Análise do impacto da covid-19 na continuidade operacional das empresas do setor aéreo internacional

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has had devastating effects on all sectors of the global economy, with emphasis on the air transportation market, with a drastic reduction in flights and mass cancellations, due to the lockdown policies restricting the movement of citizens between countries and states from across the globe. The hypothesis of this research is that the COVID-19 pandemic has aggravated the operation, economic, and financial situation of airline companies in the international market, therefore increasing the incidence of going concern citations in their audit reports. To test this hypothesis, we selected a sample of air transportation companies with primary or secondary listing on US stock exchanges available in the Refinitiv Eikon database (23 companies). For the analysis, we used mixed research methods, including content analysis, descriptive analysis, and inferential analysis. We analyzed the companies' audit reports before (2018 and 2019) and during the pandemic (2020 and 2021) in order to investigate whether the incidence of going concern citations has increased with the COVID-19 crisis. The results of the content analysis indicate a change of focus of the reports after the pandemic, reflecting more specific concerns with the air transportation sector, while the reports of the companies with going concern discuss revenue and companies' internal controls, with recurring themes in reports with going concern and during the pandemic overlapping. Finally, the logit regression results point out that the COVID-19 pandemic significantly increased the probability that the audit reports of companies in the international airline sector present a going concern citation, however, companies with larger market expectations and size suffered lower impacts.