Hotels' occupancy rates and convergence: Empirical evidence from the first pandemic wave

The scope of this study is to unravel possible convergence clubs regarding the occupancy rates of the hotel industry in the US states in the aftermath of the first COVID-19 pandemic wave. For this reason, the underlying paper resorts to the application of the generic convergence algorithm developed in Phillips and Sul (2007) for a sample of 50 US states over the daily period ranging from 01.12.2019 to 26.07.2020. The empirical analysis supports the identification of two primary convergence clubs consisting of an equally distributed number of regions (states). However, the two clubs can be merged into one after the implementation of the Phillips and Sul (2009) methodology, revealing that the first pandemic wave has eliminated any distinct (economic) characteristic between the different US states.JEL codes: L10, L80, R10 .