The impact of COVID-19 on hotel performance: Evidence from a Difference-in-Differences approach

This note aims to investigate the impact of the national lockdown adopted by the Italian government on hotel performance. For this purpose, a difference-in-differences (DID) methodology is employed to compare the performance of the hotel industry in Italy and Turkey during the post-treatment period. The empirical findings based on a daily unbalanced panel data set indicate that the national lockdown adopted by the Italian government to stem the COVID-19 spread mitigated the level of hotel performance by 68% on average. Our empirical findings survive robustness checks to account for alternative proxies of hotel performance and the inclusion of time fixed effects on the model.