Special Issue: Business Economics in a Pandemic World

Aim of the Special Issue:

Similarly to the financial crises of 2008/09, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020/21 reveals once again the fragility of the global economic system. But in contrast to previous general economic crises, the impact on different industries is remarkably different as well. For example, the real estate sector certainly will undergo substantial changes. First surveys show that many consumers may permanently change their shopping behavior and stick to shopping online. This will shift the demand for space of retail shops and shopping centers to storage houses and decentralized distribution centers and consequently their rents will rise. The hotel, leisure, and catering industry − hopefully − may only undergo a short economic drop so that there are lower long-term consequences with respect to real estate issues to be expected in these fields, unless the impact of a reduction in business trips does not become too grave. Other effects and implications are unclear and further developments are not yet foreseeable. For example, if the trend to work (partly) at home or in decentralized co-working buildings will continue, the necessity for office spaces in the city centers will decrease. This would change the demand for traditional office concepts and commuting patterns and consequently the city and traffic planning.

Capital markets were hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic in February and March 2020 with losses in stock prices in Europe and the US amounting to more than 30 %. However, by the end of 2020, stock markets worldwide had recovered to a large extent though many European countries were facing the second or third wave of massive COVID-19 infections with hard lockdowns being in effect similarly to those during the stock market crash at the beginning of that year. These circumstances alone raise ques-tions, as to whether such a highly volatile stock market development can be justified as rational, or to put it another way: What were the drivers of these stock market reactions? What about the different effects across industries? The COVID-19 pandemic thus may offer the opportunity for several analyses of investor behavior in situations of crisis. At the same time, many governments around the world launched various kinds of support packages for firms. Their impact and relevance during this time of crisis also seems worth of investigation. The same holds true for special measures like the one in Germany of suspension of the obligation for firms to file for bankruptcy under certain conditions. This leads to the issue of the financial consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on the firm level. In a similar vein, with a new push to online business, fintechs may be on the rise in the wake of this disease affecting the future of bank businesses.

The COVID-19 crisis also has consequences for financial reporting strategies. Prior research has shown that transparent disclosures and communication with stakeholders help companies successfully navigate through a crisis, while opaque companies frequently experience adverse market reactions. Little evidence exists on how firms adjusted their external reporting during the COVID-19 crisis and how disclosure strat-egies evolved during the crisis. Given the plausibly exogenous nature of the shock, the setting of the COVID-19 crisis also offers interesting opportunities to examine economic consequences (e.g., on debt and equity markets) of these different strategies.

In the area of taxation, the COVID-19 pandemic has created demand for short-term and long-term gov-ernmental reactions. In the short run, some countries (e.g. Croatia, Germany, UK) temporarily reduced VAT rates. One question is whether firms passed on the tax cut to consumers, especially in an environ-ment in which firms were hit heterogeneously by the pandemic. Another question is whether firms and consumers cooperatively shift contracts and fulfillment into the reduced tax rate period. In the long run, a central research topic will be the future of tax loss carryforward rules. On the one hand, generous tax loss carryforwards (and potentially carrybacks) will be crucial for hard-hit industries to regain traction. On the other hand, advantageous tax loss carryforward rules will threaten the recovery of public budgets. Another interesting observation is that calls for general tax rate reductions are substantiated with the pandemic − despite the fact that a general tax cut would mainly help those firms and industries that were less hard hit by (or even benefitted from) the pandemic. Moreover, COVID-19 may affect tax compliance in several ways: How has the pandemic changed opportunities for tax evasion (e.g. to claim commuting expenses despite working from home)? Has it changed tax morale?

The spread of the Corona virus and the corresponding bans and restrictions force firms to deal with flex-ible working arrangements and modern communication technologies. Specifically, firms often convert to mobile work solutions or working-from-home arrangements to protect their employees’ health and to ensure productivity during the crisis, thereby posing new challenges for management accounting. These challenges comprise, for example, the design of performance evaluation and compensation systems un-der working-from-home conditions, but also the interactions between management controls and other accounting features such as auditing. The Corona pandemic also has specific consequences for the design of management controls in large manufacturing firms, small family-owned firms, and organizations in the health-care sector.

Information Systems research has for many decades strived to understand, develop and manage enter-prise systems, business processes and, more generally, technologies that shift traditional boundaries of firms. The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified, accelerated and shed new light on requirements, limits and opportunities in this context. One opportunity of the crisis thus lies in seeing old trends from digitalization to flexible work arrangements and virtual work in a whole new light. There is a need for theoretical, em-pirical, and design contributions that take advantage of the experience of the COVID-19 crisis and ask: What established insights and theories can or need to be reconsidered in the light of what we have ex-perienced so far under COVID-19? How to build and operate systems and business processes that are resilient and flexible enough to better respond to far-reaching and sometimes unexpected consequences of exogenous shocks such as the next pandemic? What insights does the crisis offer for shaping systems and processes to support the future of work?

The COVID-19 pandemic affects almost any field of business administration, not only real estate eco-nomics, finance and financial reporting, tax issues, management accounting and information systems as described above. Other fields like marketing, production planning and logistics, human resource man-agement, or the organization of elementary, secondary, and higher education face challenges as well. Therefore, the above enumeration may only be seen as an exemplary illustration of possible issues. We cordially invite submissions to all potential impacts of the current COVID-19 pandemic as well as the threat of future, currently unknown new sources of global pandemics on all fields of business economics.

Theoretical and empirical papers with a clear quantitative focus are particularly welcome. Empirical papers should be based on theoretically derived hypotheses and state-of-the-art hypotheses testing. Papers must be written in English and must not contain any reference to the identity of the authors.

Please submit an extended abstract of about 1,000 words to wolfgang.breuer@bfw.rwth-aachen.de by 04/30/2021. The authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit a full paper by 10/31/2021. They must not have not been published previously. Submitted papers will be double-blind peer-reviewed and may be published in a special issue of the Journal of Business Economics at the beginning of 2023. Author guidelines are available here.