Adapting to the new normal: The impact of remote work on firm performance in Jordan and Morocco

Businesses have been impacted particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in a decline in productivity. Whether a remote work policy boosts the firm's productivity is still debatable. We use the COVID-19 World Bank Enterprise Survey, a cross-sectional dataset that covers Jordan and Morocco, to empirically examine this question. We use the propensity score matching technique to estimate the causal effect between remote work and firm performance. Results suggest the existence of a positive impact, suggesting that remote work policies cause an increase in productivity. In a further investigation, we perform our regression by country and firm size. Coefficients are found to remain positive in both countries but statistically significant only in Morocco. Regarding firm size, coefficients are found to be positive and statistically significant across all models. The paper offers some recommendations for policymakers in both countries to mitigate the ongoing crisis on firm performance.

COVID-19 and consumer behavior: food stockpiling in the U.S. market

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought radical changes in consumer spending patterns. One aspect of this change is food stockpiling detected in several countries. Using a univariate probit model, this paper relies on the COVID-19 Impact Survey (2020) for American households to assess the likelihood of consumers stockpiling food in response to the stringent lockdown measures imposed by the government's pandemic regulations. Our findings reveal a set of significant correlations between marital status, age, race, occupation, household structure, and the propensity of stockpiling food during the pandemic. Furthermore, the results show that residents in urban areas are more likely to engage in food stockpiling compared with residents in rural and suburban areas. The paper also examines the nexus between residence areas, lockdown measures, and the probability of stockpiling food. This research reveals a significant association between psychological factors and the likelihood of stockpiling food in response to the COVID-19 pandemic [EconLit Citations: D12, H12, I18, P25].

The Fatality Rate of COVID-19: How Does Education, Health Infrastructure and Institutional Quality Make a Change?

This article provides new empirical evidence on the impact of institutional quality in affecting female fatality rates resulting from COVID-19 by grounding our analysis on the marginal effects on other explanatory variables. This strain of research is not well examined in existing literature. We identify the main determinants of these rates and empirically estimate several models using cross-country data for 2020 for 57 countries. Our results show that not allowing for such marginal effects seems to produce imprecise results whereby institutional quality returns to be insignificant in explaining the fatality rates from COVID-19 and thus may have resulted in inappropriate policy recommendations front previous studies. Our results extend recent findings on the role of institutional quality in reducing female fatality rates and imply that benefits expected front improvements in institutional quality are worthy of consideration and implementation. The article offers some recommendations based on the reported results.