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The authors examine the factors that impact the growth of exchange traded funds (ETFs) from 1990 to 2020. The authors show the first-mover and winner-takes-all effects from top ETF issuers. Besides the longer history and larger asset under management (AUM), the ETFs being managed by top issuers have exhibited lower risks and higher trading volume. Delisted ETFs on the contrary has a shorter history, lower AUM, higher risks, and lower trading volume. For zombie ETFs, the authors find longer history, lower risks but lower AUM and trading volume, controlled for total expense ratio, return, volatility, Amihud (2002) illiquidity, bid-ask spread, turnover ratio, as well as year, issuer, asset class and region fixed effects. The authors further study the ETFs’ AUM and trading activities over the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and COVID-19 pandemic crisis, and find that the GFC has a significant negative impact while the COVID-19 has a positive impact on the ETFs’ popularity. The significant increase in AUM of ETF relative to common stocks during the COVID-19 is associated with retail investors’ holdings, as the authors document a significant reduction of institutional holdings at the aggregate level.

The purpose of this paper is to understand women’s approaches to acquiring financial and other resources is essential for closing the entrepreneurship gender gap. In nearly 40% of economies, women’s early-stage entrepreneurial activity is half or less than half of that of men’s.

Even when there is extensive literature on female entrepreneurs, the authors review the findings through a Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-1)9 crisis lens, trying to find new perspectives and solutions. With the approach of a systematic review of 4,520 publications on financing topics related to female entrepreneurs, various sources of financing available to female entrepreneurs are considered: bootstrapping, banks, business angels, venture capital and crowdfunding.

Identifying potential gender bias both on the supply and the demand side of financing, this research highlights new directions in encouraging female entrepreneurship and gives guidelines to public organisations on how to foster advanced forms of financing for female entrepreneurs in COVID-19 times.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed an unprecedented challenge for economies and companies. Female entrepreneurs are the ones who have been hit harder, as they overcome pre-existing barriers, such as lack of access to finance, lack of networks and mentors and gendered priorities, among others. Without ensuring gender policies to counter these incremental negative effects, the authors face the risk of widening the gender gap.

Regarding previous systematic reviews of literature, this paper focusses on a specific challenge, how women entrepreneurs finance their activity, with a double vision: supply and demand of money.

This study compares the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on stock returns in the first two waves of infection across selected markets, given built-in corporate immunity before the global outbreak.

The data are collected from listed firms in five markets that have experienced the second wave of COVID-19 contagion, namely the United States (US), Australia, China, Hong Kong and South Korea. The period of investigation in this study ranges from January 24 to August 28, 2020 to cover the first two COVID-19 waves in selected markets. The study estimates the research model by employing the ordinary least square method with fixed effects to control for the heterogeneity that may confound the empirical outcomes.

The analysis reveals that firms with larger size and more cash reserves before the COVID-19 outbreak have better stock performance under the first wave; however, these advantages impede stock resilience during the second wave. Corporate governance practices significantly influence stock returns only in the first wave as their effects fade when the second wave emerges. The results also suggest that in economies with greater power distance, although stock price depreciation was milder in the first wave, it is more intense when new cases again surge after the first wave was contained.

This paper provides practical implications for corporate managers, policymakers and governments concerning crisis management strategies for COVID-19 and future pandemics.

This study is the first to evaluate built-in corporate immunity before the COVID-19 shock under successive contagious waves. Besides, this study accentuates the importance of cultural understanding in weathering the ongoing pandemic across different markets.

This study investigated the attitudes and concerns of Saudi higher educational institution (HEI) academics about privacy and security in online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Online Questionnaire questionnaire was designed to explore Saudi HEI academic’s attitudes and concerns about privacy and security issues in online teaching. The questionnaire asked about attitudes and concerns held before the pandemic and since the pandemic. The questionnaire included four sections. At the beginning of the questionnaire, participants were asked what the phrase “online privacy and security” meant to them, to gain an initial understanding of what it meant to academics. A definition for what we intended for the survey was then provided: “that a person’s data, including their identity, is not accessible to anyone other than themselves and others whom they have authorised and that their computing devices work properly and are free from unauthorised interference” (based on my reading of a range of sources, e.g. Schatz et al., 2017; Steinberg, 2019; NCS; Windley, 2005). This was to ensure that participants did understand what I was asking about in subsequent sections.

This study investigated the attitudes and concerns of Saudi HEI academics about privacy and security in online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings provide several key insights: Key aspects of online privacy and security for Saudi HEI academics: Saudi HEI academic’s notion of online privacy and security is about the protection of personal data, preventing unauthorized access to data and ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of data. This underscores the significance of robust measures to safeguard sensitive information in online teaching, but also the need to make academics aware of the other aspects of online privacy and security. Potential to improve policies and training about online privacy and security in Saudi HEIs: Although many participants were aware of the online privacy and security policies of their HEI, only a small percentage had received training in this area. Thus, there is a need to improve the development and dissemination of policies and to provide academics with appropriate training in this area and encourage them to take available training. Use of videoconferencing and chat technologies and cultural sensitivities: The study highlighted moderate levels of concern among Saudi HEI academics regarding the use of videoconferencing and online chat technologies, and their concerns about cultural factors around the use of these technologies. This emphasizes the need for online teaching and the growing use of technologies in such teaching to respect cultural norms and preferences, highlighting the importance of fostering a culturally sensitive approach to technology deployment and use. Surprising low webcam use: An unexpected finding is the low use of webcams by both academics and students during online teaching sessions, prompting a need for a deeper understanding of the dynamics surrounding webcam engagement in such sessions. This calls for a reevaluation of the effectiveness of webcam use in the teaching process and underscores the importance of exploring methods for enhancing engagement and interaction in online teaching. In summary, this paper investigated the attitudes and concerns about privacy and security in the online teaching of Saudi HEI academics during the coronavirus pandemic. The study reveals areas where further research and policy development can enhance the online teaching experience. As the education landscape continues to evolve, institutions must remain proactive in addressing the concerns of their academics while fostering a culturally sensitive approach to technology deployment.

One limitation of this study is the relatively small qualitative data sample, despite the adequate size of the sample including 36 academics from various Saudi Arabian HEIs for quantitative analysis. It was necessary to make the most of the open-ended questions optional – participants did not have to answer about concerns if they did not want to, as we did not want to make the questionnaire too long and onerous to complete. Consequently, the number of academics responding to the open-ended questions was limited, emphasizing the need for additional data and alternative research methods to further these issues. The study was focused on investigating the concerns of HEI Saudi academics, recognizing that the attitudes and concerns of academics in other countries may differ. Furthermore, the research also includes an exploration of the changes in academic attitudes and concerns before and since the COVID-19 pandemic, which will be the subject of further data analysis.

This research delves into Saudi HEI academics' perceptions and concerns regarding privacy and security in online education during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Notably, it highlights the moderate priority placed on online privacy and security, the unexpectedly low usage of webcams and the potential for enhancing policies and training. The study emphasizes the necessity for comprehensive measures to protect sensitive data and the importance of tailored policies for educators. It also underscores the need for a more nuanced understanding of webcam usage dynamics, offering valuable insights for institutions aiming to improve online education and address educators' concerns amidst evolving educational landscapes.

Using ethnicity as our point of focus, the authors consider the dynamics of the demand for bank loans, and the willingness of banks to supply them, as the UK economy entered the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 with a particular focus on potential behavioural differences on the demand-side and discrimination on the supply-side. In doing so we directly address crisis induced financial concerns and how they played out in the context of ethnicity.

Using the most recent ten quarterly waves of the UK SME Finance Monitor survey the authors consider whether ethnicity of the business owner impacts on the decision to apply for bank loans in the first instance. The authors then question whether ethnicity influences the banks decision to meet or reject the request for a bank loan.

The authors’ pre-COVID-19 results show that there were no ethnic differences in loan application and success rates. During COVID-19, both white and ethnic business loan application rates rose significantly, but the scale of this increase was greater for ethnic businesses. The presence of government 100% guaranteed lending also increased general loan success rates, but again the scale of this improvement was greater for ethnic businesses.

The authors show very clearly that differences in the willingness of banks to supply loans to SMEs relate very explicitly to firm specific characteristics and ethnicity either plays no additional role or actually leads to improved loan outcomes. The data is for the UK and for a very unique COVID time which may mean that wider generalisability is unwise.

Ethnic business owners should not worry about lending discrimination or be discouraged from applying for loans.

The authors identify at worst no lending discrimination and at best positive ethnic discrimination.

This is one of the largest COVID-19 period studies into the financing of ethnic businesses.

This study models the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the performance of the private health-care sector in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries. This paper aims to address the economic, societal and sustainability of the health-care sector.

Data were collected from Bloomberg and the sample consists of 534 firm-year observations from 55 firms listed over 2010–2020. The authors apply panel data and control for the country and governance effects.

The authors found heterogeneous results regarding the three sub-sectors. The pandemic has a negative effect on the accounting and market performances of the “Pharmaceutical companies” and an insignificant impact on “Healthcare Management and Facilities Services.” Moreover, the impact of COVID-19 on health-care firms’ performance depends on the country’s economic classification and the degree of regulatory and governance frameworks.

Further studies may consider a larger sample and other regions. It is recommended to address the health-care sector's challenges to invest in new technologies such as “digital twin” and predictive and personalized medicine. It is worth testing model development theory and its effects on speeding up and designing models to ensure the proper functioning and developing mathematics to determine uncertainties in patient data and model predictions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is novel as it is unique in modeling the impact of COVID-19 on the health-care public companies in the MENA region. The findings pinpoint firms’ and countries’ heterogeneous impacts on financial and market performances.

This study aims to contribute to the extant literature on logistics by investigating the interrelationship between the financial performance of listed logistics firms and the COVID-19 and compare the logistics firms’ financial performance of G-20 countries during the pandemic period.

To conduct the confirmatory analysis by testing the hypotheses formulated for this study, data have been collected from Bloomberg of all logistics firms from G-20 countries. This paper gathered the first quarter from 2010 until the last quarter of 2020 as the research sample to examine the pandemic impact on financial performance.

The results show that the financial performance of logistic firms was significantly higher during 2020. Overall, the country-wise findings corroborated with the main results and the financial performance of 14 countries’ logistic firms out of 20 ones analysed has been significantly elevated, during the pandemic period. However, this paper has found out a negative financial performance of the logistics firms during the COVID-19 period in six countries (Germany, Korea, Russia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and the UK), which support the second proposition.

The study’s results were important as they highlighted the role of logistics firms in offering insights to academics, practitioners, policymakers and logistic firms’ stakeholders. For future research, this paper suggests including some other variables that might influence firm performance and that have not been considered in this study, which is a limitation, and going more deeply into the logistics sector by comparing the financial performance of the sub-sectors.

As the importance of logistics services during the pandemic period is relevant, this study may provide significant insights because the logistics firms play a crucial role by anticipating to ensure the supply of essential items such as food, medicine, then supporting for the continuity of supply chains. The view of finance impacts during the pandemic may provide insightful perspectives for logistics companies, allowing them to understand those impacts and better prepare for likely disruption events such COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper is novel considering that it is unique in evaluating logistics firms’ financial performance from a global perspective, considering the context of this historical pandemic.

The goal of this work is to evaluate how digital transformation disclosure in corporate news and press releases affects stock prices. We examine American and Chinese companies from the energy and industry sectors for two periods: pre-COVID-19 and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To estimate the effects of disclosure of information related to digital transformation, we applied the bag-of-words (BOW) method. As the benchmark dictionary, we used Kindermann et al. (2021), with the addition of original dictionaries created via Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) analysis. We also employed panel regression analysis and random forest.

For USA energy sector, all aspects of digital transformation were insignificant in pre-COVID-19 period, while sustainability topics became significant during the pandemic. As for the Chinese energy sector, digital strategy implementation was significant in pre-pandemic period, while digital technologies adoption and business model innovation became relevant in COVID-19 period. The results show the greater significance of digital transformation aspects for industrials sectors compared to the energy sector. The result of random forest analysis proves the efficiency of the authors’ dictionary which could be applied in practice. The developed methodology can be considered relevant.

The research contributes to the existing literature in theoretical, empirical and methodological ways. It applies signaling and information asymmetry theories to the financial markets, digital transformation being used as an instrument. The methodological contribution of this article can be described in several ways. Firstly, our data collection process differs from that in previous papers, as the data are gathered “from investor’s point of view”, i.e. we use all public information published by the company. Secondly, in addition to the use of existing dictionaries based on Kindermann et al. (2021), with our own modifications, we apply the original methodology based on LDA analysis. The empirical contribution of this research is the following. Unlike past works, we do not focus on particular technologies (Hong et al., 2023) connected with digital transformation, but try to cover all multi-dimensional aspects of the transformational process and aim to discover the most significant one.

COVID-19 pandemic is a global health emergency which posed new challenges to the organizations to adjust their ways of working by redefining approach to work culture. The objective of this paper is to study as to how COVID-19 has impacted organizational culture which can be sustained with good leadership style. The aim of the paper is to identify and analyze the change in organizational culture and leadership style flexibility adoption required during the pandemic.

This paper is based on qualitative research that focused on newspaper articles. In the paper, the authors made analysis of newspaper articles on NVIVO software published on culture and leadership from February to December 2021.

Three main themes that emerged across the study include the change in leadership perspective, organizational perspective and employee perspective to reshape the organizational culture. Companies that support on flexible working hours, work from home and virtual gatherings are likely to attract and retain the most talented employees.

The study gave useful insights to establish well-developed standard operating practices to manage the cultural change. The organizations which reinforce their leadership style to provide psychological support to its employees and amend the policies thereof, can best respond to the potentially damaging effects of COVID-19 to enhance the job satisfaction of its people.

The paper is among the very few studies that examined as how to sustain a good culture in an organization during tough times and how a leader should manage the entire team with the help of qualitative analysis through analysis of newspaper articles. The specific contribution of this paper is to align organizational culture with leadership based on democratic values and standards of legitimacy during tough times so that focus can be made on well-being of employees, strong work ethics and thereby increasing work commitment of the employees.