A Language-independent Network to Analyze the Impact of COVID-19 on the World via Sentiment Analysis

Towards the end of 2019, Wuhan experienced an outbreak of novel coronavirus, which soon spread worldwide, resulting in a deadly pandemic that infected millions of people around the globe. The public health agencies followed many strategies to counter the fatal virus. However, the virus severely affected the lives of the people. In this paper, we study the sentiments of people from the top five worst affected countries by the virus, namely the USA, Brazil, India, Russia, and South Africa. We propose a deep language-independent Multilevel Attention-based Conv-BiGRU network (MACBiG-Net) , which includes embedding layer, word-level encoded attention, and sentence-level encoded attention mechanisms to extract the positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. The network captures the subtle cues in a document by focusing on the local characteristics of text along with the past and future context information for the sentiment classification. We further develop a COVID-19 Sentiment Dataset by crawling the tweets from Twitter and applying topic modeling to extract the hidden thematic structure of the document. The classification results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves an accuracy of 85%, which is higher than other well-known algorithms for sentiment classification. The findings show that the topics which evoked positive sentiments were related to frontline workers, entertainment, motivation, and spending quality time with family. The negative sentiments were related to socio-economic factors like racial injustice, unemployment rates, fake news, and deaths. Finally, this study provides feedback to the government and health professionals to handle future outbreaks and highlight future research directions for scientists and researchers.

Does sustainability matter for Fintech firms? Evidence from United States firms

Purpose This study aims to look at how financial technology (FinTech) companies adhere to sustainable standards in contrast to their counterparts. Following the validation of its new sustainability index, this study looks into the impact of sustainability on the stock performance of FinTech companies. Design/methodology/approach To efficiently test the hypotheses, sample has been collected from the Bloomberg of all FinTech and non-FinTech companies from the USA. The final sample comprises 1,712 company-year observations over the investigation period 2010–2019. The methodology entails ordinary least squares regressions and generalized panel methods of moments (GMM). Findings The results suggest that the developed sustainability index is a valid proxy for sustainability measures and directly relates to stock performance. Besides, the evidence indicates that non-FinTech companies display superior sustainability and stock performance compared to FinTech companies. The present results corroborate with stakeholder theory, which implies that quality sustainability performance will alleviate the agency issue and safeguard the shareholders’ interest. Research limitations/implications Despite the fact that it presents the limitation of not considering other dimensions of financial performance, this research is important as it highlights the sustainability practices by the FinTech and non-FinTech companies, offering insights to researchers, policymakers, regulators, financial reports users, investors, environmental union, employees, clients and society. Originality/value This paper is novel because it is unique in evaluating the sustainability practices in FinTech and non-FinTech firms.

Can lifestyle factors be the key in deciding the COVID-19 outcome?

The COVID-19 recovery rate of 97.3% and the death per million of 345 in India are better than the corresponding values in the USA and most of Europe despite better health infrastructure in these countries. The mean COVID fatality rate of Europe and a few countries in America is seven times that of India. This warrants a systematic study of the factors behind this conspicuous disparity. It is time to study lifestyle and other factors that may be related to recovery with minimal medical intervention or serious complications, leading to belated recovery and sometimes mortality. Obesity and excessive consumption of soft drinks, red meat and processed food may have a role to play in the European and American countries. On the other hand, the use of turmeric, black pepper, ginger in daily cooking, consumption of Indian gooseberry, Tulasi, different decoctions (Kashaya) and practice of various immune-boosting breathing exercises including yoga might have had a role in India. A detailed study involving a sizable number of cases of recovery and death in India, USA and some European countries will throw light on these factors behind the significant differences. The results shall provide crucial learning to the world for managing future waves and pandemics.