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The city of Christchurch, New Zealand, incurred significant damage due to a series of earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. The city had, by the late 2010s, regained economic and social normalcy after a sustained period of rebuilding and economic recovery. Through the concerted rebuilding effort, a modern central business district (CBD) with redesigned infrastructure and amenities was developed. The Christchurch rebuild was underpinned by a commitment of urban planners to an open and connected city, including the use of innovative technologies to gather, use and share data. As was the case elsewhere, the COVID-19 pandemic brought about significant disruptions to social and economic life in Christchurch. Border closures, lockdowns, trading limitations and other restrictions on movement led to changes in traditional consumer behaviors and affected the retail sector's resilience. In this study, we used CBD pedestrian traffic data gathered from various locations to predict changes in retail spending and identify recovery implications through the lens of retail resilience. We found that the COVID-19 pandemic and its related lockdowns have driven a substantive change in the behavioral patterns of city users. The implications for resilient retail, sustainable policy and further research are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This case study examines Marriott Corporation's large and successful spinoff between 1993 and 1995 and the concomitant adoption of a corporate ALFO strategy enabled by the transfer of assets and debt between the two entities. As an example of corporate restructuring, it involves changing ownership, operational structure, or business activities within a corporation in order to improve shareholder performance. Methods: Key directional changes in Marriott's history that have changed the structure of the business is used to examine the spinoff and ALFO strategy adaptation. Results: Marriot have been characterised by a small number of significant and foresightful innovations. There was a great deal of importance attached to the company's move away from food service and towards accommodation in the future. During the early stages of the company's existence, the company was located near Marriott's Bethesda headquarters and was headed by the founder's oldest son. There is no doubt that these investments have been probing in nature in the recent past, but they are significant in terms of scale and commitment in the future. Implications: Marriott's success can be attributed to the fact that the company has a flexible corporate strategy that focuses on high growth and high yield business opportunities, as well as the willingness to dispose of assets that don't provide this outcome. As a result of this focus, the company was able to grow globally from the 1990s onwards. Ultimately, it can be said that the company's success can be attributed to the fact that it has adapted appropriately and successfully to changing operational and industry realities over the course of many decades, especially as exigencies in the asset and debt markets rendered the portfolio structure it had developed over so many decades unsustainable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguably, the audit course is one of the most challenging as it links prior accounting knowledge with new audit knowledge that students are generally not exposed to. A mini‐audit group project was implemented at a New Zealand university, and a learning approach and learning experience survey instrument was administered. Responses from 98 students suggest that they perceived the learning experience positively and were encouraged to adopt a deep approach to learning. The findings have implications for accounting educators in the design and development of learning and assessment strategies in an audit course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New data and modeling approaches are improving the usefulness of Internet search data for forecasting inbound tourist arrivals. Previous research has focused on Google Trends as a source of search data to augment tourism forecasting capabilities. In the context of rapidly increasing Chinese outbound tourism Google data lacks the market penetration in China to produce reliable auxiliary data for tourism forecasting. This short paper provides evidence of the usefulness of Baidu search data in predicting Chinese inbound tourist arrivals into a specific region in New Zealand. It also compares three modeling approaches, finding a Vector Autoregressive approach the most useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Panic buying and hoarding behavior is a significant component of crisis- and disaster-related consumption displacement that has received considerable attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding such purchasing and stockpiling behavior provides critical information for government, disaster managers and the retail sector, as well as policy makers to adjust crisis response strategies and to better understand disaster management, including preparedness and response strategies. This study examines consumer purchasing behavior, retail spending and transactional data for different retail sectors between January 2017 and December 2020 using data for the greater Christchurch region in New Zealand. Once COVID-19-related panic buying began, overall spending increased sharply in anticipation of lockdowns. Transactional spending increased and subsided only slowly to a level higher than pre lockdown. The magnitude of the panic buying event far exceeded historical seasonal patterns of consumer spending outside of Christmas, Easter and Black Friday, although daily spending levels were comparable to such consumption events. The results of the study highlight the importance of comparing panic buying to other events in terms of purchasing motivations and also considering that so-called panic buying may contribute to greater individual and household resilience. The volume of sales alone is not adequate to define panic buying. Instead, the extent of divergence from the normal daily spending value per retail transaction of a given population provides a much more accurate characteristic of panic buying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades, the retail sector has experienced unprecedented upheaval, having severe implications for economic development and sustenance of traditional inner-city retail districts. In the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, this effect has been exacerbated by a series of earthquakes in 2010/2011 which destroyed much of the traditional retail precinct of the city. After extensive rebuild activity of the city's infrastructure, the momentum of retailers returning to the inner city was initially sluggish but eventually gathered speed supported by increased international visitation. In early 2020, the return to retail normality came to an abrupt halt after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study uses spending and transaction data to analyze the compounding impact of the earthquake's aftermath, shift to online shopping, and the retail disruption in the Christchurch central retail precinct because of COVID-19. The findings illustrate how consumers through their spending respond to different types of external shocks, altering their consumption patterns and retail mode (offline and online) to cope with an ever-changing retail landscape. Each event triggers different spending patterns that have some similarities but also stark differences, having implications for a sustainable and resilient retail industry in Christchurch. Implications for urban retail precinct development are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were significant restrictions on the transportation of food products in Indonesia. The research objective of this study was to investigate the extent to which these restrictions impacted changes in marketing margins at the provincial level in Indonesia. The approach taken was through the examination of trade and freight margin statistical data before the pandemic (2019) and after the pandemic (2020) across a number of different commodity markets: rice, shallots, red chilli pepper, beef, chicken meat and eggs, sugar, and cooking oil. The evidence indicates that the pandemic brought a rapid rise in Indonesian domestic prices as a result of purchasing panic at its start. But after the imposition of transportation restrictions, there were wide variations: some durable food options experienced increased marketing margins, whereas non-durables tended to experience decreased marketing margins in some regions, as fresh products such as red chillies and shallots were discarded as a result of declining consumer purchasing power. The conclusion for policymakers is that any future restrictions should take into account this likely difference in response, in order to minimise economic disruption by calibrating support along the supply chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uncertainty and unpredictability are the main characteristics of a crisis: the Covid-19 pandemic was definitely characterised by these two issues. During the Covid-19 pandemic, people experienced a very high level of fear that affected their behaviour in several dimensions of their lives, including their buying habits. Retailing was one of the most affected industries due to government health regulations and people's fears and emotions. In such tumultuous times, organizational legitimacy plays a crucial role since consumers tend to interact with legitimate organizations, avoiding companies that are not fulfilling their expectations and are not aligned with the accepted social norms. The objective of this research is to understand how uncertainty and crisis may affect consumer behaviour taking into account their emotional conditioning. Specifically, we measured the impact on three different groups of people based on their relationship with the virus: those infected, those uninfected, and those with long-Covid sequelae. We conducted an empirical study in June 2022 on a sample of 515 individuals from the above groups. Our findings revealed that the effects of risk perception and legitimacy are significantly different and that these factors affect individuals purchase intention. The research findings contribute to consumer behaviour theories and offer practical insights for marketing professionals and policymakers in crisis situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to examine the moderating role of institutional theory in the association between participative leadership style and various outcomes, such as employee loyalty and job performance in organizations. A cross-sectional research design was employed, where data were gathered from 347 participants from all managerial levels in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The findings demonstrated how the level of complexity of the institutional theory reduces the positive relationship between participative leadership style and employee loyalty, negatively affecting job performance. The current study contributes to the existing leadership literature by showing that participatory leaders do not behave similarly across various degrees of institutional theory complexity. The findings suggest that the higher the complexity of institutionalism, the wider the gap between leaders and subordinates, so implementing the participative style may become problematic in some circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their significant role in the performance of hotel industry, hotel workers are suffering from high rates of turnover, due to several reasons, particularly amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has had numerous negative consequences on hotel workers, including their intention to leave the job or/and career. This study is an attempt to investigate the impact of transformational leadership on turnover intention amid COVID-19 and how psychological safety can intermediate this relationship. The study used a quantitative research approach via a pre-test instrument, self-distributed and collected from hotel workers at different regions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Valid responses from 1228 workers, analyzed through a structural equation modeling (SEM) of AMOS version 23, showed that transformational leadership has a significant negative impact on turnover intention as hypothesized. Nevertheless, it has a significant positive impact on psychological safety, whereas psychological safety has a significant negative impact on turnover intention. The most important finding of this study was the perfect mediating effect of psychological safety in the link between transformational leadership and workers' turnover intention. This finding confirms that psychological safety has the ability to change the above-mentioned link. In other words, the presence of psychological safety ensures negative turnover intention, even if transformational leadership practices do not exist. The findings have implications for scholars and practitioners, especially in tourism and hotel context, in relation to the role of psychological safety and transformational leadership in creating a sustainable working environment to maintain a lower turnover intention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disasters are often followed by a large-scale stimulus supporting the economy through the built environment, which can last years. During this time, official economic indicators tend to suggest the economy is doing well, but as activity winds down, the sentiment can quickly change. In response to the damaging 2011 earthquakes in Canterbury, New Zealand, the regional economy outpaced national economic growth rates for several years during the rebuild. The repair work on the built environment created years of elevated building activity. However, after the peak of the rebuilding activity, as economic and employment growth retracts below national growth, we are left with the question of how the underlying economy performs during large scale stimulus activity in the built environment. This paper assesses the performance of the underlying economy by quantifying the usual, demand-driven level of building activity at this time. Applying an Input–Output approach and excluding the economic benefit gained from the investment stimulus reveals the performance of the underlying economy. The results reveal a strong growing underlying economy, and while convergence was expected as the stimulus slowed down, the results found that growth had already crossed over for some time. The results reveal that the investment stimulus provides an initial 1.5% to 2% growth buffer from the underlying economy before the growth rates cross over. This supports short-term economic recovery and enables the underlying economy to transition away from a significant rebuild stimulus. Once the growth crosses over, five years after the disaster, economic growth in the underlying economy remains buoyant even if official regional economic data suggest otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]