From Heroes to Scoundrels: Exploring the effects of online campaigns celebrating frontline workers on COVID-19 outcomes.

This paper examines the effects of online campaigns celebrating frontline workers on COVID-19 outcomes regarding new cases, deaths, and vaccinations, using the United Kingdom as a case study. We implement text and sentiment analysis on Twitter data and feed the result into random regression forests and cointegration analysis. Our combined machine learning and econometric approach shows very weak effects of both the volume and the sentiment of Twitter discussions on new cases, deaths, and vaccinations. On the other hand, established relationships (such as between stringency measures and cases/deaths and between vaccinations and deaths) are confirmed. On the contrary, we find adverse lagged effects from negative sentiment to vaccinations and from new cases to negative sentiment posts. As we assess the knowledge acquired from the COVID-19 crisis, our findings can be used by policy makers, particularly in public health, and prepare for the next pandemic.

The good, the bad and the ugly on COVID-19 tourism recovery.

This paper is to produce different scenarios in forecasts for international tourism demand, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. By implementing two distinct methodologies (the Long Short Term Memory neural network and the Generalized Additive Model), based on recent crises, we are able to calculate the expected drop in the international tourist arrivals for the next 12 months. We use a rolling-window testing strategy to calculate accuracy metrics and show that even though all models have comparable accuracy, the forecasts produced vary significantly according to the training data set, a finding that should be alarming to researchers. Our results indicate that the drop in tourist arrivals can range between 30.8% and 76.3% and will persist at least until June 2021.

The Mediating Roles of Psychological Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness on Work-Life Balance and Well-Being.

The main objective of this current research is to investigate the impact of "work balance" on "psychological well-being" using employees within the hospitality industry in United Arab Emirates as statistical units. To meet the objective of this research, we developed a structural equation model to examine how psychological autonomy, psychological competence, and psychological relatedness affect psychological well-being and work-life balance, as well as the effect of work-life balance on psychological well-being. We also examine the mediating effect of work-life balance in these relationships. The results of this study show that psychological autonomy affect positively both psychological well-being and work-life balance, whereas psychological competence only affect psychological well-being positive. Moreover, psychological relatedness affects negatively both psychological well-being and work-life balance while work-life balance affects positively psychological well-being.