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Today’s organizations have to remain alert and adaptive to unforeseen events, such as external crises, which create increased uncertainty among their workforce and pose immediate threats to the organizations’ performance and viability. However, with the recent COVID-19 pandemic, organizations suddenly have to navigate the unprecedented and thereby find new solutions to challenges arising across many areas of their operations. In this article, we discusses some of these challenges, focusing on the implications COVID-19 has for human resource management (HRM) as organizations help their workforce cope with and adjust to their newly altered work environment. In addition, we propose several avenues for future research and advocate for an integrated research agenda for tackling the challenges discussed.

With looming uncertainties and disruptions in today’s global supply chains, such as lockdown measures to contain COVID-19, supply chain resilience has gained considerable attention recently. While decision-makers in procurement have emphasized the importance of traditional risk assessment, its shortcomings can be complemented by resilience. However, while most resilience studies are too qualitative in nature and abstract to inform supplier decisions, many quantitative resilience studies frequently rely on complex and impractical operations research models fed with simulated supplier data. Thus there is the need for an integrative, intermediate way for the practical and automated prediction of resilience with real-world data. We therefore propose a random forest-based supervised learning method to predict supplier resilience, outperforming the current human benchmark evaluation by 139 percent. The model is trained on both internal ERP data and publicly available secondary data to help assess suppliers in a pre-screening step, before deciding which supplier to select for a specific product. The results of this study are to be integrated into a software tool developed for measuring and tracking the total cost of supply chain resilience from the perspective of purchasing decisions.

Die Autoren, die sich bereits im Vorfeld der ersten Volksabstimmung über das Covid-19-Gesetz ausführlich zum Verhältnis von dringlicher Gesetzgebung und direkter Demokratie geäussert haben, setzen sich anlässlich der Volksabstimmung über die Änderung vom 19. März 2021 mit den staatsrechtlichen Herausforderungen auseinander, die das Covid-19-Gesetz stellt, und werfen noch einmal einen Blick auf die Probleme, die ein nachträgliches Referendum mit sich bringen kann.

Since the European debt crisis economists and politicians discuss intensively the sovereign-bank nexus. The high activity in sovereign bond issuance required to mitigate the burden of the Covid19 crisis will rather intensify this debate than calm it down. Surprisingly, however, we still have only limited knowledge about the impact of a home bias in sovereign exposure on bank stability. This paper provides a new way to use European stress test data to study this relationship. In addition, we explore the effect on a bank’s probability of default if the existing capital requirement privilege for EU sovereign exposures were abolished. Our results support the conceptual idea behind the nexus theory. Interestingly, the effect of a home bias on bank stability is contingent on the home country’s solvency. If the home country is sufficiently solvent, investments in home sovereign bonds may improve bank stability. The findings clearly support the benefits of additional CET1 capital buffers. Regulation focusing on the home bias should account for heterogeneous effects depending on the home country’s solvency.

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.

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.

Die Märkte für Gewerbeimmobilien, Wohnliegenschaften sowie Hypotheken haben sich direkt zu Beginn der Covid-19-Pandemie mit dem Virus infiziert. Der neuartige Erreger ist dabei ein wahrer Stresstest für Immunabwehr dieser als krisenfest geltenden Immobilien. Dabei zeigen sich milde und schwerere Krisenverläufe bei den einzelnen Immobilienarten sowie unterschiedliche Genesungswege.

In a two-part series, Prof. Erik Hofmann from the Institute of Supply Chain Management analyses the impact of COVID-19 on procurement and logistics in Switzerland. Part II: long-term effects and new trends (e.g. deglobalization, nearshoring, reshoring, digitalization, industry4.0, risk management, decentralization, supply chain viability management, sustainability, supply chain finance, bullwhip effect, recovery phase, post-Corona crisis, resilience).