The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism has received general attention in the literature, while the role of news during the pandemic has been ignored. Using a time-frequency connectedness approach, this paper focuses on the spillover effects of COVID-19-related news on the return and volatility of four regional travel and leisure (T&L) stocks. The results in the time domain reveal significant spillovers from news to T&L stocks. Specifically, in the return system, T&L stocks are mainly affected by media hype, while in the volatility system, they are mainly affected by panic sentiment. This paper also finds two risk contagion paths. The contagion index and Global T&L stock are the sources of these paths. The results in the frequency domain indicate that the shocks in the T&L industry are mainly driven by short-term fluctuations. The spillovers from news to T&L stocks and among these T&L stocks are stronger within 1 month.

Information and communication technology have enabled the collection of high-frequency financial asset time series data. However, the high spatial and temporal resolution nature of these data makes it challenging to compare financial asset characteristics patterns and identify the risk. To address this challenge, a method for realized volatility calculation based on the functional data analysis (FDA) method is proposed. A time–price functional curve is constructed by the functional data analysis method to calculate the realized volatility as the curvature integral of the time–price functional curve. This method could effectively eliminate the interference of market microstructure noise, which could not only allow capital asset price to be decomposed into a continuous term and a noise term by asymptotic convergence, but also could decouple the noise from the discrete-time series. Additionally, it could obtain the value of volatility at any given time, which is no concern about correlations between repeated, mixed frequencies and unequal intervals sampling problems and relaxes the structural constraints and distribution setting of data acquisition. To demonstrate our methods, we analyze a per-second level financial asset dataset. Additionally, sensitivity analysis on the selection of the no equally spaced sample is conducted, and we further add noise to ensure the robustness of our methods and discuss their implications in practice, especially being conducive to more micro analysis of the volatility of the financial market and understanding the rapidly changing changes.