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During the COVID-19 pandemic, transitory unemployment insurance (UI) policies substantially increased unemployment benefits (UBs) and the number of eligible groups in Russia. The procedure for registering as unemployed was moved to an online platform. The present paper aims to distinguish the effect of anti-COVID-19 restrictions on unemployment from that of the transitory unemployment insurance policies.

Using 553,627 approved claims for unemployment benefits from the Russian Public Employment Service (PES) administrative records (June 2019–December 2020), monthly data on the number of individuals registered as unemployed are aggregated in a pseudo panel. A double-difference approach is employed to identify the effects of the social interaction intensity and teleworkability (TW) of the latest occupation on unemployment. The first is associated with a direct effect of anti-COVID-19 restrictions and the latter with the simplified application procedure.

The face-to-face (F2F) intensity of the latest occupation did not lead to any increase in the number of unemployed persons as could be expected in response to anti-COVID-19 restrictions. Job TW had two opposite effects on unemployment: it decreased individuals' risk of job loss and increased their likelihood of claiming unemployment benefits. Surprisingly, however, in line with the typical response of the Russian labour market to downturns, the latter dominated. The largest response was found among men and individuals with primary education.

This study is the first to attempt to distinguish the effect of anti-COVID-19 restrictions from that of the transitory UI policies on unemployment in Russia.

Little attention has been given to the effects of returnee entrepreneurs on external and internal corporate social responsibility (CSR). This study aims to investigate whether returnee entrepreneurs engage in more external or internal CSR and to further explore the contingency effects of foreign market embeddedness and local government endorsement.

This study uses 11,967 startups in China to examine the relationship between returnee entrepreneurs and external and internal CSR. The authors use an ordinary least square regression and propensity scoring matching approach to analyze the data.

The empirical results show that returnee entrepreneurs are more likely to undertake external CSR but less likely to undertake internal CSR. Foreign market embeddedness and local government endorsement have opposite moderating effects on these relationships.

This study has important implications for returnee entrepreneurs’ strategic choice between external and internal CSR and also provides theoretical support for policymakers to make effective and enforceable CSR policies.

This study discusses how returnee entrepreneurs implement external or internal CSR in China, answering the call to distinguish between external and internal CSR. Drawing on a legitimacy perspective, the authors find interesting and seemingly counterintuitive effects of returnees on external and internal CSR, which also necessitates distinguishing between these two types of CSR. In addition, the authors find different moderating roles of foreign market embeddedness and local government endorsement.

External institutional policy and its impact on corporate social responsibility (CSR) have been widely discussed by researchers, but its effect still remains controversial. This study aims to use the minimum wage policy as an illustrative example to analyze its impact on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of tourist enterprises. Furthermore, the research seeks to examine the boundary conditions that influence the minimum wage’s effect on CSR.

This paper takes the data of 42 listed tourism companies from 2010 to 2020 in China as samples and uses the mixed OLS regression method and the fixed effects panel model to examine the effect of the minimum wage on CSR.

Findings show that increasing wages has a significantly negative impact on their total CSR investment. Also, low-operating-capacity enterprises and private enterprises will react more adversely when faced with increasing minimum wages. And found that the increase of minimum wage has no significant negative impact on the strategic social responsibility of tourism enterprises; however, it has a significantly negative impact on their tactical social responsibility. In addition, as far as employees’ rights and interests are concerned, the minimum wage increase has effectively increased employee salaries, but the nonsalary benefits of the employees have significantly decreased.

The contribution of this paper not only expands the research on the antecedents and boundary mechanisms of CSR but also clarifies the specific effect of the rise of the minimum wage on corporate social responsibility; it further deepens the impact of institutional policy factors on CSR, which also opens new perspectives for policy evaluation and provides a theoretical basis for government policymakers.

Following the COVID-19 outbreak, there are concerns whether economies are becoming farther from equality and competency. While this matters to every economy, it is more crucial for developing ones who already suffer from income inequalities and lack of competency. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

This study uses an administrative data from the Iran's Social Security Organization (ISSO) that provides insurance to workers entitled to the Labor Law of Iran. The data contain more than 7,000,000 workers. The authors assess heterogeneous impact of the first wave of the pandemic by firms' size and average payment.

The authors’ estimation results indicate that, following the initiation of the pandemic, the workers whose corresponding firms are smaller, overall, are more prone to the pandemic and are more likely to submit a request for unemployment benefits. However, the relation is neither homogeneous across sectors nor linear among micro-sized firms. Few sectors indicate a positive relationship between size and likelihood of request submission, including cultural activity, shoemaking and clothing sectors. Besides the size, the authors investigate whether pay grades could explain the probability of becoming unemployed after the pandemic. Results show that workers whose corresponding firms pay less are more likely to submit a request. This is robust within different sectors.

The ISSO dataset is not a panel, so the authors cannot employ methods of causal inferences. The authors’ results should be seen as correlation; however, due to exogeneity and sharpness of the pandemic the result infers to some degree of causality. The data does not cover the informal sector, so the estimates are at lower boundary.

Administrative data on unemployment benefits during COVID-19 show that the pandemic interferes with competition by forcing low-paid workers and small firms to exit the market. This is an alarm for the competition in every economy, specially developing ones.

This study aims to investigate the global issues of youth unemployment using bibliometric analysis covering the period from 1983 to 2022. There is a dearth of a bibliometric study analysis on unemployment, particularly youth unemployment even at the global level. The present study seeks to fill this gap by exploring the prominent studies related to youth unemployment at the global level.

Using VOSviewer software bibliometric results and the Scopus database, the study uncovered the most frequently cited, prominent and influential authors, as well as the institutions that have worked on youth unemployment and the most prominent keywords published on youth unemployment.

Nearly 80% of the research articles on youth unemployment were published from 2005 to 2022, and a significant increase in publication after 2012 is observed. Based on the published papers, the most studied determinants of youth unemployment are increased levels of regional economic advances, state demographics, relocation, household conditions, regional openness and export/import. Economic freedom, labour market reforms, economic growth, high proportion of part-time employment, active labour market policies, minimum wage norms, extent of bargaining scope and alignment are prominent determinants that reduce unemployment at large and improve labour market performance of youth in particular.

Bibliometric analysis, like the present study, can narrow down the most prominent sources of information on youth unemployment for beginners in this field of research.

This bibliometric study on youth employment assists researchers and policymakers in understanding and summarizing the necessary determinants of youth employment that are already being identified and studied based on practical evidence from the authors’ case study-based research work. The present study raises the issue of youth unemployment at large. It helps in identifying factors in one place and thus new researchers can use it as a starting point for their research on youth unemployment. It helps in providing clustering of factors. It highlighted the significant studies, authors and institutions working in this field.

On social implication, it can be argued that studies on topics related to human resources have a direct impact on society standards. By producing scientific knowledge that aids in the recognition of the complexities of human processes and behaviours, social science research significantly contributes to the enrichment of the community as a whole. When young people are unemployed, it causes social unrest and may increase crime and terrorism, all of which contribute to political instability. Youth unemployment causes psychological illness because of anxiety, alienation and depression. As a result, it causes social instability and necessitates immediate attention in all societies. The present study highlights that although the unemployment rate of youth is significantly higher in underdeveloped countries than the developed countries, their representation in the publication is significantly low. This under-representation of countries shows their lack of commitment to society in working on the issue of youth unemployment.

It is assumed that there are plenty of research studies on unemployment, particularly at the global level. However, various domains of researchers may require a bibliometric kind of analysis wherein they may get an idea about the prominent number of literatures arguing concerning issues at large, in the sense of “focused studies” covering the comprehensive viewpoint on youth unemployment. The paper aimed to emphasize the topic of youth unemployment, its development in the research field and the usefulness of bibliometric analysis in social sciences in general, and youth unemployment in particular.

Employment-related measures play a significant part in preventive and mitigative social policies. The importance of these actions is especially emphasised in times of crisis. This paper provides empirical insights into employment-related measures implemented in a sample of OECD countries as a response to the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. Furthermore, it addresses the continuity of the measures by July 2022.

The research applies and further develops a capability approach in the COVID-19 context to provide a theoretically informed empirical understanding of the implemented employment related measures.

The results indicate that countries expanded the coverage of previous preventive and mitigative employment measures horizontally and vertically while also introducing new schemes to protect workers. The main conclusions suggest that most employment-related measures (65.5%) were preventive aiming at saving jobs and broadening peoples capabilities with bridging measures during the crisis. The employment measures served first as an emergency aid. However, most measures were recalibrated and changed incrementally toward 2022.

The data consisted major employment-related measures and changes in social policies the studied countries. The authors focussed the examination on governmental-level measures. Thus, sub-national or sector-specific responses, for example tripartite agreements in certain employment sectors or social transfers in certain areas, were excluded.

The way in which welfare states reacted to employment problems during the COVID-19 pandemic may have an impact on how governments approach social policies in the future. The capability approach exhibits a pronounced strength by facilitating the establishment of sustainable trajectories for social policy and welfare services.

The capability approach embracing the preactive and proactive role of social policies lends a unique perspective on public policies.

The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate whether social contacts can mediate the way in which current unemployment impacts future unemployment.

We use 2006–2017 data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey and a dynamic random-effects model to describe the evolution of individual unemployment status over time.

Once controlled for the local context where individuals live and create friendships, we find that above-average social contacts reduce unemployment persistence. However, social contacts seem to be slightly less effective in deprived neighborhoods. These findings are consistent with the idea that individuals obtain information about job opportunities through a network of social contacts, and unemployment may lead to a decay of social capital, making it more difficult to find employment in future periods. Our results also show that neighborhood deprivation increases individual unemployment risk, while above-average neighborhood cohesion reduces the probability of unemployment in deprived neighborhoods.

Although many studies have been published on unemployment persistence, to the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first study quantifying the impact of social contacts on unemployment persistence. The study also offers fresh empirical evidence on the impact of neighborhood characteristics on unemployment risk.

The purpose of this scoping review is to analyse comparative studies on social-policy measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic in Global North welfare states. The authors also consider the potential influence of the regimes on the responses.

The authors conducted a scoping review of six databases including peer-reviewed comparative studies. In an iterative process with exact inclusion criteria, the authors screened 699 titles/abstracts/articles and found 16 comparative research articles to be included in the review and analysis. The review summarises the main themes of the comparative articles and the articles' typical features.

The results show that social-policy measures were directed specifically at working-age people to minimise income loss and to save jobs. The pandemic also increased care-related responsibilities, necessitating the expansion of current policies and the implementation of new instruments. Despite the differences in responses between universalistic and residual welfare states, the influence of welfare regimes on COVID-19 social-policy measures remains unclear. The emergency responses in the different regimes varied widely in terms of coverage.

The results of this review provide a basis on which to conduct future studies, identify new research topics and knowledge gaps and inspire new research questions and hypotheses. Given the accumulation of scientific knowledge in the area of social-policy measures, the need for systematic reviews will grow in the future.

The authors identified three main themes: changes in employment protection, changes in care-related income protection and the potential influence of welfare-state regimes on COVID-19-related measures.

The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately impacted Latinos across the United States though data on emerging immigrant communities is lacking. The purpose of this study is to better understand how Latino immigrants were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing a community health clinic in Charlotte, North Carolina to quickly respond to their needs.

A mixed method, rapid appraisal using community-based participatory research approaches conducted in February to April 2021 by a team of bilingual researchers. Project consisted of a Spanish, electronic survey distributed through community leaders and in-person interviews conducted in Spanish at COVID-19 vaccine clinics. SPSS Version 26 was used for quantitative analysis. Ordinal and binary logistic regression tests were performed to assess the associations among several outcome and four predictor variables: documentation status, status of health insurance, level of trust in the vaccine and place of birth. Qualitative analysis used rapid appraisal and grounded theory approaches.

Latino immigrants experienced job and income loss, resulting in difficulty paying for food, housing and health care. Participants experienced emotional and financial stress and isolation from family. Undocumented immigrants were more likely to experience detrimental impacts than documented immigrants. Most wanted the vaccine but felt barriers like trust and insurance may prevent them.

Findings from this study are locally relevant to Latino immigrants living in the Charlotte area of North Carolina and findings may not be generalizable to other Latinos. Participants were recruited through faith networks and those who are not connected may not be represented. In addition, interview participants were sampled during vaccination clinics and likely had positive views of the vaccine.

As a direct result of this project, community health clinic (CHC) held vaccination clinics to instill more confidence in the vaccination process. Spanish-speaking staff were available to assist with paperwork and answer questions onsite. The importance of familismo in decision-making and the reported presence of misinformation about the vaccine prompted CHC to continue providing accurate information about the vaccine in Spanish, and to strategize marketing materials to reflect a family-centric approach to better appeal to Latinos. Findings were used to obtain funding for expansion of clinical and behavioral health services in the community through mobile units, increasing accessibility for Latino immigrants.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this was the first study to examine the effects of the pandemic on a growing and disproportionately underrepresented group in an emerging immigrant state. Findings informed culturally competent COVID-19 vaccine clinics, marketing strategies and the expansion of medical and behavioral health services for a local community clinic.

The aim of this study is to analyze which socioeconomic factors (economic, demographic, and political) most commonly affect the social expenditure of the European Union (EU) and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

A panel data fixed-effects model is employed for 34 OECD and 23 EU countries between 2000 and 2020.

Results indicate that, in all country groups, economic factors have the most significant influence on social expenditures, with income being the primary determinant, particularly in EU countries. The negative impacts of unemployment and inflation underscore the importance of counter-cyclical measures adopted by countries to maintain stability in their social expenditures. The most influential demographic factor is found as the old-age-dependency ratio. While the rule of law affects social expenditure positively, government effectiveness and female labor force participation affect it negatively. The positive effect of Konjunkturforschungsstelle (KOF) indexes shows the globalization effect, which can be attributable to the compensation hypothesis.

Governments enforce inclusive and sustainable policies to boost economic activities and GDP, thus combating inflation and unemployment and regulating the labor market and socioeconomic problems about aging populations and women’s economic participation to control social expenditures. The rule of law and institutional quality will also boost economic growth.

This study focuses on the effects of social expenditures in a broader view within the framework of the three main factors (economic, demographic, political) and attempts to determine the key factors that account for the differences in social expenditure between the OECD and EU countries.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-05-2023-0384