Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of profitability for a sample of Greek non-financial firms listed in the Athens Stock Exchange for the period 1995-2003. This is a very important period for the Greek economy on the way to European monetary union (EMU). Design/methodology/approach -The methodologies employed include panel data estimation techniques. This research attempts to exploit the determinants of firm profitability of non-financial Greek firms listed in Athens Exchange utilizing firm-specific publicly available accounting variables using panel data estimation techniques rather than cross-sectional analysis. Findings -According to the findings, firm profitability was positively affected by size, sales growth and investment and negatively by leverage and current assets. Additionally, we found that the EMU participation and the adoption of the euro were negatively related to firm profitability. Practical implications -Taking into account the fact that the Greek economy has undergone significant transformation during the period under examination on its way to join EMU and to adopt the euro currency, a model has been formulated where both firm-specific and economy wide factors determine firm profitability. Originality/value -This paper focuses on a less developed and efficient stock market. In contrast to previous studies that did not take into account the convergence of the Greek economy to EMU averages and the subsequent adoption of the euro, this paper analyses data for the pre-EMU and the post-EMU periods in an attempt to quantify a potential macroeconomic effect on firm-specific profitability.

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The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of terrorism on tourism demand in Greece using monthly data from 1977 to 2012. We investigate whether this relationship is bidirectional and whether it exhibits long run persistence. Thus, we employ a large dataset of terrorist incidents and perform cointegration and long-run causality tests, correcting our data for cyclical seasonality and applying PCA to construct a terrorism proxy according to the severity of the incident. Our findings concur that terrorism has a significant negative impact on tourist arrivals to Greece and that causality is noted from terrorism to tourism only. The results suggest that authorities should establish firm measures against terrorism and that further actions should be taken to promote tourism, safety and security, as a response to terrorist incidents. Our study is, to the best our knowledge, the first to approach terrorism using a three-factor proxy with qualitative features.

This paper investigates the expected results of the current COVID-19 outbreak to arrivals of Chinese tourists to the USA and Australia. The growing market share of Chinese tourism and the fact that the county was the first to experience the pandemic make China a suitable proxy for predictions on global tourism. We employ data from the 2003 SARS outbreak to train a deep learning artificial neural network named Long Short Term Memory (LSTM). The neural network is calibrated for the particulars of the current pandemic. Our findings, which are cross-validated using backtesting, suggest that recovery of arrivals to pre-crisis levels can take from 6 to 12 months and this can have significant adverse effects not only on the tourism industry but also on other sectors that interact with it.