Does emergency policy mend the fold after the sheep have been stolen?- an empirical study on the Baiyin Cross-country race and its subsequent circuit breaker mechanism

This study examines the biggest disaster in the history of international trail running—the Huangshi Cross-Country Race in Baiyin city, China—as an example to quantitatively evaluate this large-scale sporting event's impact on the local economy. After calculating the city stock market returns based on the improved worst-case Value-at-Risk (WCVaR) designed for this study, this study proposes a hybrid forecasting method combining time series modelling and neural network autoregression (NNAR) models to quantify the net effect of the race disaster, through counterfactual information. The study discoveres that although the event's pre-publicity period positively stimulated Baiyin city's economy, it still could not offset the negative impact of unexpected events during the race. Then, the study further explores the net economic effect of the circuit breaker mechanism as a strategic tool in an attempt to quell the above-mentioned negative effects after the cross-country race, through applying a difference-in-differences method to regress and analyse the stock market yield panel data of Baiyin and its control cities before and after the policy's implementation. Subsequently, it was revealed that the circuit breaker mechanism could not effectively curb the spread of the disaster's negative influence, in other word, the circuit breaker exists only to ‘mend the fold’ after the ‘sheep’ are endangered and it is already too late.