EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

To reopen or not to reopen? How entrepreneurial alertness influences small business reopening after the COVID-19 lockdown

Jintong Tang, Stephen X. Zhang and Song Lin

Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 2021, vol. 16, issue C

Abstract: COVID-19 lockdowns have been effective in curbing the spread of the virus and saving lives. Government-imposed restrictions and lockdowns have required that businesses close temporarily. While many businesses survived in lockdown, others, particularly small businesses, did not, or were not able to reopen when the lockdowns were relaxed. We sought to study the phenomenon of small businesses still being squeezed and explore the internal drivers for their reopening after the lockdowns. We collected two-wave data from 303 small businesses in China during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Our findings indicated that entrepreneurs with higher level of alertness were less likely to reopen their businesses after the lockdowns were lifted. In addition, the negative relationship between alertness and reopening was attenuated for older firms. Our findings underscore the role of entrepreneurs’ cognitive characteristic in determining the reopening of businesses during the pandemic.

Keywords: COVID-19; Entrepreneurial alertness; Lockdown; Reopen (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352673421000536
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jobuve:v:16:y:2021:i:c:s2352673421000536

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbvi.2021.e00275

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Venturing Insights is currently edited by Dimo Dimov

More articles in Journal of Business Venturing Insights from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:jobuve:v:16:y:2021:i:c:s2352673421000536