An analysis of factors affecting the profits of new firms in Spain: Evidence from the food industry

Using the logistic model, this article investigates the influence of financial factors on gaining profits for new firms in the Spanish food industry. Specifically, the firms founded separately during the crisis period and during the postcrisis period are observed for their first three years. The findings suggest that indebtedness (for both periods), previous profitability (for the postcrisis period) and accounts payable (for the crisis period) were most frequently statistically significant in the logistic model. Hence, for new firms, controlling debt burden, accumulating internally generated funds and using payables to establish business relationships can help to gain profits. Firm size and asset rotation were significant in the first year (especially during the postcrisis period), with a positive relationship to profits. Given that the food industry is highly competitive, enlarging firm size to reach efficiencies of scale and using a low-price strategy with high asset rotation to obtain market share are effective marketing strategies for new firms. This article contributes to the empirical studies about the financial effects on new firms' profits in the food industry; it can also help potential entrepreneurs make better decisions about starting new businesses and help to manage new firms better in different macroeconomic environments.

COVID-19 impact on job losses in Portugal: who are the hardest-hit?

Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic caused job losses to rise dramatically. Herein, the purpose of the article is to identify which personal and job characteristics make individuals more vulnerable or more resilient to COVID-19 unemployment in Portugal and thus to help policymakers, organizations and individuals themselves, in creating mechanisms to avoid unemployment within this new context.Design/methodology/approach Using extensive personal and job-related data on the complete population of newly unemployed in Portugal over several months after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, a logit model is estimated to identify the characteristics that make workers more resilient or more vulnerable to COVID-19 unemployment, in comparison with the pre-crisis period.Findings The COVID-19 crisis is shown to be disruptive by changing the unemployment structure, increasing socioeconomic inequalities and weakening traditional mechanisms of employment protection. Additionally, the authors identify a higher vulnerability of low-skilled individuals and of those in occupations with low working-from-home feasibility and/or from non-essential sectors (particularly tourism).Practical implications Policy indications are given aiming to protect the most vulnerable individuals, sectors and regions in Portugal, in this new and unprecedented context.Originality/value A seven-month period following the emergence of the pandemic is considered, which allows investigating both the immediate and the medium-term effects of the COVID-19 crisis on job losses. Additionally, by matching data from three different sources, an extensive set of multilevel variables is considered, some of them new in the literature.

Remote employment in the corona-crisis period: the extent of spread and effectiveness of introduction

Basing on the materials of the representative surveys held by RANEPA in 2020 and 2021, it has been shown how wide-spread and effective is the distance form of employment in Russia. Before the epidemiological crisis distance employment was characteristic of a very limited segment of the labor market and was mostly concentrated in groups of relatively high-income employees in the sphere of services and informational technologies. Along with actualization of the coronavirus threat and activation of the measures taken to prevent its spread, the labor market underwent significant changes in 2020, and more than 20% of the employed were forced to switch to distance employment. The transition to distance employment turned out to be very traumatic in terms of work efficiency and psychological comfort. The developed typology shows that positive perception is likely only for 16% of respondents and more than a half are found in the zone of negative integral assessment. Representatives of the youngest cohorts and metropolis dwellers showed the highest level of adaptivity: they expressed the highest positive assessments of the shift to the remote format. The spread of remote employment enhanced the use of informational technologies, particularly, the means of distance visual interaction for solving working tasks. On the whole, such a mass switch to remote employment has turned out to be effective as a temporary measure that will allow smoothing out the negative outcomes of the pandemic. It may be assumed that in the medium term there will be optimization of management efforts when introducing remote work of some employees, and segmental development of mixed employment forms based on the effective balance of employees' and employers' interests.

Dynamics of basic personal beliefs during a pandemic coronavirus

The article examines the question of the impact of the pandemic crisis on the basic beliefs of an individual. The results of a comparative study of the structure of basic beliefs during the period of personal crisis, pandemic and outside the crisis period are presented. Based on the analysis of the results of the study, it is concluded that in a pandemic situation, the severity of the conviction that the world around is beautiful and full of goodness decreases, while the «Image of the Self» remains steadily positive. A person perceives the situation of a pandemic detachedly, as an event not related to his individual life.

“COVID-19” Pandemic: Rethinking Defence Spending in Bulgaria

This paper investigates defence spending in Bulgaria in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It analyses military expenditures on both regional and national scales and tries to compare the post-financial and economic crisis period of the first decade of the 21st century to the current pandemic situation. The paper argues that it is unlikely that the ever evolving threat landscape will lead to a significant decrease in defence spending, while requiring its rethinking in Bulgaria with a focus on investments in technologies and related activities. Due to the ongoing pandemic and the fact that relatively little time has passed since its emergence, part of the conclusions drawn are primarily prospective in nature.

Negotiating Identity and Power during a Crisis: An Analysis of ‘Small Stories’ Told by Australian Christian Priests during the COVID-19 Health Crisis

The COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 and localised government responses have led to fundamental changes in the conditions in which organisations operate. This article draws on a social constructionist understanding of identity as multiple and performed (Angouri 2016; Butler 1990) to explore the experiences of a group of six Australian Christian priests during this crisis period. Drawing on in-depth interview data, the article presents a narrative analysis of the storying of identities and power relations within church communities whose everyday activities were suddenly curtailed. In contrast to linguistic studies of narrative which often focus on structural features of canonical discourse ‘events’, this article takes up Bamberg and Georgakopoulou’s (2008) extension of narrative analysis to focus on ‘small stories’ which reflect the everyday, situated practices in which identities and power relations are negotiated and performed. This article contributes unique insights into the operation and practices of religious organisations in a crisis context.

Effective transfer entropy to measure information flows in credit markets

In this paper we propose to study the dynamics of financial contagion between the credit default swap (CDS) and the sovereign bond markets through effective transfer entropy, a model-free methodology which enables to overcome the required hypotheses of classical price discovery measures in the statistical and econometric literature, without being restricted to linear dynamics. By means of effective transfer entropy we correct for small sample biases which affect the traditional Shannon transfer entropy, as well as we are able to conduct inference on the estimated directional information flows. In our empirical application, we analyze the CDS and bond market data for eight countries of the European Union, and aim to discover which of the two assets is faster at incorporating the information on the credit risk of the underlying sovereign. Our results show a clear and statistically significant prominence of the bond market for pricing the sovereign credit risk, especially during the crisis period. During the post-crisis period, instead, a few countries behave dissimilarly from the others, in particular Spain and the Netherlands.