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The crisis came after a period of generally favorable financial markets in 2019, which had already built greater confidence among Swiss banks. As a result of the Covid-19 related lockdown, banks swiftly implemented crisis management measures. This enabled them to continue serving clients from home offices without significant disruption. The speed with which change has been implemented following the lockdown - and the benefits this change has already begun to produce - has given banks the confidence that change is possible, and that it can deliver tangible results in a very short timeframe.

Globalisation has led to a strongly growing demand in international air transport. This growth was fuelled by deregulation of the airline sector. The industry was challenged by downturns every decade and at the time of finalising this book, by COVID-19, the biggest global aviation downturn in history. The aviation industry is facing huge challenges especially with respect to its impact on the environment and new technologies to solve those challenges. More than ever, policy makers, business leaders, but also the whole society need a deeper understanding of the aviation sector and the connections between its benefits and costs. This book targets industry managers as well as policy makers, institutional customers of the sector, and in particular students in the field of transport and tourism. It provides an overview on the aviation sector with a special focus on value creation and strategies based on industrial economics. The consequent application of a system view makes the book unique in its field. The book draws on the rich tradition of integrated management approaches and the use of system models in management research and teaching in management at the University of St. Gallen. The system view and the use of system models help to understand interrelated and interdependent developments, like the consequences of technical progress on regulation, supply and demand. The authors were fortunate enough to be able to draw on research results of many years at the Center of Aviation Competence at the University of St. Gallen. Therefore, the editors thank all colleagues who contributed to this book by discussions, research contributions, and administrative support, and especially the co-authors René Puls, Adrian Müller, Erik Linden, Jan-Christian Schraven, Mark Roth and Philipp Boksberger. Special thanks go to our assistant Christopher Siegrist who did the language editing and supported with different works along the development of the book.

Many economic activities have more or less come to a standstill since measures were taken against the spread of SARS-CoV-2. This includes tourism in particular. Governments in various countries have therefore taken measures to cushion the economic costs of this shutdown. This brief report presents and comments some of these measures as well as countries in which they have been implemented or planned.

The Swiss Trade Monitor documents time trends in Switzerland's foreign goods trade. The first edition considers data from January 2019 until November 2022, a time span that covers both the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 and the Russo-Ukrainian War which started in February 2022. Both events led to noticeable declines in trade volumes which were, however, of temporary nature. Swiss foreign trade recovered quickly from the pandemic-induced decrease. And in contrast to the European Union or the United States, Swiss exports to Russia do not show a lasting decline throughout 2022. Large volumes of pharmaceutical exports imply that Swiss-Russian trade in 2022 is at a level similar to the previous years.

In Maternal Optimism, Ladge and Greenberg expertly explore how women can survive and thrive in the work and family domains. Spanning the gamut of potential work-life events, the authors tackle the topics of pre-pregnancy, maternity, return to work, empty nesting, and retirement. Designed as a resource for working women to “provide...stories and research that support the notion of owning and feeling confident in the choices you make as future or current working mothers” (x), this review relays the book’s key themes, focusing on those with particular relevance for management scholars and practitioners, leaders and organizations. Because of its American-centric focus and pre-COVID-19 publication, special care is taken to integrate a more global focus and consider some COVID-19-related reflections. However, diverse groups of readers in management education, academia, and practice may find this resource interesting and relevant.

Background: The current COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic is an emergency on a global scale, with huge swathes of the population required to remain indoors for prolonged periods to tackle the virus. In this new context, individuals' health-promoting routines are under greater strain, contributing to poorer mental and physical health. Additionally, individuals are required to keep up to date with latest health guidelines about the virus, which may be confusing in an age of social-media disinformation and shifting guidelines. To tackle these factors, we developed Elena+, a smartphone-based and conversational agent (CA) delivered pandemic lifestyle care intervention. Methods: Elena+ utilizes varied intervention components to deliver a psychoeducation-focused coaching program on the topics of: COVID-19 information, physical activity, mental health (anxiety, loneliness, mental resources), sleep and diet and nutrition. Over 43 subtopics, a CA guides individuals through content and tracks progress over time, such as changes in health outcome assessments per topic, alongside user-set behavioral intentions and user-reported actual behaviors. Ratings of the usage experience, social demographics and the user profile are also captured. Elena+ is available for public download on iOS and Android devices in English, European Spanish and Latin American Spanish with future languages and launch countries planned, and no limits on planned recruitment. Panel data methods will be used to track user progress over time in subsequent analyses. The Elena+ intervention is open-source under the Apache 2 license (MobileCoach software) and the Creative Commons 4.0 license CC BY-NC-SA (intervention logic and content), allowing future collaborations; such as cultural adaptions, integration of new sensor-related features or the development of new topics. Discussion: Digital health applications offer a low-cost and scalable route to meet challenges to public health. As Elena+ was developed by an international and interdisciplinary team in a short time frame to meet the COVID-19 pandemic, empirical data are required to discern how effective such solutions can be in meeting real world, emergent health crises. Additionally, clustering Elena+ users based on characteristics and usage behaviors could help public health practitioners understand how population-level digital health interventions can reach at-risk and sub-populations. Frontiers in Public Health, 9 (1543) ISSN:2296-2565

The traditional approaches to “cure” economic recessions are monetary and fiscal policies. Most economic crises are first addressed with monetary instruments, as the Federal Reserve’s extensive corporate bond purchasing program of March 24, 2020, has shown.1 However, when interest rates are zero or close to zero—referred to as the zero-lower bound—and the economic downturn is expected to be significant, governments often launch additional fiscal stimulus programs, such as the U.S. COVID-19 Stimulus Package in the amount of $2.2 trillion passed by Congress on March 27, 2020.2 But monetary and fiscal policies are not the only means of influencing an economy’s business cycle. A third and novel option is expansionary legal policies, also referred to as countercyclical regulation, which is the focus of this article. Legal instruments have been used only to a limited degree to stimulate the economy. One of the first advocates of law and macroeconomics was Yair Listokin who promotes the use of legal policies and lawyers in macroeconomic policy. In this article, the author explains and applies the idea of expansionary legal policies to the field of public procurement law. Public procurement lends itself particularly well to expansionary legal policies for two reasons. First, public contracts form a large part of the government’s expenditure side, amounting to fifteen to twenty percent of global GDP,4 and can therefore be used to expand the money supply. Second, government contracting is governed by a set of complex administrative rules that can be adjusted to better reflect the business cycles. This article will discuss the idea, design, application, and potential effects of expansionary legal policies by means of two procurement policies that were adopted in the United States and Switzerland in response to COVID-19 this March and compare them to Germany’s relaxation of procurement rules after the financial crisis in 2009. To protect taxpayers’ money and mitigate the risk of corruption, this article suggests legal safeguards for expansionary procurement policies. With the necessary measures in place, expansionary procurement policies will help procurement regulations to reflect economic realities more accurately and stimulate the economy by increasing and expediting spending through public projects in infrastructure, healthcare, and other sectors.

Die COVID-19-Pandemie stellt ein Ereignis mit signifikantem Einfluss auf die Gesundheitskosten in der Schweizerischen obligatorischen Krankenpflegeversicherung (OKP) dar. Diese Studie nutzt die COVID-19-Pandemie und die hier aufgetretene zufällige zeitliche Variation im regulatorisch beschränkten Zugang zu Gesundheitsdienstleistungen, um (1) den Effekt der COVID-19-Pandemie auf die OKP-Gesundheitskosten im Sinne eines Kausaleffektes zu berechnen und (2) etwas über das relative Verhältnis der Grösse von angebotsseitigen und nachfrageseitigen Effekten bei einzelnen Leistungserbringern zu lernen. Als Mass für den Effekt der COVID-19-Pandemie auf die OKP Gesundheitskosten wird die sogenannte „Excess Health Care Utilization“ – die Differenz zwischen den erwartbaren und realisierten Kosten – für die von der Pandemie betroffenen Monate März bis Dezember des Jahres 2020 herangezogen. Zusätzlich bilden die relativen Unterschiede in der „Excess Health Care Utilization“ zwischen OKP Leistungserbringern und eine weitere Differenzierung in angebotsseitige (i.e., Einschränkungen nach COVID-19-Verordnung) und nachfrageseitige Effekte detailliertere Einblicke in die Treiber der beobachteten Gesamt-Effekte. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die COVID-19-Pandemie zu einer substanziellen Reduktion der Gesundheitskosten i.H.v. 3.19% der zu erwartenden Kosten geführt hat. Dies entspricht einem nominellen Rückgang i.H.v. 868 Millionen CHF für die in dieser Studie einbezogenen Leistungserbringer über den Zeitraum März bis Dezember 2020. Zudem wurde beobachtet, dass sich die Effekte der COVID-19-Pandemie auf die Gesundheitskosten bei den verschiedenen Leistungserbringern stark unterscheiden. Die stärksten Kostenreduktionen sind hier im Bereich der Radiologie (-12.6%), Psychiatrische Kliniken (-11.7%), Kinder- und Jugendmedizin (- 10.5%), Angiologie (-9.5%) und Physiotherapeut:innen (-9.0%) zu beobachten. Die Separierung in Angebots- und Nachfrageeffekte zeigt, dass Kostenreduktionen bei folgenden Leistungserbringern fast ausschliesslich durch angebotsseitige Beschränkungen erklärbar sind: Rehabilitationskliniken, Zentrumsversorgung, Rheumatologie, plastische Chirurgie, Pneumologie und Pflegeheime. Diese Gruppe von Leistungserbringern zeichnet sich folglich durch einen hohen Anteil an “nicht dringend angezeigten medizinischen Eingrien und Therapien” aus, welche zudem nicht bis zum Jahresende (innert ca. acht Monate) nachgeholt wurden. Einen substanziellen Anteil nachfrageseitig getriebener Kostenreduktionen weisen die Leistungserbringer Chiropraktoren, psychiatrische Kliniken, Physiotherapeut:innen und Ergotherapeut:innen auf. Diese nachfrageseitigen Effekte sind ggf. ein Indikator dafür, wie die Versicherten den Wert von bestimmten Gesundheitsdienstleistungen wahrnehmen. Hohe nachfrageseitige Effekte sind hier ggf. mit einem geringeren Wert für die Versicherten in Zusammenhang zu bringen. Die Ergebnisse erlauben so eine fokussiertere Herangehensweise bei einer Detailanalyse; jedoch lassen sie keine Aussage darüber zu, welche Leistungen medizinisch “nötig” und welche “unnötig” sind.

2020/2021, b = −0.133) across the five-year span in both datasets. Using a subset of n = 111 German participants surveyed over two waves, we found the indirect effect confirmed over time with identity leadership (at T1) predicting team identification and, in turn, burnout, three months later. Finally, we explored whether there could be a “too-much-of-a-good-thing” effect for identity leadership. Speaking against this, we found a u-shaped quadratic effect whereby ratings of identity leadership at the upper end of the distribution were related to even stronger team identification and a stronger indirect effect on reduced burnout. Do leaders who build a sense of shared social identity in their teams thereby protect them from the adverse effects of workplace stress? This is a question that the present paper explores by testing the hypothesis that identity leadership contributes to stronger team identification among employees and, through this, is associated with reduced burnout. We tested this model with unique datasets from the Global Identity Leadership Development (GILD) project with participants from all inhabited continents. We compared two datasets from 2016/2017 (n = 5290 28 countries) and found very similar levels of identity leadership, team identification and burnout across the five years. An inspection of the 2020/2021 data at the onset of and later in the COVID-19 pandemic showed stable identity leadership levels and slightly higher levels of both burnout and team identification. Supporting our hypotheses, we found almost identical indirect effects (2016/2017, b = −0.132 20 countries) and 2020/2021 (n = 7294