Heterogeneity in financial performance caused by the COVID-19 pandemic: Food producers in Czechia

Abstract

This paper focuses on the heterogeneous impacts of COVID-19 on financial performance among middle-sized food product manufacturers in Czechia in dependence on ownership concentration. In particular, this work aims to esti- mate differences in these pandemic impacts among Czech companies with a major owner. The DuPont framework has partially revealed significant relations of return on assets depending on the return on sales, both reflecting earn- ings before interest and taxes. Neither is the only novelty in the use of heterogeneous difference-in-differences with cohorts of companies developed by Wooldridge (2021); however, 2018-2022 annual financial data from the Bureau van Dijk Orbis database for 480 companies have also been merged with epidemiological data, particularly the av- erage morbidity per 10,000 inhabitants within NUTS-3 regions based on the open source database from the Nature journal (Naqvi, 2021). The tests revealed a significant difference between middle-sized companies with high own- ership concentration and the rest of the market.