This research asks how an epidemic affects human behaviour. Probably the COVID-19 contagion is the most adverse global public health, economic, social, and technological stress since the Second World War. It affects almost all countries and challenges the globalisation particularly the global supply chain. The research community struggles with the multidimensional consequences of the SARS-CoV-2 virus infections. The critical goal is to quickly implement an efficient vaccine, as the society faces a tradeoff between death exposure and the size of the economic downturn. With this paper, we search for factors affecting contagion, mortality, and the time span between the country virus inception and first death. Additionally, we analyse the development of social media and financial markets. We applied a panel data set on all of the countries across the globe from 31 December 2019 until 31 March 2020 to investigate the patterns of epidemic development. We examined 7,642 country-daily data. We constructed classification tree regression, panel, and cross-sectional regression models. Our results support the conclusion that: 1) the speed of severity and contagion is different between themselves and across continents, 2) financial markets and social media respond differently to factors affecting contagion and severity, and 3) the time span between the first contagion in the economy and first death case cannot be plausibly explained with time-invariant variables. This research supports the policymakers with robust data for the informative allocation of scarce resources.

Purpose This paper aims to show that when conducting a literature review, important papers can be identified by regressing citation counts on prior publications’ metadata. Design/methodology/approach The method developed in this paper applies citation count regression analysis to identify important papers that may be overlooked when conducting literature reviews on subject areas with a large population of studies. Findings The developed method reduces a literature down to a small sample of important papers for further narrative analysis. Research limitations/implications Although the most widely used citation count database was used for research, there is a risk that a paper is not indexed; thus, it would be out of the scope of the literature. Practical implications The developed method allows both preliminary selection of important papers for literature review, and robustness and completeness checks for already conducted narrative reviews. Originality/value This paper develops an automated search method for identification of important papers based on citation counts. This method allows for the reduction of big samples of research papers into smaller heterogenic subsamples. Like meta-analysis, this method is a quantitative technique that can enhance traditional narrative literature reviews.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the links between a company's ultimate owner and the risk involved with financial performance. The study tests hypotheses on the relation between ultimate ownership origin and risk of return on assets. The research adopts cross-sectional data from a unique sample of 32,614 companies across 43 European countries with ultimate owners from 105 countries. The results indicate that the domestic ultimate owner is, in general, less likely to be a risk-taker than overseas investors. The research develops the nature of ownershipperformance relations in the specific economic context of Europe. The results add robust evidence on attitudes towards performance risk of Europe wide ultimate owners.

A debt does not function as a liquid asset in an ineffective enforcement environment. In this study, we investigated the efficiency of creditor protection in insolvency. We approached efficiency in three dimensions: ex ante, ex post, and interim. This paper presents the differences between Polish and Spanish ex ante efficiency, the factors influencing the interim recovery rate and efficiency, and the differences between ex ante and ex post efficiency in Polish proceedings. We studied 17,494 financial statements of Polish companies and the finalized proceedings of 784 court cases from the period 2004-2012. We applied regression analysis, combined with classification and robustness tests. Our evidence supports the conclusion that Polish insolvency proceedings are inefficient. The interim efficiency oscillates at 12% per annum. The duration of the proceeding from filing until resolution takes an average of 853 days. These results have policy implications, as creditor protection is a major aspect in attracting investment for net foreign debtors.