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The Scottish economy was experiencing steady growth prior the hit of the COVID-19, with the pandemic causing the government to announce extreme lockdown measures with unprecedented impact on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Whilst some of the industry sectors in Scotland took a lighter hit, a large part of the organizations had to either adapt or completely disrupt their business. An essential aspect of their survival, risk management (RM) was among the areas requiring the most significant acceleration. This study compared the RM practices implemented by Scottish SMEs prior and after the outbreak as well as examined the attitudes of key decision-makers in the SMEs in relation to risk, including their perceived readiness for another crisis of similar significance.

An online survey based on ISO 31000 RM guidelines was distributed to 232 Scottish SMEs. Based on the official government reports and existing knowledge on how SMEs around the world have handled crisis events within the past 20 years, the authors developed the hypothesis that crisis events significantly accelerate SMEs' RM implementation. Around 13 items were tested in relation to the hypothesis and responses were tested via two-tailed T-test to establish significant statistical difference.

The research provides insight into the current state of risk management practices implemented by Scottish SMEs. As expected, SMEs showed significant difference in their RM implementation prior and after the COVID-19 outbreak. Whilst this has been viewed as a positive, motivations, priorities and approaches in managing risk demonstrated by the SMEs is questionable with views to their sustainable long-term recovery. The study highlights the lack of confidence instilled within the SMEs that they can handle another crisis of similar significance and provides directions for further investigation and improvements with the aim of helping the SMEs prepare better to mitigate the consequences of future crisis events.

In academic sense, the study offers a tested universal framework and a detailed questionnaire for assessment of RM strategy, applicable to organisations of various type, size and geography. Several implications with regards to managerial practices have been highlighted, including the neglect of the SMEs’ own internal environments and its significance in their risk strategies, the predominantly reactive approach to RM displayed by most Scottish SMEs as well as the neglect of compliance risk leading to potential quality and customer satisfaction issues preventing SMEs from full post-crisis recovery.

The Covid-19 pandemic appears to have engendered heterogeneous effects on individuals’ labour market prospects. This paper focuses on two possible sources of a heterogeneous exposition to labour market risks associated with the pandemic outbreak: the routine task content of the job and the teleworkability. To evaluate whether these dimensions played a crucial role in amplifying employment and wage gaps among workers, we focus on the case of Italy, the first EU country hit by Covid-19.

Investigating the actual effect of the pandemic on workers employed in jobs with a different degree of teleworkability and routinization, using real microdata, is currently unfeasible. This is because longitudinal datasets collecting annual earnings and the detailed information about occupations needed to capture a job’s routine task content and teleworkability are not presently available. To simulate changes in the wage distribution for the year 2020, we have employed a static microsimulation model. This model is built on data from the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (IT-SILC) survey, which has been enriched with administrative data and aligned with monthly observed labour market dynamics by industries and regions.

We measure the degree of job teleworkability and routinization with the teleworkability index (TWA) built by Sostero et al. (2020) and the routine-task-intensity index (RTI) developed by Cirillo et al. (2021), respectively. We find that RTI and TWA are negatively and positively associated with wages, respectively, and they are correlated with higher (respectively lower) risks of a large labour income drop due to the pandemic. Our evidence suggests that labour market risks related to the pandemic – and the associated new types of earnings inequality that may derive – are shaped by various factors (including TWA and RTI) instead of by a single dimension. However, differences in income drop risks for workers in jobs with varying degrees of teleworkability and routinization largely reduce when income support measures are considered, thus suggesting that the redistributive effect of the emergency measures implemented by the Italian government was rather effective.

No studies have so far investigated the effect of the pandemic on workers employed in jobs with a different degree of routinization and teleworkability in Italy. We thus investigate whether income drop risks in Italy in 2020 – before and after income support measures – differed among workers whose jobs are characterized by a different degree of RTI and TWA.

This study introduces a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the foreign direct investment (FDI) literature by multinational corporations (MNCs) focusing on emerging economies to identify the most influential authors, journals and articles in FDI research and reveals the fields' conceptual and intellectual structures. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

The study analyzed 533 articles published between 1974 and 2020 in 226 academic journals indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases. We used the R language for statistical computing to map author collaboration, co-word and develop a conceptual and intellectual map of the field.

The results show that, although the FDI literature has many authors, few dominate the field. The International Business Review (IBR) and International Journal of Emerging Markets (IJoEM) are the main sources of the publications. Moreover, bibliometric laws show that our dataset follows the Lotka law of scientific productivity and Bradford law of scattering, identifying the core journals. Finally, FDI by MNCs in emerging economies research is divided into four sub-research themes related to (1) FDI determinants, (2) entry mode, (3) MNCs and FDI performance and (4) the internationalization process.

The current article provides several starting points for practitioners and researchers investigating FDI. It contributes to broadening the vision of the field and offers recommendations for future studies.

This paper aims to present a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis of research papers published on chat generative pre-trained transformer (ChatGPT), an OpenAI-developed large-scale generative language model. The study’s objective is to provide a comprehensive assessment of the present status of research on ChatGPT and identify current trends and themes in the literature.

A total of 328 research article data was extracted from Scopus for bibliometric analysis, to investigate publishing trends, productive countries and keyword analysis around the topic and 34 relevant research publications were selected for an in-depth systematic literature review.

The findings indicate that ChatGPT research is still in its early stages, with the current emphasis on applications such as natural language processing and understanding, dialogue systems, speech processing and recognition, learning systems, chatbots and response generation. The USA is at the forefront of publishing on this topic and new keywords, e.g. “patient care”, “medical”, “higher education” and so on are emerging themes around the topic.

These findings underscore the importance of ongoing research and development to address these limitations and ensure that ChatGPT is used responsibly and ethically. While systematic review research on ChatGPT heralds exciting opportunities, it also demands a careful understanding of its nuances to harness its potential effectively.

Overall, this study provides a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners interested in ChatGPT at this early stage and helps to identify the grey areas around this topic.