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This chapter focuses on how to leverage public transport infrastructure to produce walk-friendly environments, positioning public transport as a walk-enhancing mode. What are the steps that public transport operators can take to create walk-friendly environments? Do more comfortable waiting conditions result in stronger loyalty from the existing customer base and stronger buyout from new customers? This novel approach stemmed from a partnership with the public transport operator Transdev on a real-life experiment in Grenoble to provide a more comfortable walking and resting experience for public transport users. Named Carrefour de Mobilité (‘the crossroads of mobility’), the experiment prototyped urban design interventions to enhance the access and waiting experience of users engaged in mixed-mode commuting. An ex ante/ex post evaluation was deployed to ascertain whether walk-friendlier environments encourage a more intensive use of public space and easier shifting between public transport modes. The findings show that when users perceive dedicated infrastructure as walk-friendly, they consider it more visible and more attractive, and find it comfortable enough to spend longer waiting times there. The evaluation would have benefited from an extension of the perimeter covered by the sensor technology measuring system which was not feasible because of budget constraints. The experiment reached out beyond the initial target public and captured children and older women as well, providing an amenity which was lacking for these groups and resulting in a livelier and more diverse environment for everyone. This lean and low-cost experiment shows that activating public space near public transport hubs enhances their attractiveness in the eyes of the public transport users.

This study aims to analyze the challenges facing five Palestinian clusters and to understand their dynamics and level of development. Using multiple sources of evidence, the research questions are answered using semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions. Content analysis was used to analyze the data obtained. The five clusters in Palestine are located in a complex environment that imposes a mix of challenges that adversely affect their performance. The challenges facing Palestinian clusters are different in terms of their degree of complexity. The common challenges facing the Palestinian clusters are the fundamental lack of innovative stimulation policies or incentives in the Palestinian ecosystem, lack of trust, unfair competition, limited access to finance, lack of access to promising markets, and the limited collaboration between different parties. More focused policies are suggested to the Palestinian authorities.

This paper aims to describe three exploratory field studies investigating which characteristics add to later time to market and/or low product functionality of newly developed products. The studies are conducted at the level of developments tasks, or work packages. The first and second studies investigate to what extent the unpredictability of the project's outcome is the result of the unpredictability of the completion time of individual work packages, and of the instability of the total network of work packages.

Statistical analysis of the empirical data about the progress of three design projects carried out in the development department of a high‐tech capital equipment manufacturer was used. The third study examines the reasons that members of the product development teams in this firm give for the unpredictability of time and quality of the project's outcome.

The results result indicate the existence of three very different sources of unpredictability: the usual uncertainty about the duration of a design task, the discovery of unexpected new problems in a design task, and the reprioritization of a work package by project leaders due to new problems in other work packages.

Together the three studies provide a detailed account of the operational characteristics of time‐paced product development projects in a particular firm and suggest ways to effectively manage such a project.

In this work, the authors analyze the dynamic interdependencies between military expenditures and the real economy for the period 1970–2018, and the authors' approach allows for the existence of dominant economies in the system.

In this study, the authors employ a Network General Equilibrium GVAR (global vector autoregressive) model.

By accounting for the interconnection among the top twelve military spenders, the authors' findings show that China acts as a leader in the global military scene based on the respective centrality measures. Meanwhile, statistically significant deviations from equilibrium are observed in most of the economies' military expenses, when subjected to an unanticipated unit shock of other countries. Nonetheless, in the medium run, the shocks tend to die out and economies converge to an equilibrium position.

With the authors' methodology the authors are able to capture not only the effect of nearness on a country's military spending, as the past literature has documented, but also a country's defense and economic dependencies with other countries and how a unit's military expenses could shape the spending of the rest. Using state-to-the-art quantitative and econometric techniques, the authors provide robust and comprehensive analysis.

Purposes – The overall aim of the chapter is to explore children's acting and disputing within a family role-play and highlight how different roles are argued upon and negotiated by the participants, both verbally and nonverbally.

Methodology – The chapter is drawn from a single play episode between five 6-year-old girls at a Swedish preschool. The analytical framework of the study is influenced by ethnomethodological work on social action focusing in particular on participants’ methodical ways of accomplishing and making sense of social activities.

Findings – The analyses show that the girls use a range of verbal and nonverbal resources to argue and accomplish the social order of the play (i) using past tense to display the factual past event status, and present tense to bid for upcoming events, (ii) building a mutual pretend understanding of places and objects that were used to configure nearness as well as distance in the girls’ interaction and relationship. Finally, the analyses clearly show that the significance of a pretend role is situated and depends on the social context in which it is negotiated.

Practical implications – To get acquainted with detailed analyses of children's pretend play can be useful for preschool teachers’ understanding of how children build relationships within the play, and hopefully awaken their interest to study children's play in depth in everyday practice.

Value of chapter – The present chapter contributes to a wider understanding of how social relationships are argued and negotiated by preschool girls within pretend family role-play.

Research on price extremes and overreactions as potential violations of market efficiency has a long tradition in investment literature. Arguably, very few studies to date have addressed this issue in cryptocurrencies trading. The purpose of this paper is to consider the extreme value modelling for forecasting COVID-19 effects on cryptocoin markets. Additionally, this paper examines the importance of technical trading indicators in predicting the extreme price behaviour of cryptocurrencies.

This paper decomposes the daily-time series returns of four cryptocurrency returns into potential maximum gains (PMGs) and potential maximum losses (PMLs) at first and then tests their lead–lag relations under an econometric framework. This paper also investigates the non-random properties of cryptocoins by computing the incremental explanatory power of PML–PMG modelling with technical trading indicators controlled. Besides, this paper executes an event study to identify significant changes caused by COVID-19-related events, which is capable of analysing the cryptocoin market overreactions.

The findings of this paper produce the evidence of both market overreactions and trend persistence in the potential gains and losses from coins trading. Extreme price behaviour explains volatility and price trends in crypto markets before and after the outbreak of a pandemic that substantiate the non-random walk behaviour of crypto returns. The presence of technical trading indicators as control variables in the extreme value regressions significantly improves the predictive power of models. COVID-19 crisis affects the market efficiency of cryptocurrencies that improves the usefulness of extreme value predictions with technical analysis.

This paper strongly supports for the robustness of technical trading strategies in cryptocurrency markets. However, the “beast is moving quick” and uncertainty as to the new normalcy about the post-COVID-19 world puts constraint on making best predictions.

The paper contributes substantially to our understanding of the pricing efficiency of cryptocurrency markets after the COVID-19 outbreak. The findings of continuing return predictability and price volatility during COVID-19 show that profitable investment opportunities for cryptocoin traders are prevailing in pandemic times.

The paper is unique to understand extreme return reversals behaviour of cryptocurrency markets regarding events related to COVID-19 breakout.