To test our hypotheses, we use the Chinese setting from 10 January to 31 March 2020. The financial and executive data is collected from the CSMAR database; the COVID-19 data is collected from the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China; the stock price is collected from the RESSET database; and the province-level data is collected from the National Bureau of Statistics. Panel A in Table 1 shows the sample selection process. After dropping the sample with missing data, the final sample contains 178,805 firm-day observations.