We investigate the influence of institutional factors upon life insurance demand for 32 European countries, considering the sociodemographic and economic determinants as control variables. Using a panel data approach, we find that life insurance demand is influenced differently by institutional indicators from the Worldwide Governance Indicators database, in emerging and transition markets compared to developed ones. The sound legal environment of developed countries, where the level of the rule of law is very homogeneous and very high, makes it non-significant for life insurance demand. For developing countries the enforceability of contracts, the independence of justice and the time efficiency of the judicial process positively influence the decision of citizens to buy life insurance contracts. The effect of income distribution over life insurance density varies across these two categories of countries. For transition and emerging markets we find a positive relationship between life insurance density, income distribution and level of urbanisation. In developed countries, because of the high levels of income, life insurance became a common good, not a luxury one, which makes income distribution an insignificant factor. For emerging and transition countries policymakers should concentrate more on strengthening trust in the insurance sector for reducing the gap with developed countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted every facet of life globally. Business and commerce are key areas where the monetary crunch has been acutely felt. This study aims to analyze the various key changes in entities' activities to evaluate the level of business performance in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. For this purpose, we use panel data analysis on 218 Romanian listed companies of different sizes (big and small) and belonging to different business sectors for the period June 30, 2019-June 30, 2020. We find that the net profits of the overall market decreased by 37.43% over the analyzed period. However, small companies engaged in agriculture, commerce, construction, IT R&D, and transport and storage witnessed better financial performance. In addition, our results show that equity financing, proper liquidity management, and an increased company size consolidate the economic performance of entities regarding return on equity and return on assets. Our findings are useful for policymakers such as managers and investors and can help them make the best decision for their managing or investing activities. Moreover, governments need to know how companies respond to the pandemic to identify the sectors of activity that are more vulnerable to the crisis' effects and the main financial management decisions that must be adopted by companies during times of crises.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many changes into people’s lives. Fear, job insecurity, changes in their financial stability, concerns about their future lives have changed the entire lives of people and have affected the cognitive well-being of individuals. The purpose of the present analysis is to measure how the COVID-19 pandemic, along with financial factors, has affected the perceived level of well-being of individuals. We are also interested whether there are differences between life before COVID-19, life now with COVID-19, and life after the COVID-19 pandemic, in terms of future expectations. To address this objective, we performed an ANOVA approach and a GLM estimate on repeated measures for a large sample (1572 respondents) from 43 worldwide countries, during the period May 2020 and July 2021. Our results show that financial factors reflected by both the size of income and changes in personal or family income affect the levels of happiness. Robustness checks using stress as an alternative estimator for happiness have consolidated our results. Additionally, we find that well-being during COVID-19 compared to the previous period decreased, while in future, people expect to be happier, but not more than in the past when they did not know about the existence of this virus. This is one of the first studies to investigate the relationship between happiness and income before, during, and after COVID-19. These findings are important for policymakers to improve the conditions of living in the areas of health and financial stability.

Nowadays, companies must be concerned with the levels of satisfaction and happiness of employees. Hence, this paper proposes to investigate the links between salary and happiness through an exploratory study with a quasi-experimental design. The sample included 376 respondents, and we employed structured equation modeling (SEM) in ADANCO. Prior to evaluating the structural model, the goodness of fit shows moderate/excellent values. Our empirical results show a positive relationship between salary and happiness, salary and life satisfaction, salary and financial satisfaction, financial satisfaction and life satisfaction, and financial satisfaction and happiness. Thus, we consider that our research contributes to the literature by analyzing the relationship between income and happiness in a developing country such as Romania. Congruent with previous findings, we consider that our results provide evidence of the road from salary to happiness in developing countries.

Our analysis aims to identify the typology of consumers