Assessing the impact of Covid-19 on the Italian comic book industry: a panel vector autoregressive analysis of financial ratios

Abstract The comic book market is a niche that has significantly benefited from the more time spent at home by people during the outbreak of Covid-19. This is particularly true in Italy, where sales of comics have met an unprecedented expansion during the two decades before the pandemic. It is therefore important for policy makers to understand the impact of Covid-19 on the economic performance of the Italian comic book industry. To this purpose, yearly data on 10 financial ratios are collected for a panel of 13 Italian comic publishers in the period 2011-2022, and an interrupted time series (ITS) design based on panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) models is applied. In order to maximize the statistical power of the design given the small number of both time points ( $$T=9$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>T</mml:mi> <mml:mo>=</mml:mo> <mml:mn>9</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> ) and cross-sectional units ( $$n=13$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>n</mml:mi> <mml:mo>=</mml:mo> <mml:mn>13</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> ), we correct least squares estimates based on the half panel jackknife and perform model reduction through system sequential elimination. The results highlight a worsened performance for small publishers used to base most of their business on comic fairs (Round Robin, Magic Press Edizioni), while companies able to renew their business by launching new products and re-editions (the historic Astorina and Sergio Bonelli Editore, but also the young Tunué) experienced a significant growth compared to the pre-pandemic period. Publishers that dedicated most of their activity to the publication of manga (Bao Publishing, Coconino, Edizioni BD, Edizioni Star Comics, and also Panini with the label Planet Manga) received even more benefits from the pandemic.