs: The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Spain,” takes a macroeconomic perspective to empirically test the role of small business in the economy. The authors use a financial social accounting matrix to distinguish between the direct and indirect effects that are transferred from micro, small, medium, and large firms to the rest of the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors explore the sequence of reactions associated with shocks that arise from the COVID-19 lockdown to small businesses using a structural model for the Spanish economy and identifying the role of businesses of different sizes for the gross domestic product (GDP). Interestingly, small businesses “explain” 43% of the gross domestic product and two-thirds of the unemployment decline caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The second strand of studies in this special issue examines the economic and non-economic impact on small business performance of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study of Grözinger et al. ( 2021 ) on “The Power of Positivity: Organizational Psychological Capital and Firm Performance During Exogenous Crisis” investigates how psychological capital in businesses impacts performance and creative innovation through organizational citizenship behavior, solidarity, and cooperation. The authors use structural equation modelling and regression analysis on 379 small businesses to demonstrate that psychological capital positively influences creative innovation and thus performance during crises. This research contributes to the organizational behavior approach of the small business literature by showing that psychological resources of small businesses can strengthen performance in times of crisis and help to prepare for future shocks.

The study by Torrès et al. ( 2021a ), “Risk of Burnout in French Entrepreneurs During the COVID-19 Crisis,” discriminates between three sources of burnout: the threat of becoming ill, having to stay at home due to the lockdown, and having to file for bankruptcy due to the economic downturn. They use seven data sets of French entrepreneurs with a temporal comparison of averages and two data sets of French entrepreneurs with a cross-sectional analysis of individuals. They show that the risk of burnout increased during the pandemic, that all three factors play important roles, and that the financial threat is the dominant one. These findings call for the extension of entrepreneurial support systems beyond the financial by also involving an “entrepreneurship care” aspect, which includes telephone support, webinars, mental help facilities, and other support measures.

The study by Kalenkoski and Wulff Pabilonia ( 2021 ), called “Impacts of COVID-19 on the Self-employed,” uses monthly panel data from the Current Population Survey in the USA and examines the initial impacts of COVID-19 on the employment and hours of unincorporated self-employed workers. The authors find that effects become visible in March 2020 as voluntary social distancing started, peaked in April during the complete shutdown, and were slightly smaller in May. They conclude that self-employed married mothers were hit hardest and were even forced out of the labor force to care for children. Moreover, remote work and working in an essential industry mitigate some of the negative effects on employment and hours worked.

Pereira and Patel ( 2021 ) in their study, “Is the Impact of COVID-19 More Severe on Self-employed of Colour? Large Scale Evidence from Brazil,” complement prior research on self-employed from racial minority groups and use resilience theory to explain how minority self-employed in Brazil responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with lessons for other developing countries (e.g., Sri Lanka) (Robinson & Kengatharan, 2020 ). The paper extends the argument that minorities may face greater adversity from the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA and other developed countries (Buheji et al., 2020 ), while there is little evidence that minority self-employed in a developing country are also significantly affected in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The third strand of studies brings together the role of financing for entrepreneurship and small businesses in crises and a variety of support tools. Studies in this part discuss the role of financial support and other government programs to respond to economic disruption. Various support policies were developed and provided by governments all over the world in response to address their small businesses’ financing needs. In a paper by Liu et al. ( 2021 ), “SMEs’ Line of Credit under the COVID-19: Evidence from China,” the Chinese SMEs’ financing responses to the outbreak of COVID-19 are examined. The study shows the supportive role of Chinese state-owned banks on small businesses’ lines of credit. These policy instruments can be broadly categorized into loan guarantees, direct lending to small businesses, grants and subsidies, and equity instruments. Interestingly, there are considerable differences in supporting small businesses’ financing policies between countries. For example, in the USA, European Union, the UK, and China and Russia, policies to support small businesses during the pandemic were a commonplace. Brazilian and Indian government provided little support to small business.

The study of Fairlie and Fossen ( 2021 ), “Did the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program Get Disbursed to Minority Communities in the Early Stages of COVID-19?,” examines the effect of the US federal government response to help small businesses—the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the related Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL). The program’s stated goal is helping disadvantaged groups. The authors provide the first detailed analysis of how the 2020 PPP and EIDL funds were disbursed across minority communities in the country. The authors find a positive relationship between PPP loan receipt per business and the minority share of the population or businesses, although funds flowed to minority communities later than to communities with lower minority shares. This study acknowledges the importance of financial support through PPP loans of minority communities as a share of the population. The important evidence is that the EIDL program, both in numbers per business and amounts per employee, was positively distributed to minority communities. This is the first study about how loans and advances from these programs were distributed between minority and non-minority communities.

Another study by Atkins et al. ( 2021 ), “Discrimination in Lending? Evidence from the Paycheck Protection Program,” adds to our understanding of the role of race in loans made through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Expanding the paper of Fairlie and Fossen ( 2021 ), the authors argue that the historical record and PPP program design choices made it likely that many Black-owned businesses received smaller PPP loans than White-owned businesses: Black-owned businesses received loans that were approximately 50% smaller than observationally similar White-owned businesses. Interestingly, the effect is marginally smaller in areas with more bank competition and disappeared over time as changes to the PPP program were implemented allowing for entry by fintechs and other non-traditional lenders.

The study by Block et al ( 2021 ), “The Determinants of Bootstrap Financing in Crises: Evidence from Entrepreneurial Ventures in the COVID-19 Pandemic,” investigates the measures that entrepreneurial ventures undertake to preserve liquidity. The authors build on prior research on bootstrap financing as an important enabler for the growth of resource-constrained early-stage ventures. Their work fills the gap about the use of bootstrap financing during COVID-19, during which the preservation of liquidity is particularly salient. The determinants of bootstrap financing are embedded into a “necessity” human capital perspective and an “opportunity” cost perspective. The analyses are based on data of 17,046 German entrepreneurial ventures.

The study of Dörr et al. ( 2021 ), “Small Firms and the COVID-19 Insolvency Gap,” focuses on fiscal policy in rescuing companies short of liquidity from insolvency. The authors show that, in the first months of the crisis, the small businesses that are the backbone of Germany’s economy benefited from large and mainly indiscriminate aid measures. The authors estimate the extent to which the policy response induced an insolvency gap and analyze whether the gap is characterized by firms that were already struggling before the pandemic. They also examined whether this insolvency gap differs with respect to firm size and find that the gap was larger for smaller firms. The theoretical contribution of the paper is in translating Schumpeter’s theory of the cleansing effect in economic crises into an empirical assessment by estimating the size of a policy-induced insolvency gap using firm-specific credit rating data combined with information on insolvency filings.

The fourth strand of studies represents a variety of micro and macro public support and well-being programs aiming to mitigate the negative effects of the COVID-19 crises.

The Lastauskas ( 2021 ) study, called “Lockdown, Employment Adjustment, and Financial Frictions,” examines businesses’ employment adjustments after the imposition of stringent lockdown in March 2020. It uses monthly administrative data and takes value-added tax payment changes as a proxy for the demand shock. The main finding is that all businesses in the manufacturing sector reduced employment more if they had uncovered tax liabilities before the lockdown. Among small businesses, those in the real estate and the service sectors downsized more rapidly. While employment changes are rather modest, this early evidence points to the importance of addressing liquidity needs and specific pre-conditions among capital-intensive and services businesses to avoid employment losses.

The Belghitar et al. ( 2021 ) study, “When the rainy day is the worst hurricane ever: the effects of governmental policies on SMEs during COVID-19,” examines the impact of COVID-19 on 42,401 UK small businesses and how government intervention affected their capability to survive the pandemic. The results show that, without governmental mitigation schemes, 59% of UK small businesses report negative earnings and that their residual life is reduced from 164 to 139 days. This analysis demonstrates that government financial support may reduce the number of small businesses with negative earnings and allows extending the residual life for small businesses with negative earnings up to 194 days. Block et al. ( 2020 ), who analyze the first emergency aid program in Germany, find similar effects among German businesses hit by the crisis. Interestingly, the study of Belghitar et al. ( 2021 ) highlights that—in contrast to Block et al ( 2020 )—those industries that were worst hit by COVID-19 are not those that benefited the most from the government support scheme. The possible reason is that the government scheme does not differentiate between firms that do or do not deserve support.

Finally, the study of Braunerhjelm ( 2021 ) deals with macro-economic stabilization policies and discusses that targeting aggregate demand may not suffice to mitigate the comprehensive effects of the COVID-19 crisis. Entitled “Rethinking Stabilization Policies: Including Supply-side Effects and Entrepreneurial Processes,” it suggests that a more active role for fiscal policies is needed and presents a modified framework for stabilization policies, giving an extended role to supply-side measures and emphasizing policies that can promote entrepreneurial processes and knowledge upgrading efforts. Aligning policies at the micro- and macro-levels can be expected to counteract economic downturns more efficiently as the potential for long-term growth is enhanced. Such a redirection of stabilization policies is argued to strengthen the competitive standing of both firms and individuals.

Future research

There are many discussions and arguments proclaiming that nothing in business will be left unchanged: in the post-COVID world, there will be opportunities for entrepreneurs to embark on creating new products and services, with novel business models and business routines arising that are different from traditional ones (Janssen et al., 2021 ). Changes in (the perception of) well-being, the way of consuming, in the way of filtering out the resilient and the agile, the adoption of new digital technologies and learning skills, and much more will all contribute to something that some call the “new normal.” Below, we contribute to this discussion with respect to four dimensions of future research, all connected to the contents of this special issue, initially sparked by our discussions with authors and referees during the online paper-development-workshop organized by the University of Reading on November 20, 2020: caution is warranted as all suffer from a certain degree of speculation.

Long- and short-term economic effect of COVID-19

The results of several papers in this special issue demonstrate that investigating the long-term effects induced by the policy responses to COVID-19 on turnover, productivity, innovation, and entrepreneurship in developed countries is needed. However, future research may also want to demonstrate a wider economic, political, and societal challenge, including inequality and poverty, unemployment within poor countries, and the gap between rich and poor countries (Bartik et al., 2020 ; Robinson & Kengatharan, 2020 ).

Real wages in certain sectors may rise, such as tourism, hospitality, and restaurants, as the disease reduces the supply of workers, leaving survivors in a stronger bargaining position.

The macro- and microeconomic effects of the COVID-19 shock are different between small and large firms as well as between the self-employed and incorporated business. Smaller businesses are typically disadvantaged in their ability to capture the opportunities that crises have created. It is important to research further the role of local and national governments, public organizations, civil society, and other stakeholders in mitigating the effect of crises.

Forming partnerships between small and large firms, the role of open innovation and knowledge spillovers may emerge as an important conduit for entrepreneurship and for mitigating the effects of COVID-19. Particularly interesting is the dynamics of so-called science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)–related jobs in the long term.

Further insights are needed to understand economic and psychological drivers of innovation during crises. While previous research demonstrates that context matters (Audretsch et al., 2021a ; Welter, 2011 ; Welter et al., 2019 ), the context of a crisis is a compelling, yet understudied, one. Welter et al. ( 2019 ) outlines three recent and overlapping waves of contextualization in the entrepreneurship field and shows that the discussion has moved from challenging the Silicon Valley model by considering the why, what, and how of entrepreneurship (first wave) to considering more subjective elements in enactment of contexts (second wave), through broadening the domain of entrepreneurship research (third wave).

To quantify the effect of the COVID-19 lockdown on economic activity, it may be possible to consider the links between all three waves (Welter et al., 2019 ) at the idiosyncratic level and their aggregate impact. It is probably not just sectoral issues and those issues related to the labor market or economic growth that play a role, but also deeper mental issues (Torrès et al., 2021a ).

The use of digital technology, competencies, and robots

Digital skills trends seem to be interacting with the pandemic and its social, political, economic, environmental, and demographic tensions, combining to accelerate the reconfiguration of production and service systems. This reconfiguration of existing skills and adoption of digital skills not only affects employment trends, but also the way we work and experience our mental and physical health, perhaps even long after the crisis is over.

The role of digital technology has significantly increased under COVID-19. For instance, digital technologies affected the way firms do head-hunting during COVID-19 as well as how products and services are manufactured and delivered. During disease outbreaks—Ebola in 2014–2016 and COVID-19 in 2019, among others—the adoption of robot and digital tools accelerates, especially when the health impact is severe and associated with potential economic losses or economic crises.

Entrepreneurship in the post-pandemic world will further fuse with the digital economy. This will take the form of entrepreneurs increasingly selling products on digital platforms, using digital tools like TikTok for marketing and relying on platforms such as Kickstarter for funding. Moreover, we believe that entrepreneurs will further seek to use peers in online communities to develop opportunities, get assistance with problems, and find collaborators. The key implication is that, while entrepreneurs in the past have often physically worked side by side to develop their business locally, in the future such bounds will play a diminishing role. One can start a business in Ghana, work with a programmer in Indonesia, find a marketing specialist in Paris, secure funding over Kickstarter, and sell the product through a digital platform. In other words, COVID-19 fosters the transition of the entrepreneurial economy into a digital, disembodied economy. The next big technology to be adopted at large scale is likely to be 5G. The large-scale use of artificial intelligence is being pushed but may not be relevant until 2025 at the earliest. Quantum computing is also being pushed, but not likely to affect small businesses before 2030.

All small businesses must be prepared for the “new normal” of a digitally driven economy (Meurer et al., 2021 ). Many are well positioned, but others feel uncertain due to challenges accessing capital, tools, and training, as well as with measuring success. During the pandemic, so-called advanced small businesses invested more than twice as much money in digital tools than the so-called uncertain small businesses (Digitally Driven, 2021 ). The working environment changed fundamentally with the digitalization and flexibilization of work receiving a considerable boost. These changes probably make companies more resilient to future shocks.

Even though the self-employed initially were hit harder by the COVID-19 pandemic than larger firms in the USA and Europe (Digitally Driven, 2020 , 2021 ), there is reason to be optimistic because, for the millions of SMEs that still lack skills, technology, and resources, adopting digital tools is within reach with the right mindset, strategy, access to world-class digital technologies, and training. As the working world has become more flexible, it is likely that mixed forms of remote and physical working (especially in teams) will become accepted in the future. However, we also learned that remote work cannot sufficiently replace personal encounters in all cases. Therefore, we believe that society and the working world will learn to appreciate such personal encounters again and that these will be valued differently in the future. Future research may need to better understand the role personal encounters and skills, which, along with new technology, will be valued more in the future.

Financing for entrepreneurship

As witnessed by several contributions in the present special issue, there are many promising avenues for research regarding what drives the financing of entrepreneurial activity during and after the COVID-19 crisis. For example, we would expect that entrepreneurial motivation may play an important role, along with networks of venture capital and angel investors. A significant share of solo self-employed individuals start their businesses out of necessity (Block et al., 2015 ; Caliendo & Kritikos, 2019 ; De Vries et al., 2020 ; Zwan et al., 2016 ). As policymakers want more high-growth ventures to recover from the crisis, their interest in opportunity-driven entrepreneurs may grow. Human and social capital including networks for entrepreneurship may be important for sourcing entrepreneurial financing. Finally, research should also analyze performance effects and investigate whether and how various sources of finance, beyond bootstrapping during the COVID-19 crisis, may impact long-term entrepreneurial performance, survival, and high growth (Audretsch et al., 2021b ).

Financial support policies are important for supporting small businesses and individual entrepreneurs with the mechanisms and the extent of such support being substantially different between OECD and non-OECD countries. Thus, understanding the causes and consequences of SME financing policies in the COVID-19 era would be intriguing and pivotal for both academic researchers and policymakers. Future research could also examine whether and how the institutional and development stage heterogeneities shape the policy differences related to stakeholders, unit of financing, and form of financing (e.g., grants, loans, equity). In that sense, the pandemic is a natural experiment.

A criticism of the financial support programs is that often there was no data collected on applications for loans that were denied (Fairlie & Fossen, 2021 ). This is an important piece of information that should be collected for future research on public support to small businesses and entrepreneurs to gauge demand and unmet need for these loans, in particular by minority businesses in developed and developing countries. As in the case of the USA, PPP and EIDL funds were allocated to support businesses, and it is crucial to track who receives funding and how it helps small businesses to become more resilient and grow during the crisis.

During the first phase of the pandemic, massive government support slowed firm exits. However, it may be argued that the resources were not spent efficiently and that public support mechanisms slowed down industrial dynamics. Hence, an important challenge for the post-pandemic world is to revitalize entry rates and stimulate technology adaption while also encouraging the adoption of new business models that restore productivity and growth beyond pre-crisis levels. In this context, research in industrial dynamics may help to contribute to the existing long-run challenges faced by modern societies such as digitization, decarbonization, and sustained prosperity.

Looking ahead, government and policymakers may want to design financial policy interventions that dampen the impacts of the pandemic on small businesses. Future research should focus on direct policies, like zero-interest loans, subsidies, and grants. According to Liu et al. ( 2021 ), in this special issue, the measures should target subgroups, firms that heavily rely on supply chains, and small businesses without stable bank relationships.

Understanding the effects of the interplay between liquidity support, on the one hand, and temporary adjustments to insolvency regimes, on the other, will provide an important lesson from the COVID-19 crisis. Further research may focus on the interplay of these two instruments as it is assumed that they may discourage struggling firms from exiting the market.

Non-economic effects of the COVID-19

An increasing number of studies in the entrepreneurship literature analyzes to what degree entrepreneurs’ mental health influences their activities. Further studies about the perception of burnout or general mental health issues, with a focus on experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic across more countries, industries, and fields, could expand what we know about the response of entrepreneurs during crises and how negative effects (e.g., burnout) could be leveraged.

COVID-19 put a large strain on entrepreneurs, who experienced an unprecedent shock to their businesses (Torrès et al., 2021b ) Without being able to meet physically with investors and clients, some entrepreneurs had to scale down their businesses; others closed their business, and solo entrepreneurs were left more isolated than before. The COVID-19 pandemic has likely been detrimental to the mental health of entrepreneurs. The pandemic forced entrepreneurs to reflect on the importance of their mental health and to actively seek and establish coping techniques. Some entrepreneurs experiencing failure may decide that entrepreneurship is not for them, but we expect that those who continue their entrepreneurial career found ways to cope with high stress levels. For instance, such entrepreneurs will use “time boxing” to become more productive, meditate regularly, or use digital tools to connect with peers. These entrepreneurs will likely also focus more on balancing their working and private lives by creating a working situation that suits their social needs. In that sense, some of the entrepreneurs who suffered during the pandemic may come back mentally stronger and more resilient.

The lockdown likely led to frustration, loneliness, and worries about the future (Kritikos et al., 2020 ), which are also risk factors for mental illnesses (Banerjee & Rai, 2020 ). Future research can focus on the impact of lockdowns and quarantine on small businesses as well as on the link between lockdowns, psychological effects (Brooks et al., 2020 ), and entrepreneurship (Shepherd, 2020 ). Results of future investigations could inspire entrepreneurs to search for novel, more sustainable, and more social forms of entrepreneurship, better understanding failures and successes of small businesses. This knowledge, which is often informal and tacit, represents a source of wealth for dealing with new forms of crisis (both health related and economic).

Protecting and supporting the health of small businesses and entrepreneurs during and after the COVID-19 pandemic is essential because they have a special role in the aftermath of crisis and in the anticipated post-pandemic boom. This aftermath may be predominantly dematerialized with a virtual mode of working and new norms of working from home. The climate and the green agenda would be a priority. A large part of business services would be contactless. Entrepreneurs’ health—both physical and mental—would be acknowledged and recognized as vital, both by the entrepreneurs themselves and by the policy makers.

However, given the length of school closures and the considerable reduction in the availability of childcare centers, the gender gap in entrepreneurship, which was identified at the beginning of this crisis, may widen in the post-pandemic period (Seebauer et al., 2021 ).

In general, economic inequality between and within nations is likely to also increase the likelihood of contracting the coronavirus and dying from it. Developing nations with weak healthcare systems and an inability to practice social distancing also account for the unequal impact. For people of low socio-economic status and economically disadvantaged people in developed countries, COVID-19 also poses higher risks of living in overcrowded accommodations increasing risk of illness (Patel et al., 2020 ). Racial and ethnic minorities experience higher death rates from COVID-19, which has also unequally affected urban residents and foreign migrants around the world. With the closure of schools, nurseries, and other childcare facilities for all but children of essential workers (Blundell et al., 2020 ), parents were typically left with the sole responsibility for caring for their children, including education, which particularly affected the survival of the self-employed. How these growing inequalities affect business dynamics will become an entire field of scholarly research and, hopefully, of compensating policy interventions.

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Contributor Information

Maksim Belitski, Email: [email protected].

Christina Guenther, Email: [email protected].

Alexander S. Kritikos, Email: [email protected]

Roy Thurik, Email: [email protected].

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Management research and the impact of COVID-19 on performance: a bibliometric review and suggestions for future research

• Kingsley Opoku Appiah 1 ,
• Bismark Addai 2 ,
• Wesley Ekuban 3 ,
• Suzzie Owiredua Aidoo 4 &
• Joseph Amankwah-Amoah 5  

Future Business Journal volume  8 , Article number:  41 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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Although there has been a burgeoning scholarly interest in the effects of COVID-19, the current stream of research remains scattered in different business and management fields and domains. Accordingly, integrative knowledge is needed to drive poignant and relevant examinations of the phenomenon. This study attempts to fill this gap by providing a synthesis of the literature, patterns of research studies, and direction for further development of the field. This study also provides a systematic identification and bibliometric and thematic review of literature, performance analysis, science mapping, and cluster analysis. The study additionally provides suggestions for future research to guide relevant discourse.

Introduction

The term pandemic has been used to describe the widespread outbreak of disease through human-to-human infections [ 1 ]. Medical texts providing a clear definition of what constitutes a pandemic are non-existent. However, its geographic extent and infectiousness and severe negative impact on all aspects of society are clearly understood [ 2 ]. To this end, research has continued to understand the extent to which pandemics shape communities, economies and society as a whole [ 3 , 4 ]. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception, with its catastrophic effects considered to be one of the worst in human history [ 5 ]. It is no surprise the plethora of studies seeking to understand the phenomena. The severity of the pandemic has paved the way for a rapidly escalating body of empirical literature analyzing the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on countries [ 6 , 7 ], firms [ 8 ], and households [ 9 , 10 ]. Some business and finance-related studies, for example, have focused on macro-economic indicators [ 11 ], policy alternatives and implementation [ 12 , 13 ], business responses and implications [ 4 , 14 ] as well as firm performance outcomes and failures [ 15 , 16 ].

The COVID-19 pandemic like all other global crises impacts on all aspects of life including business activities. Shocks caused by such events disrupt business operations across the globe and in extreme situations lead to business failure [ 17 , 18 ]. The influence of business activity on national and global economies has encouraged an increasing scholarly interest in understanding the extent to which firm performance has been impacted. Developing suitable and sustainable policy and strategy responses is the logical action and focus of all governments and scholars to help mitigate the negative effects of this pandemic. However, to develop such effective strategies, the extent and various ways in which firm activities and performance has been affected must first be examined. To this end, scholars have found that the COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted the performance of the hospitality industry [ 19 ], supply chains [ 20 ], stocks of listed companies [ 21 , 22 ], SMEs and family firms [ 23 , 24 ].

Notwithstanding the vital contributions of these studies, the integral role of research is to detect and synthesize patterns, conditions and effects in business activity, to help ensure effective decision-making and policy development. Carracedo et al. [ 25 ] began this pattern detection by conducting a systematic literature review of relevant literature. Although, Carracedo et al.’s [ 25 ] study offers novel insights into the clusters of COVID-19 business-related studies, it hardly provides in-depth knowledge and practicable knowledge on the scope, relationships and gaps in literature. To this end, the present study advances knowledge by conducting a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis of the relationship between COVID-19 and firm performance.

The contribution to the literature is threefold. First, based on the review a comprehensive baseline systematization on the impact of COVID -19 on firm performance was advanced to enhance the understanding of the impact of the pandemic on firm performance. In so doing, we also provide fruitful lines for future research and/or policy (see [ 26 ]). Second, synthesizing the rapidly evolving literature into a conceptual framework/clusters, the study provides academicians, industrial players, government agencies, and all other stakeholders a comprehensive overview and access to the central topics, trends and the implications of the research on the impact of the pandemic on firm performance. Furthermore, the review of the data provides an opportunity to offer a deeper insight to help control the impact of the pandemic on firm’s performance and the antecedent effects on households and economies.

The rest of the paper proceeds as follows. “ Method and initial statistics ” section discusses the method. “ Bibliometric analysis ” and “ Thematic/cluster analysis ” sections present an in-depth bibliometric and cluster/thematic analyses of the dataset, respectively. “ Directions for future research ” and “ Conclusion and limitations ” sections provide direction for future research and the conclusion, respectively.

Method and initial statistics

The objective of this study is to construct a scientific map and further analyze the worth of knowledge produced by management experts who examine the impact of COVID-19 on firms’ performance. Following relevant literature (e.g., [ 27 , 28 ]) and best practices in the mapping of scientific knowledge, we conduct a bibliometrix analysis and a systematic review of the relevant literature. Specifically, we use the bibliometrix to construct scientific mapping to highlight the knowledge base, and its intellectual structure as well as both the conceptual and social network structures of Covid 19’s impact on performance extant literature (see [ 29 , 30 ]). By combining the two complementary approaches, we are able to paint a picture of the development of scientific knowledge on the impact of COVID-19 on firm performance using quantitative bibliometrix tools and also provide a comprehensive analysis of the themes/topics and contents by means of qualitative systematic review. These approaches are well established in management literature (see [ 27 , 31 ]).

Data collection

To undertake this systematic and bibliometric analysis, articles discussing the influence of COVID-19 on firm performance were retrieved and analyzed. To ensure and maintain an unbiased and high-quality database and review, strict criteria were adhered to. These are described in the following steps:

Step 1 A literature search was conducted in Scopus Database. The aim is to ensure broader access to ranked management related, reputable and quality journals.

Step 2 The search was conducted with the search term: ("COVID-19" or "CoronaVirus") and ("value" or "performance" or “profitability”). Various search strings using multiple combinations of the search terms were used during the data collection process. These include ((covid-19 OR coronavirus) AND (value OR performance OR profitability)).

Step 3 The search focused on scholarly studies relating to the impact of COVID 19 on firms published from 2019 to 24 July, 2021. We consider papers published from 2019 to 2021 because COVID-19 emerged as a global health crisis in 2019 [ 9 ] and we finished our literature search in July 2021.

Step 4 These studies were limited to final articles published within Business & Management & Accounting, Social Science, Economics, Econometrics & Finance Journals. We omit books, Ph.D. Thesis, working papers, technical reports, conference proceedings. The stages and the tasks undertaken during the literature search are summarized in Table 1 .

An initial search produced 19,645 articles, excluding articles outside of the 2019–2021 range yielded 18,710. Of these 1571 were management and accounting related. Subsequently, review papers (70), conference papers (59), editorial (10), book chapters (14), note (27), book (7) and letters (4) leaving 1372 articles. Finally, 1355 English journal articles were retained for the bibliometric and thematic analyses. Subsequent steps in this study consisted of conducting a bibliometric and a thematic analysis of articles retained. The bibliometric analysis consists of a performance analysis of articles, authors and journals to identify relevant literature in the field. Next a scientific mapping of country production as well as a keyword analysis is conducted to highlight on the various research topics in the field. We use Biblioshiny and VOSViewer Software applications to perform the bibliometric analysis. Finally, the study conducts a detailed thematic analysis, by identifying and synthesizing studies within the four main research clusters.

Descriptive statistics

Table 2 captures the description of the data collected for the bibliometric analysis and the SLR. As illustrated in the table, we identify 1355 scholarly articles, spread across 437 sources, with 73,478 references, 4407 authors keywords, 3538 authors, 0.383 article per author, and 2.85 co-authors per article. Our descriptive also shows 253 single authorships, while collaboration index is 3.03 (see Table 2 ). Our analysis shows the impact of Covid 19 on performance was first mentioned in the Management research literature in 2019 by Sterling and Merluzzi’s (2019) paper, highlighting that tryouts may rise due to Covid 19-related impacts on US Firms. Table 2 reports an astronomical rate of 31.7% for the 2-year period from 2020 to 2021, implying the ever-increasing literature on the impact of Covid 19 on performance.

The study examines the scientometric index measuring a journal’s impact by assessing the average number of article citations over the last two years. Table 3 shows the top ten most impactful journals in terms of the number of publications on impact of Covid-19 on performance research. It should be noted that the top ten journals published 215 out of 1355 articles, accounting for 15.9% of articles in our dataset. The results indicate that majority of these journals ranked three or two in Association of Business School Journal quality list. Overall, these multi-disciplinary outlets suggest the topic is attractive to all management scholars and research areas.

Bibliometric analysis

The study’s bibliometric analysis reveals the valuable insights to knowledge within management research in assessing the influences of COVID on business performance.

Author influence

This section discusses the most impactful authors to the research domain. Table 4 displays the most impactful author on the basis of h-index, m-index, g-index and number of publications. We examine author’s impact by analyzing the number of academic benchmark performance indicators, namely citations, H-index, G-index, and M-index [ 32 , 33 , 34 ]. The H-index, viewed as an unbiased overview, for example, combines the number of papers and citations to assess author’s scientific contributions over time [ 35 ]. The H-index, however, overlooks the impactful but discriminatory author, implying it favors high-volume authors. Accordingly, we complement the H-index analysis with the G-index. G-index measures the highest rank such that the top G papers have, together, at least G 2 citations (see [ 35 ] for details).

Overall, the small number of publications from these prolific authors confirms the infancy stage of the research domain, thereby allowing different authors with diverse expertise in management research to contribute to the discourse on the impact of Covid-19 and performance from 2019 to present. The results indicate that Dmitry Ivanov is the most influential author with an H-index of 5 and a G-index of 6. All 6 articles authored or co-authored by him have received a total of 448 citations. This is followed by Vanessa Ratten with H and G-indexes of 5 and 6, respectively. She has authored and co-authored a total of 8 articles in the field, earning a total citation score of 64. Next, Andres Coca-Stefaniak, Sertan Kabadayi and Jungkeun Kim assume the third, fourth and fifth most impactful author, respectively, each with an H and G-index of 3. Generally, the H and G-indexes produce different rankings, the results show that the ranking remains the same except for the highest and second highest ranked authors, who interchange according to the index understudy.

Again, critics argue that both H-index and G-index ignore different career lengths [ 36 ]. Accordingly, we use the M-index (i.e., M-quotient), which is H-index divided by author’s active literary years to help provide a clearer view of author rankings in the research area. Ranking scholars according to the M-quotient, sees Junkeun Kim as the highest ranked author with an M-quotient/index of 3, Dmitry Ivanov and Vanessa Ratten are the second and third highest ranked authors. Other impactful authors, who have contributed immensely to the field and are ranked among the top 10 impactful scholars are summarized in Table 4 .

Geographical and institutional scientific production

Biblioshiny was used to retrieve the author organization/affiliation and address information, after which all the authors were sorted in descending order. Table 5 displays the top 20 organizations publishing the most articles on Covid 19 and performance. University of Johannesburg in South Africa contributes most with 17 articles on Covid 19 and performance, followed by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in Hong Kong . Table 4 shows that RATTEN V from the La Trobe University contributes most with 9 articles, and the affiliation appears as the Top 6 contributing organization. Surprisingly, most of the other influential authors do not have their organizations listed in Table 5 . For example, Ivanov D, Gupta S, Kim J, Kumar A, Li S, Li Z, Sharma A, Zhang J, emerge as the Top 2 to 5 contributing authors, respectively; however, their organizations do not appear in influential organizations in Table 5 . Likewise, the University of Johannesburg emerges as the Top 1 contributing institution with 17 publications but no author from this university is listed in Table 4 . Similar surprises exist at other universities such as the RMIT university , the University of Auckland and the Auckland University of Technology which appear in Table 5 but no author from those organizations appears in Table 4 . The results imply that the contributing authors have come diverse research backgrounds in different methodological and industrial settings. For instance, the 17 publications from the University of Johannesburg cover various industries such as fruit, food, manufacturing and food, and they employ differing methodologies including empirical analysis and case studies.

Being a global health issue that has induced economic and social upheaval worldwide, COVID-19 and its related performance impact has received global scholarly attention. The geographic distribution of research attention is shown in Fig.  1 . The United States of America has the highest concentration of COVID-19 and performance impact studies of 377 (22.93%) articles. The literature on performance impact of COVID-19 has received much attention in the United States because the country has encountered disproportionately elevated levels of economic fallout, infections and deaths [ 6 , 37 ]. For instance, WHO reports that compared to other countries, the USA has the highest infection and death rates of 99,085,620, and 2,377,656, respectively. The United Kingdom emerges as the second country with concentration of studies on the performance impact of COVID-19 contributing 286 (17.40%) of the articles. China, Australia and India contribute the third (11.50%), fourth (10.95%) and fifth (10.10%) positions, respectively. Also, the impact of Covid-19 is evaluated in the Indonesia, Italy, New Zealand, Spain and Portugal by other 446 empirical research articles, representing 27.14% of the top 10 geographic dispersion. Generally, the geographical distribution in Fig.  1 depicts that countries in North America (USA), Oceania, Europe and Asia have the highest interest in studies on the performance impact of COVID-19 as compared to those in South America, Africa and Antarctica (where the interest in the study area is scanty). However, literature shows the highly interrelated nature of the global economy today [ 38 ]. Besides, the multinational nature of business activities today, heightens the need to expand knowledge on performance impacts across all continents. Thus, more empirical analysis on the impact of Covid-19 on performance is needed in those regions seemingly underrepresented in scholarship but pivotal to global business and supply chain [ 39 , 40 ].

Geographic dispersion of publications on Covid-19 and performance

Keyword analysis

Next, we conduct a keyword analysis to identify popular research perspectives in the area. Table 6 contains the biblioshiny’s keyword analysis results of 4407 author keywords in the 1355 articles reviewed in the study. As expected, COVID-19 and several iterations of the virus, crisis, crisis management and resilience make up the top 8 keywords. “ Tourism” takes 9th place on the list, indicating the relevance of tourism to national and global economies and elucidating the extent to which the pandemic has influenced the valuable global industry [ 41 ]. Innovation and resilience have been frequently discussed in conjunction with COVID-19 and business research, highlighting inherent relations between innovation and resilience in the COVID-19-performance nexus [ 42 , 43 ]. Again, Finsterwalder and Kuppelwieser [ 44 ] and Golan et al. [ 39 ] highlight the need for resilience and for developing appropriate strategy for recovery following a disruptive event. “Crisis Management” and “Leadership” are similarly popular research foci owing to the significant roles crisis management and leadership play in mitigating crisis and lessening its adverse effects [ 45 , 46 ]. Other frequently used keywords include performance, entrepreneurship, stock market, and supply chain as they all relate to business management and the performance implications of the pandemic. Country-related keywords include India and China, which have both been epicenters of the pandemic at one point or another [ 47 ]. Lastly, Table 6 shows gender as a frequently used keyword as a result of the recorded differences in infection and fatality rate among men and women [ 48 ] as well as employment, equality and other sociological equality implications [ 49 ].

To further identify themes investigated in the management research and the impact of COVID -19 and Performance, given that the field is at its infancy, we used co-occurrence of keywords analysis based on keywords that occurred at least five times, resulting in 133 satisfying the threshold out of 4407 authors keywords. Figure  2 displays the network visualization diagram of VOSviewer highlighting seven common keywords, namely, COVID-19, pandemic, coronavirus, resilience, crisis, COVID-19 pandemic and crisis management. The size of nodes and thickness of line displayed in Fig.  2 verify these findings (see [ 50 ], p. 552 for further reading). The homogeneous nature of these keywords confirms the collective focus on business performance and economic impacts of the pandemic. Figure  2 also displays 7 clustered keywords for 132.

Network visualization diagram of authors keyword on Covid-19 and performance

Citation analysis

In analyzing the 1355 articles, the study examined the citation measure of each article. Citation analysis is usually measured using two indexes: the global and local citations, whereas the former represents the citation of a given article by other articles within the entire academic database of articles, the latter indicates the citation score of a given article by other articles within the articles being assessed in this study [ 29 ].

Table 7 reports the top 10 cited articles, based on both local and global citation scores. The table shows that the most impactful article is “Predicting the impacts of epidemic outbreaks on global supply chains: a simulation-based analysis of the COVID-19/SARS-CoV2 case" —[ 51 ] . Ivanov [ 51 ] examines the global supply chain impacts of pandemic outbreak through simulation-based analysis, which was published in Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review. The study focuses on crucial management and performance issues affected during crisis such as risk management and resilience and thus sets the tone for the later empirical studies. The second most cited article is “ Risk perceptions of COVID-19 around the world ”—[ 52 ]. This article mapped and modeled the risk perception of COVID-19 around 10 countries (US, UK, Australia, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and Sweden). It highlights the role strong predictive roles of various experiential, and socio-cultural values and factors. The next highest cited article is “ Tourism and COVID-19: Impacts and implications for advancing and resetting industry and research ”—[ 53 ]. The study critically evaluates tourism transformation and impacts of the pandemic through a literature review and sets the tone for resetting and advancing research frontiers.

Other impactful articles include “ Feverish stock price reactions to COVID-19 ”—[ 21 ], which provides evidence of the impacts of COVID-19 on stock returns across US industries. The next is “ Effects of COVID-19 on hotel marketing and management: a perspective article ”—[ 54 ] which discusses the effect of COVID-19 on hotel marketing and management by outlining relevant research agenda to foster knowledge development. The multidisciplinary nature of COVID-19 research is evidenced in the diverse perspective from which these studies have examined the effect of the pandemic. Table 2 summarizes the top 10 most impactful studies.

The top 10 cited articles on COVID-19 and performance are presented in Table 8 . The table indicates that the two most cited authors are Ivanov D and Wen J. who appear as the Top 2 and Top 18, respectively, in the authors with most publication list in Table 4 . Most of the other authors in the most cited author list also appear in the most productive author list and these results signify that most of the authors in the two lists are not only productive but they are also very influential.

Co-citation analysis

We analyze the 1355 articles in our dataset, with a minimum threshold of 3 citations; the obtained set contains 29 cited references out of the 6724 total references as reported by VOSviewer. The five most connected references (Fig.  3 ) are: Fornell, C. and Larcker, D.F., 1981. Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error.  Journal of marketing research ,  18 (1), pp. 39–50. Henseler, J., Ringle, C.M. and Sarstedt, M., 2015. A new criterion for assessing discriminant validity in variance-based structural equation modeling.  Journal of the academy of marketing science ,  43 (1), pp. 115–135. Podsakoff, P.M., MacKenzie, S.B., Lee, J.Y. and Podsakoff, N.P., 2003. Common method biases in behavioral research: a critical review of the literature and recommended remedies.  Journal of applied psychology ,  88 (5), p. 879. Sheth, J., 2020. Business of business is more than business: Managing during the Covid crisis.  Industrial Marketing Management ,  88 , pp. 261–264. Teece, D.J., Pisano, G. and Shuen, A., 1997. Dynamic capabilities and strategic management.  Strategic management journal ,  18 (7), pp. 509–533.

Network visualization of the largest connected sets of cited references

Figure  3 displays the network visualization of the largest connected sets of cited references. The papers with the highest coupling strengths are those by Henseler, J., Ringle, C.M. and Sarstedt, M., 2015 and Podsakoff, P.M., MacKenzie, S.B., Lee, J.Y. and Podsakoff, N.P., 2003. These papers are central because of their specific contribution to methodological issues in business management and accounting research. Henseler et al. [ 55 ] provide guidelines on how to handle discriminant validity issues in variance-based structural equation modeling, while Podsakoff et al. [ 56 ] provide recommendations for how to select appropriate procedural and statistical remedies for different types of research settings.

Out of the 2354 cited sources, 17 journal each received more than 20 citations. The top 5 journals with the highest numbers of citations are: Tourism Management (98), International Journal of Hospitality Management (66), Journal of Business Research (50), Annual of Research (38), and Journal of Travel Research (32) (Fig.  4 ). These numbers make it evident how much of the discussion of the impact of Covid-19 on performance is supported by papers published in Tourism Management. The analysis of the network visualization provides interesting considerations. It suggests the existence of four different clusters, regarding the managerial implications related to tourism, finance, marketing and hospitality management. The specific clusters on tourism and hospitality management is inevitable due to the impact of Covid-19 on this industry.

Network visualization of the largest connected sets of cited sources by journal

Out of the 9338 cited authors, only 52 had been cited more than 10 times, while only 9 authors were cited more than 20 times. The authors are: Hall C.M (38), Boccia, F (31), Narayan, P.K (31), Salisu, A.A (28), Glossling, S (25), Zhang y (25), Liu Y (22) and Sarstedt, M (20) from University of Canterbury, Parthenope University of Naples, Deakin University, University of Ibadan, Lund University, Harbin Institute of Technology, University of Illinois, Otto-von-Guericke University, respectively. Figure  5 shows network visualization of the author co-citation analysis. It also highlights that these authors are most connected as well as most cited. The network visualization displays the existence of five different clusters. The red, green, and blue clusters are characterized by a high degree of bibliographic coupling with 15–16 items each, while two clusters show 2 items each. The red, green, blue, yellow and violet clusters with the highest degree of bibliographic coupling contain Hall et al. [ 57 ], Zhang et al. [ 58 ], and Narayan et al. [ 59 ], respectively. These studies provide insights on the impacts of Covid-19 on the services sector and consumption displacement (Hall et al. 57 ), global financial markets (Zhang et al. 58 ) and economic stimulus (Narayan et al. 59 ) (Fig.  5 ).

Network visualization of the largest connected sets of cited sources by authors

Network visualization of the bibliographic coupling of articles

Bibliographic coupling

We use bibliographic coupling of the 1349 articles to understand the theoretical foundations of publications on Covid-19 and performance. The minimum number of two articles was analyzed, resulting in the most extensive set of connected documents of 418 publications (30.98% of the dataset). Figure  6 shows network visualization of the bibliographic coupling analysis by articles, highlighting two clusters with the largest set of connected articles of 8 publications (0.59% of the dataset) implying the absence of a consolidated Covid-19 on performance field of study. The red cluster is characterized by a high degree of bibliographic coupling with 5 publications (i.e., [ 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 ]) (Tavares et al. 64 ), while green cluster shows 3 publications (i.e., Asian et al. 65 ; Kells 66 ; Tavares et al. 67 ).

Network visualization of the bibliographic coupling of journals

To analyze the bibliographic coupling of journals, we set a minimum of two articles per journal (see [ 28 ]) (Ferreira 68 ), resulting in 226 (50.78% of the dataset) out of 445 journals (see Fig. 7 ). Figure  7 shows network visualization of the bibliographic coupling analysis by journals, highlighting seven clusters with the largest set of connected journals of 74, implying the absence of a consolidated Covid-19 on performance field of study. Figure  7 reveals that the five journals with the highest bibliographic coupling index are Research in International Business, Financial Innovation, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Tourism Management, and Journal of Business Research. Figure  7 reveals the central role played by other journal in the various clusters including red (International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management and Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting and Financial Management), violet (International Journal of Entrepreneurship Behavior and research), yellow (Corporate Governance-Bingley), green (Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Research) and blue (International Journal of Emerging Markets). These show the field of the research on the impact of Covid 19 on financial and non-financial indicators is receiving attention from multi-disciplinary scholars of business management and accounting.

Cluster analysis of articles

Thematic/cluster analysis

Next, to provide a deeper synthesis and identify relevant patterns in performance-related COVID-19 research, the study conducts a thematic analysis as advocated by [ 69 ]. The study begins by conducting a cluster analysis of the reviewed studies and subsequently discusses the themes of these clusters in detail. The study conducts a cluster analysis of articles to identify relevant ideas, couplings or themes shaping research in COVID-19 influence on performance research. Using a co-citation cluster analysis with Biblioshiny in R, the study identifies three main clusters of research. These are illustrated in Fig.  8 .

Although identifying the main clusters of research in this domain is important, a deeper analysis of the identified themes or clusters will offer more critical insights to knowledge while guiding direction for future research. Thus, we discuss landmark publications within each thematic cluster and synthesize their key contributions to COVID-19 and performance literature. These publications are divided into three clusters contributing to different thematic areas within COVID-19 and performance literature, as identified in Fig.  3 . The landmark publications highlighted within the first cluster assess the COVID-19 pandemic situation from various foundational perspectives. Cluster two contains articles focused on the broad concepts of crisis management and strategic management. Cluster three includes landmark publications which capture the performance outcomes and strategies of COVID-19 on various businesses including sports, education, and global supply chain.

Cluster 1: foundational discussions and risk assessment

Cluster 1 is made up of several papers that assess the COVID-19 pandemic since its inception from various perspectives. These studies elaborate on the nature and implication of the pandemic on macro-economic management [ 70 ] hospitality and human rights to movement [ 71 ] as well as service ecosystems [ 44 , 72 ]. Studies in this cluster provide an elaborate assessment of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a crisis with catastrophic implications while highlighting the shortcomings of current crisis management strategies worldwide on a business and macro-economic level.

First, we consider the seminal paper [ 71 ] which attempts to assess the impact of COVID-19 on human rights to participate in hospitality and tourism, as a result of imposed travel restrictions. The study assesses the extent to which government responses to the pandemic influenced individual right to travel for leisure, business, education among others. These were evident in the closing of tourist sites, national borders, recalling of citizens to their primary residence as well as national restrictions on movement, thus confining people to their homes with little mobility to almost all service provision locations except those considered essential. In certain instances, these restrictions resulted in the inability of some tourists to return to their home countries as was experienced on several cruise ships in Europe, the Americas and Asia. These restrictions additionally, resulted in the loss of employment of numerous individuals. However, the study shows that although the pandemic and its resultant restrictions have imposed numerous challenges to tourism, individual, business and national economic growth, the closure of national borders has seen a reduction in human trafficking, child sex tourism as well as the reduction in environmental pollution and degradation through fossil fuel consumption among others. Lastly, speculating that the global hospitality and tourism industry will face a precarious future riddled with mass closures of small hospitality businesses, increasing operating and consumer costs, the study urges that scholars continue to seek answers to important questions overtime on reinstating hospitality and tourism in a post-COVID-19 world.

Following the broad picture by Baum and Hai [ 71 ], Kabadayi et al. [ 72 ] synthesized the macro-economic impact of COVID-19 while offering a framework for recognizing impacts of disruptions on service ecosystems. The study proposes the concept of service mega-disruptions (SMDs) to refer to the simultaneous multi-industry service disruptions caused by a pandemic. Defining the concept as an event caused by an unforeseen pandemic which affects multiple stakeholders and service ecosystems simultaneously and remains difficult to swiftly recover from, the study introduces a multi-level framework which may better arm service researchers and practitioners alike for future similar disruptions. The study uncovers five research themes relevant in the reducing the impact of service mega-disruptions. These include service ecosystem recovery, service agility and transformation, service technology and automation, remote service provision and finally service theory of social distancing. The study provides these holistic themes which encompass the micro- (individual and employee), meso- (service industries and public services) and macro-level (government actions and policies) perspectives of recovery measures.

Next, Finsterwalder and Kuppelwieser [ 44 ] explore the impact of crises such as COVID-19, on the service industry and its research community. By identifying and categorizing the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of service ecosystems, the study introduces a novel resource-challenges equilibrium (RCE) framework for pre-incident, incident, and post-incident phase strategies directed at building resource resilience. The study highlights the need for stronger resilience to create, facilitate and leverage on safe co-creation spheres with consumers, businesses, not-for-profit organizations as well as governmental institutions. The study highlights the need for co-creation spheres, while accentuating the need for relevant resource-challenge balance to ensure business profitability as well all overall ecosystem equilibrium.

Next, the study discusses the article Andrew et al. [ 70 ], which explores the constraints of the Australian government in responding to crises with relevant budgetary action. The study reviews literature on the COVID-19 crisis, as well as public budgeting responses to the health and economic effects of the crisis. The study identifies public budgeting as being neoliberal. This has been evident in the duo phased response strategy to COVID-19 within the Coronavirus Economic Response Package Omnibus Bill (2020) by initially stimulating businesses through the instant asset write-off scheme in the phase first, and individuals through unemployment benefits among others in the second phase. The study in its examinations seeks to offer insights and synthesis of knowledge relevant to other countries in managing and mitigating the fiscal consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. By discussing responses, outcomes and shortcomings the study provides an overview of neoliberalism influenced crisis responses for the objective assessment of multiple governmental responses available.

Lastly, Ivanov and Dolgui [ 73 ] assess the state of global supply chain in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis and provide a methodical taxonomy of supply chain disruptions caused by pandemics. The study highlights the ideas of ripple effects, structural dynamics and network resilience relevant in the COVID-19 supply chain disruption discourse. The study assesses the various ripple effects caused by the pandemic, such as the halting of production by Chrysler Automobiles NV and Hyundai as a result of the lack of parts supplied from China. The study focuses on disruption propagation throughout networks also known as ripple effects and resultant changes within supply chain structures (structural dynamics) from an operational research perspective. The study reviews relevant theories and methodologies to disruption research at network, process and control levels. By reviewing resilience in supply chain literature, the study advocates for the consideration of 5 stages in building resilience. These include anticipation, early detection, containment, control and mitigation and finally elimination. The study thus, provides relevant direction for future research while providing foundational discourse to drive this increasingly important domain of supply chain studies.

Baudier et al . [ 74 ] use survey method to extensively examine the adoption of telemedicine solutions by patients in several countries in Europe and Asia to help avoid the spread of the disease and alleviate the associated impacts of the pandemic, while ensuring a relatively uninterrupted healthcare service provision. The study argues that the development of ICTs, the individual’s adoption rate of devices (tablets, computer, smartphones), the technological advancements of telemedicine tools, and, recently, the worldwide pandemic (COVID-19) are the key drivers of the expansion of healthcare services. The empirical results based on some constructs of the Technology Acceptance Model, Availability, Personal traits, and Perceived Risks emphasize the huge influence of Performance Expectancy, the positive impact of Contamination Avoidance and the negative effect of Perceived Risk on the adoption of Teleconsultation Solutions. Brodie et al. [ 75 ] similarly review the healthcare system, while highlighting the need for a sustained value co-creation perspective for healthcare delivery with the help of integrative technologies. This, the study argued, helps to create stronger resilience through knowledge sharing, flexibility information and learning. These studies highlight the integral need and potential ecosystem resilience has in responding to and mitigating adversity and crisis during a pandemic.

Cluster 2: crisis and strategic management

The second cluster contains a number of articles which highlights the relevance of crisis and strategic management as well as communication, coordination and the media among firms. Kraus et al. [ 24 ] in a qualitative study of family firms in five western European countries, the study examined several strategic and crisis management measures used in adapting to the crisis. The study examined strategic crisis responses including retrenchment, persevering innovating and exit as discussed by Wenzel et al. [ 4 ]. Several firms included in the study begun changing or extending (innovating) their existing business models to take advantage of new consumer demands even though they may have lost a significant portion of their typical revenue streams. Others, however, continued to persevere by maintaining existing business models as a result of extensive investments in systems prior to the pandemic. The study highlighted various changes occurring among these firms. These include an increase solidarity and commitment among employees as well as a focus on increased digitalization. More prominently, although the study provided empirical evidence for and extended the strategic responses proffered by Wenzel et al. [ 4 ], results show that firms use a combination of various coping mechanisms for two main reasons: safeguarding liquidity and improving long-term survival and viability of the company. One strategic response is incapable of achieving both objectives, thus providing a basis for the combination of various strategic responses. The study however showed that, in the beginning stages of the pandemic no firm adopted exiting as a coping mechanism.

The tourism and hospitality industry has received the greatest brunt of the pandemic and as such continues to enjoy a burgeoning interest in performance, and management research. Although various studies have focused on the performance setbacks encountered by firms within this industry [ 76 ], Sigala [ 53 ] highlights the need to effective crisis management strategies. The study attempts to provide transformational remedies by unraveling all aspects of the industry including demand, supply, and other important stakeholders through three identified stages of responding, recovering and restarting. Giousmpasoglou et al. [ 77 ] extend this conversation by highlighting the relevance of managerial roles in effective crisis management. By ensuring that managers anticipate, equip and prepare their teams for crises by identifying, monitoring and mitigating potential vulnerabilities, firms within the hospitality industry will be better placed to manage crisis and reduce economic losses. By expanding this conversation to human resource management, Carnevale and Hatak [ 78 ] advocate for greater support to the workforce as they cope with altered work systems and environments and navigate changing work-family dynamics among others.

Again, we discuss studies in this cluster that highlight how countries and institutions deal with the impacts of the pandemic through communication and media. For example, Viola et al. [ 79 ] use survey data and the logit model to examine the effectiveness of institutional communication in mitigating COVID-19 impacts in Italy. The study also highlights the crucial roles of education, health literacy and the effect of asymmetric information on the effectiveness of institutional communication. The empirical results show that education plays a significant role in understanding communication pillars and building an individual consciousness about the pandemic and its associated impacts. Similarly, Machmud [ 80 ] by means of content analysis, assesses government officials’ communication and coordination intensity on twitter social media in dealing with the impacts of Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia. The study documents that government officials are intensively building coordination and communication to overcome the performance impact of Covid-19 in Indonesia. The study further shows that the Indonesian President constantly communicates with the national COVID-19 team to ensure that all government agencies at both central and regional levels are actively mobilized and united. The study confirms coordination and communication strategic crisis management vehicles that enable public officials to jointly implement COVID-19 control policies quickly and accurately throughout Indonesia.

We also highlight studies that contribute to the theoretical development on the use of media by individuals to deal with the impacts of the pandemic. By adopting the theory of planned behavior (TPB), Mohammed and Ferraris [ 81 ] analyze the role of social media in reducing the effects of the pandemic by specifically looking at the factors that stimulate individual’s participation in social media during crises. The empirical method from the survey data shows that attitude, perceived behavioral control, subjective norm, hedonic, utilitarian values and trust affect Twitter users’ active participation significantly during the pandemic. The understanding of these driving factors could help enhance user participation, and information dissemination in the era of social distancing and lock-downs. In the same vein, Kim [ 82 ] employs survey data to examine the effect of video games on the psychological of individuals in the era of COVID-19. The study finds that video individual’s negative and positive emotional states while playing a video game increase one’s level of psychological well-being, which also results in loyalty toward the video game. The empirical findings also indicate that individuals’ positive and negative emotional states while playing a video game were obtained from the perceived emotional value of the virtual product, implying that people evaluate the game not only based on time, money and effort, but also based on enjoyment, positive feelings and pleasure from consuming the digital product. The psychological benefits derived will improve the level of positive emotions and reduce the levels of negative emotions while partaking in the recreational activity. The study advocates that video game companies should design more exciting games that offer fun and entertainment to consumers to help improve the psychological well-being of consumers during this crisis.

The last strand of studies in this cluster emphasizes the role of media in overcoming the performance impact of COVID-19 across industries. These studies highlight the significance of the media in enhancing performance of retail supply chains, tourism, and brand engagement (e.g., [ 83 , 84 , 85 ]. For example, Im et al. [ 84 ] develop two joint models with fixed-effects estimations to examine the relationships among the pandemic, online information search, social distancing, and firm performance in the tourism and hospitality industries. The first model explored the relationship among COVID-19, information search, social distancing and stock performance of tourism and hospitality companies. The results reveal that news coverage on COVID-19 significantly impacts information search and social distancing, and social distancing, in turn, exerts an impact on stock performance. The second analysis focused on the effect of the pandemic on hotel reviews through information search and social distancing for tourist attractions at the regional level. The results indicate that when looking at the geographical effect, news coverage and the number of confirmed cases both lead to variations in social distancing and information search for tourist attractions and these behavioral tendencies are influential in hotel selection. Thus, media coverage and the number of confirmed cases in the news significantly influence social distancing actions of consumers which in turn influences the stock performance of tourism and hospitality industries.

Cluster 3: performance outcomes and strategies

The final cluster contains a number of articles which discuss recorded or projected effects of COVID-19 on various business setups while offering specific remedies, and perspectives for sustained resilience and stronger performance. In Ivanov [ 51 ] the impact of COVID-19 on global supply chains is examined using a simulation-based methodology to predict and examine disruption effects on supply chain performance. This groundbreaking study sets the basis for later empirical studies on supply chains resilience and performance in pandemic era. The study primarily analyzes the manner in which simulation-based methodology can be adopted to examine and predict the effect of pandemic on global supply chain performance. The study highlights the need for firms to be resilient against the disruptions, risks and uncertainties caused by the COVID-19 as such epidemics start small but scale fast and spread across vast geographical expanses creating uncertainty and resulting in numerous unknown and usually adverse outcomes. The results of the simulation based on primary and secondary data offers possibility of predicting both long-term and short-term supply chains performance impact of pandemic in different scenarios. The study approach helps to identify the successful and wrong elements of risk preparedness/mitigation and recovery policies when pandemics erupt. The study results indicate that the timing of the opening and closing of facilities at different strata may become a key factor that determines the impact of epidemic outbreak on supply chain performance rather than the speed of epidemic spread or the duration of an upstream disruption. That is, in the event of pandemic propagation, supply chain performance and reaction depend largely on the timing and the scale of disruption propagation and the sequence of facility opening and closing at various supply chains strata.

Ratten [ 60 ] reviews literature on crisis and its effects on entrepreneurship. By focusing more intently on cultural, lifestyle and social changes experienced in society, the study examines how entrepreneurship has changed in the wake of COVID-19. The study highlights the need for stakeholders to be proactive during a crisis, as it presents both an opportunity and a threat. The study advocates for entrepreneurs to build a social movement by considering broader community needs in addition to their business needs. Additionally, the study highlights the need for a focus on societal trends as well as social changes as a way to surmount possible business setbacks as a result of COVID-19, while taking full advantage of new opportunities. By focusing on inter-organizational networks and collaboration, the study posits that entrepreneurs will begin to leverage and create new, relevant and sustainable innovations. Through appropriate information and resource sharing policy can ensure that entrepreneurs are equipped with relevant tools to rejuvenate troubled industries and grow related businesses.

Ratten [ 62 ] examines the extent to which COVID-19 has influenced sports entrepreneurship, creating the need for considering new business models and encouraging creativity. The study examines the intersection between crisis management and sport entrepreneurship and provides concrete paths to resilience, growth and performance success in dealing with COVID-19. The study examines the concept of sports entrepreneurship, and highlights the critical role technological innovation has played in the success of businesses in this domain. Although the health crisis caused by COVID-19 has resulted in the postponement and cancelation of various sports games including Euro 2020, and the Olympics among others, the study suggests that firms may rise above these setbacks with investments in capital and infrastructure to encourage greater customer and fan engagement as a way to be more entrepreneurially oriented.

Ratten [ 61 ] considers the extent to which COVID-19 has influenced educational entrepreneurship in its almost complete shift to online learning. The global education system was profoundly affected in areas of service, research and teaching. However, the study proffers that educational innovation and the leveraging of multifaceted and rich digital learning environments provides sustainable means through which education communities may cope with the devastating effects of COVID-19. By reimagining online teaching and learning experiences, possibly including artificial intelligence-related tools, and adopting a complimentary approach of innovation and empathy, education communities will begin to identify new revenue streams while strengthening existing ones.

Next, we discuss seminal studies that focus on how entities are responding to the impacts of the pandemic for survival and sustainability (e.g., [ 63 , 86 , 87 , 88 ]). Santos et al. [ 63 ] undertake a comparative study across nine countries to unravel the factors that affect COVID-19 infections and deaths across countries to sustain economies. The study specifically looks at socio-economic indicators and COVOD-19 testing, comparison of infection and death rates across countries and the impact of climate on infection rates across countries. The study finds a significant impact of climate change on COVID-19 infection rate. The results also indicate that socio-economic indicators such as security index, innovation, and GDP per capita are important for a country's sustainability, being imperative to respond to anxious moments such as what nations are living from the COVID-19 pandemic. Through content analysis, Hossain [ 89 ] investigates how the sharing economy (SE) is coping with the changing environment triggered by the Covid-19. The study examines SE sector from four main perspectives: service providers, SE firms, regulatory bodies, and service receivers (customers). The study also explores SE along the following themes: income reduction, anxiety, job loss, hygiene and safety, cancelation, overcoming strategy, and outcomes. The study results indicate the devastating impact of the pandemic on the performance of SE firms and service providers such as Airbnb, accommodation hosts, Uber, and their Uber drivers. Therefore, firms and service providers have adopted strategies to survive in business. The study indicates that because of the pandemic, accommodation hosts are looking at long-term tenants and focusing on domestic instead of foreign guests. This is mirrored by Airbnb strategy of beginning to focus more on long-term stays. These overcoming strategies significantly reduce the impact of the pandemic on SE performance.

Directions for future research

Following the critical review of several relevant studies, this study seeks to categorize and highlight important gaps in literature as well as pertinent trends and foci which research may benefit from while offering practical knowledge and solutions for policy and practice. By structuring relevant gaps and research trends into unique categories, the study provides a means to decompose the broad research domain into vital and unique sub-domains, each warranting extensive and in-depth consideration. For instance, the cluster analysis reveals unexplored areas such as the use of digital technologies and big data to boost performance in the era of viral pandemic. For methodological gaps, the studies analyzed are limited in terms of collecting data at the early stages of the pandemic, hence, the need to consider longitudinal data to better understand the performance impact of pandemic. Another methodological gap is that most of the studies use case-study approach. For contextual gap, the cluster analysis shows lack of attention to supply chains reactions under different pandemic plans. The supply chain performance studies also omitted elements such as back-up suppliers, reserved capacities, regional sub-contracting and lead-time reservations, which could obscure managerial insight. The studies are also limited to upstream disruptions, which call for examination of pandemic disruption in downstream supply chains strata and the antecedent impact on forward and backward propagations of ripple effect.

To facilitate research in addressing the theoretical, contextual, and methodological gaps such as those highlighted, we implement a four-step approach to discern future research agenda by adopting content and bibliometric analyses (Bahoo, 89 ). First, we reviewed 50 top-cited articles that make a citation map. Second, we reviewed all the influential and trending articles during the last 6 months (January to July 2021). Third, we reviewed the remaining articles in our sample to circumvent top citation bias. Fourth, we transformed the possible research agenda into research questions and excluded those questions already investigated by researchers. This systematic process produced the 20 future research questions listed in Table 9 . Through an in-depth qualitative and quantitative review, we recommend a need to establish an appropriate pandemic response framework to help businesses, governments and policy makers to maintain resilience besides maintaining public health safety during such crises.

Conclusion and limitations

The study provided an integrative review to map out the COVID-19 performance discourse. The study adopts a systematic approach to identifying relevant literature used in this review. The study performs a performance analysis to identify seminal studies, impactful authors and high-ranking journals and affiliations. Additionally, the study provides a geographical science mapping of research attention. To guide future research direction, the study conducts a keyword analysis and cluster analysis to identify relevant research themes.

Although the study makes relevant contribution to knowledge, and highlights impactful scholars in the field, the list of impactful scholars provided in this article is far from exhaustive. Additionally, the study adopts a combination of the H, G and M indexes as these indices provide some idea of the impact of authors, it must be noted that such analyses are not without fault. As such, future studies may adopt a wider combination of robust indices in assessing performance factors of authors, articles and journals. The research on the impact of covid-19 on firm performance is now developing so the review in this study focused on all firms. Thus, future reviews may look at how the pandemic affects performance of specific firms and/or sectors since different firms may have different growth objectives, which could influence the impact of COVID-19 on these firms.

Availability of data and materials

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

Abbreviations

Coronavirus disease

United States of America

United Kingdom

Service mega-disruptions

Resource-challenges equilibrium

Information and communication technology

Sharing economy

Gross domestic product

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Appiah, K.O., Addai, B., Ekuban, W. et al. Management research and the impact of COVID-19 on performance: a bibliometric review and suggestions for future research. Futur Bus J 8 , 41 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s43093-022-00149-1

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Research lines on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business. A text mining analysis

Patricia carracedo, rosa puertas, luisa marti.

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Received 2020 Sep 24; Revised 2020 Nov 19; Accepted 2020 Nov 21; Issue date 2021 Aug.

Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

COVID-19 has brought about a marked slowdown in global economic development. Companies have been forced to adopt new managerial guidelines to adapt to the difficult conditions and to survive in this “new normal”. The recent and still scarce literature in this field seeks to provide suitable solutions to prevent irreparable disruption and help strengthen business, but does not apply advanced statistical methods to that end. The aim of this paper is to identify the current research lines developed around COVID-19 and their impact on the business environment, applying text mining methodology. The analysis, which uses statistical software R, focuses on systematic review of studies published in prestigious journals of business and marketing areas. In light of the results obtained, three different areas of intervention were identified. The common thread that runs through all of them is the need to introduce new forms of action to improve citizens' quality of life.

Keywords: COVID-19, Text mining, Cluster, Business, Marketing

1. Introduction

The rapid spread of COVID-19 meant that in little over three months the whole world was struggling to curb not only the disease but also the harsh economic consequences of the measures taken to do so. Governing authorities in almost all countries were forced to limit the free movement of the population both nationally and internationally, bringing the economy to a total standstill ( Nicola et al., 2020 ). This situation has underscored the fragility of the foundations of the 21st century economy, which is characterized by major technological advances and remarkable globalization, centred around globally interconnected production chains seeking maximum profitability.

The lockdown measures led to widespread economic collapse with significant repercussions on production and employment, and a severe impact all branches of activity due to the sharp decline in consumption. The most developed countries have seen their positive economic growth dip into the red with marked rises in unemployment and an increase in social inequalities. Comparisons are inevitable: some go so far as to equate the uncertainty generated by this pandemic with that caused by the Great Depression of 1929–33, and far exceeding that associated with the financial crisis of 2008–09.

Companies face an unprecedented challenge. Their survival depends on the adoption of management strategies that will allow them to overcome the sharp drop in orders and the pressure of costs stemming not only from rent, wages and taxes, but also those associated with the rise in the price of raw materials given the significant decline in suppliers ( Wen, Wei, & Wang, 2020 ). Moreover, there have been important changes in consumption habits, with people attempting to avoid physical contact in order to prevent possible contagion, leading to a pressing need for a global transformation to take on this new environment ( Sheth, 2020 ). Responsive systems are required to facilitate the rapid adaptation of supply chains to accommodate changing consumer demands ( Sjodin et al., 2020 , Gordon et al., 2020 ).

There has been a rapid emergence of research in this area in an attempt to find alternative solutions and facilitate the transformation of companies aligned with the new scenario, thereby ensuring their survival under the best conditions. Pantano, Pizzi, Scarpi, and Dennis (2020) summarize the challenges faced by retailers, in order to provide guidelines that can enable them to deal with the disruptions caused by the pandemic in both the short and medium term. In this regard, marketing strategies play a key role ( Kirk and Rifkin, 2020 , Wang et al., 2020 ). The current situation should be taken as an opportunity for companies to put in place corporate social responsibility, consumer ethics and a marketing philosophy. This would open up more attractive strategies for organizations and consumers ( He and Harris, 2020 , Woodside, 2020 ). Other key aspects such as human resource management implications ( Leung, Sharma, Adithipyangkul, & Hosie, 2020 ) or gender equality ( Carnevale & Hatak, 2020 ) in pandemic situations have also been analysed recently.

The European countries that have been hardest hit by death due to COVID-19, such as, Italy (12,430 deaths at the beginning of April 1 ), Spain (8,189), France (3,523) or the United Kingdom (2,453), among others have seen how their tourism sector has experienced a total shutdown of activity with a major direct impact on the rest of the economy. Studies such as that carried out by Sigala (2020) highlight the effects of the pandemic on the sector, in line with the guidelines set out by Nepal (2020) , which call for this situation to be viewed as a reset opportunity and a chance to provide new sustainable services. Many more examples can be cited of studies in the literature where researchers have focused on COVID-19 and its consequences for companies ( Krishnamurthy, 2020 , Mullins, 2020 , Eggers, 2020 , Sharma et al., 2020 , Bacq et al., 2020 ).

The urgent need to find workable solutions for businesses brings the discipline of data mining to the fore. The ongoing development of research on this issue requires a global analysis of textual data in order to detect patterns from which conclusions can be drawn, and thus create the best possible conditions for orienting decision-making. For this reason, the main objective of this paper is to identify the most current research fields focused on the impact of COVID-19 on business. To that end, the text summarization technique of text mining was first applied, in order to identify the most frequently mentioned terms in business research papers that study COVID-19. Next, a text clustering method using the statistical software R Core Team (2020) was applied to identify groups of most frequent terms or research lines. The subject of the analysis was articles published in business journals indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database. Specifically, 16 papers published in the Journal of Business Research and Business Horizons have been analysed.

Currently, many researchers are turning their full attention to COVID-19. Lopez, Vasu, and Gallemore (2020) use natural language processing, text mining and network analysis to explore the policies implemented to manage the COVID-19 analyzing information transmitted via Twitter. Cheng, Cao, and Liao (2020) demonstrate that information specialists can support health and medical community by applying text mining technique with latent Dirichlet allocation procedure to perform an overview of a mass of coronavirus literature. Similarly, Ulm and Nelson (2020) use text-mining and manual curation approach to comb and summarize the information from existing clinical trials and previous efforts to develop therapies against related betacoronaviruses. We emphasize that none of them performs a systematic literature review and employs a text clustering method using the statistical software R.

Therefore, it can highlight three novel contributions: (1) text-mining has been used in one of the areas most punished by the pandemic, the company, in order to be able to guide the guidelines that allow to solve the hard consequences caused by the confinement, (2) do a systematic review of business papers of high impact papers indexed in the first quartile of WoS so that the analysis of informative and sometimes sensationalist texts were avoided, (3) Free statistical software programming language R is proposed as a statistical tool.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the database or corpus built from the selected papers, and explains the text summarization technique used to identify the most frequent terms followed by the text clustering method used to determine the groups of the most frequently mentioned terms. Section 3 outlines the main results of the research. Finally, Section 4 presents the most important conclusions of the study.

2. Data and methods

To carry out the empirical research, a selection must be made of recent studies in the literature that meet the analysis criteria. The new measures taken and their direct impact on the business world have brought to light the need for updated management policies to address the difficult economic situation, the first signs of which have not taken long to emerge. The journals for the database have been selected according to the following criteria:

Journals indexed in the WoS database. WoS is maintained by the Thomson Reuters Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and contains more than 21,100 journals dating back to 1990, most of them written in English with a high impact factor ( Reuters, 2019 ).

Journals in the Business Management and Accounting area and Marketing category. These are two business fields that play a key role in ensuring companies’ survival. The development of management and marketing measures that facilitate companies' adaptation to the instability of the environment is essential in the process of overcoming the consequences of the pandemic.

Journals ranked in the top quartile (Q1).

Journals whose topic of interest is exclusively Business. Selecting these involved reading the titles, aims and scope.

These are generic criteria that have made it possible to narrow down the literature under study, so that the application of these filters yielded the following journals: Journal of Business Research, Journal of World Business, International Business Review and Business Horizons.

In order to select papers published in these journals whose topic of interest was coronavirus, a search was conducted for articles containing the words covid , coronavirus or pandemic in their abstract, title or keywords. Table 1 shows the business journals with the number of papers selected, ordered from highest to lowest impact factor (IF).

Business journals in the WoS database.

It can be seen that the Journal of Business Research has published the greater number of articles on COVID-related research (87.5% of all selected papers), followed by Business Horizons (12.5%). Journal of World Business and International Business Review have not published any research papers that deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, which highlights a focus of academic attention for business researchers.

Applying all the above search criteria has yielded a corpus consisting of 16 research papers published in two business journals which are indexed in the WoS database. Table 2 shows a summary of each individual article, providing the bibliographic citation, objective, keywords and most important conclusions.

Database: Selected Articles.

1 As this is an introductory article, it does not have any keywords.

Text analysis, also referred to as text mining, is an interdisciplinary field of activity that combines elements of data mining, linguistics, computational statistics, and computer science ( Meyer, Hornik, & Feinerer, 2008 ). The main difference between data mining and text mining is that data mining usually deals with structured data (stock information, geolocation data, etc.) while text mining works with unstructured or semi-structured data (articles, documents, etc.). In recent years, the latter technique has been a focus of interest because of the increasing amount of text data in social networks, web pages, research papers, and other information applications ( Aggarwal & Zhai, 2012 ). Its principal aim is to obtain high-quality information from processing large volumes of textual data. In this study, the summarization and clustering techniques of text mining were applied to a collection of previously processed papers, representing a collection of text documents in R. In this context, a document is a major element of text mining that constitutes a group of discrete textual data within a collection ( Acharya, 2018 ).

Given the technical requirements of the method used, the selected articles have to be filtered to avoid terms that could distort the results. Below, we show step-by-step the actions needed to prepare the text documents for analysis.

Step 1. Download the papers in pdf format and convert to txt format for processing.

Step 2. Manually analyse hyphenated words. If they are terms divided at the end of a line, remove the hyphen. If they are hyphenated words, leave the hyphen in.

Step 3. In order to focus the study on the main research topic of the papers analysed, manually remove the reference section and text citation of each one.

Step 4. Convert all terms to lowercase so there are no differences between the same terms.

Step 5. Remove punctuation marks.

Step 6. Delete digits .

Step 7. Remove stopwords which are commonly used in a language but that do not provide information in the text analysis. Some examples in English are that , then , the , a , an , and , among others.

Step 8. Stem the corpus to group related terms under their common root.

In line with the research objectives, after processing the database, a list of terms was obtained with the number of times each one appeared in the set of selected papers. The most frequent terms on the list were then analysed to identify the main research topics of interest in the corpus. Second, text clustering was applied to the most frequent terms detected. Clustering is a well-known statistical classification technique used in exploratory data analysis, which has been applied in a variety of scientific disciplines ( Täuscher and Laudien, 2018 , Han et al., 2019 , William and Chang, 2019 ). The main difference between hierarchical and non-hierarchical clustering methods is that the number of clusters is not predefined in the former. This study applied a hierarchical cluster analysis, where the number of groups was objectively determined. Specifically, the analysis was implemented using the statistical software R Core Team (2020) , applying Ward’s minimum variance method with Chi-squared distance. More details about the clustering process can be found in Husson, Lê, and Pagès (2017) .

The more terms two papers share, the more similar they are to each other ( Nguyen, 2013 ). The clustering process is based on maximizing the similarity between papers and, consequently, minimizing the Chi-squared distance between them. Chi-squared distance is a Euclidean distance but weighted by the inverse of the prevalence of each term in the whole corpus and controlling for the different lengths of the documents ( Bouchet-Valat & Bastin, 2018 ). Each resulting cluster has a certain within-cluster variance, such that the more similar the papers the lower the internal variance.

In order to choose the number of clusters objectively, four popular clustering validity indices were used in this study:

Average silhouette width . A measure that considers how closely related objects are within the cluster and how clusters are separated from each other. The average silhouette width provides clustering validity and is widely used to select the best number of clusters ( Rousseeuw, 1987 ). Its value ranges between 1 and −1, with a value of 1 indicating a very good cluster ( Yu-Wei, 2015 ). For more information about this index, see Kaufman and Rousseeuw (1990) .

Average between clusters . A measure of the average distance between cluster centres. It is influenced by the geometry of the cluster centres and increases with the number of clusters. The higher the value, the greater the separation between groups. A more formal and rigorous description of this statistic can be found in Halkidi, Batistakis, and Vazirgiannis (2001) .

Dunn index . High values of this metric indicate compact and well-separated clusters where the means of different groups are sufficiently far apart, taking into account the internal variance of cluster. For more detailed information, see Halkidi et al., 2002 , Dunn, 1974 .

Entropy Index . Measures the quantity of disorder (variation) is found in clusters. Low values of this index means better clustering. For more information, see Meilă (2007) .

3. Results and discussion

The functionalities of R have made it possible to create and examine the corpus formed by the 16 papers. To that end, we built a document term matrix of dimension nxt where n is the number of research papers (rows) and t the number of unique terms (columns). Each cell represents the absolute frequency of a term in a document.

Fig. 1 shows the output of the document term matrix. It can be seen that the corpus contains 4,743 different terms in the 16 business research papers. The non–/sparse entries are necessary to obtain the sparsity measure, which represents the frequency of the terms in the corpus. A high sparsity value means terms are not repeated often among the different documents ( Dinov, 2018 ) which implies that the documents that make up the corpus are not very similar. The longest terms, with 17 characters, are interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary.

Summary of document term matrix.

For the sake of brevity, Table 3 shows the 31 most frequent terms in the 16 papers. It should be noted that the name of each term indicates the root obtained in the stemming process (step 8). Terms that appear at least 135 times in the corpus were considered the most frequent; in the papers analysed, covid (571), crisi (407) and firm (400) were the most commonly mentioned terms.

Most frequent terms in the corpus.

Once the most frequent terms had been detected, a hierarchical cluster analysis was applied, in which the number of groups was determined objectively. Table 4 shows the result of validation statistics for the maximum number of clusters, 15. The best number of clusters will be the one with the highest value in the average silhouette width, average between and Dunn index measures, and the lowest in the entropy index. It can be seen that the best results are registered by 2 and 3 clusters. Although the results are very similar for both, we opted for 3 clusters to facilitate the interpretation of the groups.

Selection of the number of clusters.

Table 5 below shows the composition of each cluster into which similar papers have been grouped on the basis of the most frequent terms they share. The columns present the number of the cluster; the within-cluster variance; the Chi-squared distance to the cluster centroid, on the basis of which each paper is assigned to the closest cluster; document clustering; and finally, term clustering. Document clustering groups papers with the smallest Chi-squared distance to the average vocabulary of the cluster. Term clustering groups terms whose observed frequency in the document has a probability below 10% under a hypergeometric distribution, based on their overall frequencies in the corpus and on the number of occurrences of all terms in the considered cluster ( Bouchet-Valat & Bastin, 2018 ). The terms respons, provid , experi and custom are not shown because they are not significant (p-values ≥ 0.10) for clustering.

Summary of hierarchical cluster analysis of 16 research papers.

Clusters are comprised of similar papers with common terms. Fig. 2 represents the 3 obtained clusters with the terms that make up each one on a two-dimensional plane. Each term is represented by a point, with the distance to the closest one indicating the similarity between them ( Lancia, 2008 ). The distance between terms and the origin (0,0) measures the quality of the terms on the two-dimensional plane. The terms that lie farther from the origin will be more discriminatory and well represented on map cluster ( Kassambara, 2017 ). The clustering of these terms highlights the most pressing concern surrounding the pandemic, revealing patterns that could guide companies in implementing measures to mitigate the consequences of the pandemic.

Hierarchical clustering of most frequent terms in the corpus.

3.1. Cluster 1: Impact on the public health management model

The first cluster consists of a single research paper; that is, 6.25% of the papers analysed. It differs from the other documents in the sample in that it approaches COVID-19 as a scenario for studying gender equity in public systems, specifically in health organizations. The key terms that make up this cluster are health , public , develop , effect and impact . The terms health and public have a high frequency in this cluster relative to the total for the corpus. This indicates that they are the most discriminant terms of the cluster; as such, they lie far from the origin in Fig. 2 . Develop , impact and effect have a lower frequency, but are closer to one other, reflecting the high similarity between them. It should be noted that the term gender does not appear in this cluster because its frequency relative to the total for the corpus is very low.

Leung et al. (2020) show that gender equity and development have a positive impact on women's representation in the legislature and are consequently positively correlated with public health spending. Furthermore, this expenditure significantly influences the volume of diagnosed cases and the treatment of critical cases, with the urban population having a positive influence on the number of tests and COVID-related deaths. All of this underscores the importance of continuing the struggle for gender equality and of women holding decision-making positions. In extreme situations such as those experienced during the pandemic, there is a need to combine the characteristic features of both genders, toning down the riskier positions more typical of the male gender ( Ertac & Gurdal, 2012 ).

This pandemic has meant the quality of public health systems being called into question in all affected countries. The emerging new scenario is encouraging a shift from public policymakers towards fostering women's access to leadership positions, which has been shown to be a positive factor in ensuring the quality of public services provided ( WHO, 2017 , Mayer and Oosthuizen, 2020 ). Efforts must be made to ensure the excellence of the management of health systems, with clear policies and priorities set to benefit the population. In addition, it is necessary to ensure correspondence between the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and national development, where access to public health should be a universal right.

3.2. Cluster 2: Changes in society's consumption habits

This cluster includes 18.7% of the articles analysed, and the key theme centres around consumption , technology , pandemic , time , social , new , change and research . The terms consumption and technology have a high frequency in the cluster relative to the total for the corpus, and it is these terms are the most discriminating in the cluster. There is a strong connection between the terms research , change , pandemic , social , new and time which highlights the usefulness of focusing studies on the social changes arising from the new situation that emerged during the pandemic ( Fig. 2 ).

The research carried out and grouped in this cluster has placed great importance on the rapid spread of the disease and the new societal habits established in response. In just under five months this infectious disease has affected all the countries of the world, forcing all the agents in the economy to adapt. Nevertheless, countries' reactions to the uncontrolled spread of the virus have not been homogeneous. The vast majority have opted for public lockdowns, imposing strong restrictions on the national and international mobility of people and products. Social distancing rules are forcing companies to adapt their distribution channels in order to reach consumers, who have had to adapt very quickly to this new scenario.

All this has led to a reorientation of research, with analyses focused on trying to explain the unusual needs emerging in the markets. The “new normal” requires changes that are revolutionizing previous customs and life as we knew it before the pandemic ( Kirk & Rifkin, 2020 ). The use of emerging technologies is now an imperative; society is incorporating them into daily life at a dizzying pace, prompting new patterns of behaviour, which in turn are having a major impact on consumption habits. This calls for a realignment of business strategies to adapt to this new globalized market. It is thus essential to establish good management practices to bring supply in line with consumer demand ( Pantano et al., 2020 ).

3.3. Cluster 3: Economic effects of covid-19 on business organizations

Of all the papers that make up the corpus, 75.05% analyse the economic effects of coronavirus from different perspectives, but the common thread running through them is the economic and social implications for production networks as a result of the measures taken to curb the contagion. In this respect, the most commonly used terms were firm , tourism , business , crisis , strategies , financial , organization , market , innovation , supply , management , global , covid and work , with firm, tourism and, financial being the most significant. The proximity of all these terms indicates the strong correlation between them ( Fig. 2 ).

Globalization and the interconnectedness of countries has been the main trigger for the worldwide spread of COVID-19. The closure of national borders and the restricted mobility of the population even within their own territory has resulted in economic disruption comparable only to the Great Recession. The resulting global crisis is expected to be unprecedented; the paralysis of the entire productive sector has led to a supply and demand shock, with the consequent collapse of international financial markets. All economic sectors have been affected, with the impact being especially intense in countries that are heavily dependent on tourism.

Faced with this new situation, there are only two real alternatives: to try to get back to the normality we knew before the pandemic, in order to avoid the social impact of high levels of unemployment; or to consider this new scenario as a turning point, marking the start of new ways of working. International bodies and authorities responsible for setting national policy should focus their efforts on helping companies to introduce technological and social innovation to enable them to recover and remain competitive. Without exception, the pandemic has rendered countries' productive systems obsolete. New, more interconnected forms of management are needed, but with less dependence on external agents, which is where virtual markets are irreversibly gaining ground.

4. Conclusions

Affecting all countries around the world, COVID-19 has caused the most severe pandemic of recent times, the economic consequences of which have not taken long to emerge. Business survival will depend on the ability to adapt to the new market, which has been shaped by the restrictions on movement imposed by almost all nations to curb the spread of the disease. Small and medium-sized businesses have been the hardest hit by the pandemic, so they will have to reinvent themselves quickly if they want to survive in this unforeseen scenario. In this new reality, the future of business is uncertain, so making the right decisions is crucial to strengthening companies.

There has been a rush of new research papers on the disease and its economic and social effects, so it is necessary to identify some kind of similarities among them in order to be able to draw conclusions that can be used to orient guidelines for business. This paper proposes the use of text mining methodology to detect lines of research centred around the coronavirus, and the results can be used to mark out policies to be implemented. We analysed a set of papers representative of the area of business and marketing, published in journals indexed in the top quartile of the prestigious database, WoS.

In light of the results obtained, three different areas of intervention can be identified. The common thread that runs through all of them is the need to introduce new forms of action to improve citizens' quality of life. The “nascent” market resulting from the lockdown situation requires profound changes in the management systems of the entire productive network, with public health playing a key role. The standard that existed until now has become obsolete. There is thus a need to adapt to the novel features of consumer habits, where virtual business systems have gained ground they are unlikely to cede. Remote working has become universal due to the pandemic, with many companies adopting it on a long-term or even permanent basis. The survival of businesses will depend on their ability to treat this situation as a turning point; detailed market analysis and the introduction of innovation at all levels will strengthen the foundations of productive activity. Authorities must facilitate and assist in this arduous task—one for which not everyone is prepared—without neglecting issues such as gender equality and human rights. This is an opportunity for renewal that must be seized in order to promote the sustainability of organizations, regardless of their profit-making purpose. As is well known, the pandemic has caused the largest drop in CO2 emissions in history. Therefore, the time is right to introduce management models that address climate change, which is becoming an international urgency at all levels.

The whole world is experiencing an unprecedented situation that requires additional analysis and efforts in all economic sectors. The researches of the last few months is aimed at providing solutions to problems that have not ceased to arise, and which will continue until the pandemic is brought under control so as to avoid affecting the economy. It is essential to implement a joint effort between researchers and those responsible for economic and business guidelines with the aim of combining contributions that will allow them to move into the professional field to optimise the solutions found.

The main limitation of this research is the volume of the corpus. Specifically, 16 works published at the time of the empirical analysis have been analyzed, which met the criteria defined in the Section 2 . Therefore, the natural extension of this paper is to expand the database in order to be able to establish more specific measures, tailored to each scenario and country. Once the new database has been processed using the programming language provided in R, the methodology presented in this article could easily be replicated.

Biographies

Patricia Carracedo is graduated in Actuarial and Financial Sciences (2007) and Business Studies (2004) at the Universitat de València and has a Master's Degree in data analysis engineering (2013) at the Universitat Politècnica of València (UPV). PhD in Statistics and Operational Research at UPV. She is Director of two degrees in Business Administration and Management and Economics at the Valencian International University and since 2014, lecturer of Statistics and Econometrics in both degrees. She was awarded at the congress “XXV ASEPUMA Conference - XIII International Meeting 2017” and obtained a research project of the Fundación Mapfre as main researcher. Her research has been developed using the statistical package R-studio, getting to have a good command of it.

Rosa Puertas. PhD in Economics and Business. Professor at the Universitat Politècnica de València, Department of Economics and Social Sciences. She has carried out research related to various fields: International Trade, Efficiency, Input-Output and Logistics. Currently, she has focused on issues related to innovation, sustainability and construction of synthetic indexes, which are leading to publications in internationally prestigious journals. Member of Group of International Economics and Development.

Luisa Marti is PhD in Economics and Business Studies from the University of Valencia (2001). For the last 20 years I have been a professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, where I have taught subjects related to the field of applied economics. Since 2019 I have been a university lecturer. My main areas of research are trade, economic impact analysis, quantitative data analysis in companies, and efficiency analysis. Having a six-year research and numerous publications in prestigious journals of impact Journal Citation Report.

Data published by European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

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