The cascading effects of the supply chain during COVID-19

In the first phase of the COVID19 pandemic, governments, healthcare providers and citizens were grappling for personal protective equipment (PPE). While the demand for PPE surged, the supply of PPE was by far not matching the demand. The shortages of PPE and the pressure from health care providers and the population alike lead to opportunistic behaviour and panic buying. This paper aims to investigate the cascading effects of the supply chain from the first quarter of 2019 to the third quarter of 2021.
The methodology is built on a difference-in-differences approach, allowing us to examine whether and to what extent changes in economic activities are due to disruptions of a) supplies, b) demand, or c) intervention policies. In this paper, we apply this approach to compare economic activities over time between suppliers and customers affected by COVID-19-induced supply chain disruptions (treatment group) and suppliers or customers that are not impacted by the disruption (control group).
The data for this study was collected from the publicly traded companies headquartered in the European Union from six database (Johns Hopkins University Centre for Systems Science and Engineering, OxCGRT, CompuStat Global and CompuStat North America, World Bank's World Development Indicators). Additional data on supply chain relationships are obtained from the FactSet Revere database. The sample period includes 11 quarters, four pre-pandemic quarters in 2019 and 7 post-pandemic quarters from the first quarter of 2020 to the third quarter of 2021.
Findings: Overall, the findings from the difference-in-differences analysis confirmed that the cascading effects of COVID-19 supply chain disruptions is relatively small.