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During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, in France, people cleared the shelves of butter; in Italy, it was pasta; in Great Britain, it was chicken. While there may be cultural disagreement on what is essential, clearly, in times of crisis, consumers stockpile the 'essentials'. We address the problem of "panic buying", which is characterized by increasing demand in the face of diminishing inventory. In such cases, prices may hike and firms (retailers) selling the high-demand product are quantity takers, in terms of supply, and price setters. We consider a manufacturer who sells a scarce product to a single retailer. The retailer seeks to maximize her profit, while in contrast, the manufacturer pursues a social objective of regulating and lowering the amount that the end customer (consumer) pays (including the cost of traveling to obtain the scarce product). By analyzing the competition between the two parties, retailer and manufacturer, we find that even when the regulator (manufacturer) makes a significant social commitment, neither subsidizing the retailer nor subsidizing the consumers necessarily curbs price hikes. Furthermore, there is a threshold ratio (i.e., proportion of the end price subsidized by the regulator) that determines the minimal budget that the regulator would need to allocate in order for subsidization to make a difference to consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present study was to examine parental experiences of homeschooling during the COVID-19 pandemic in families with or without a child with a mental health condition across Europe. The study included 6720 parents recruited through schools, patient organizations and social media platforms (2002 parents with a child with a mental health condition and 4718 without) from seven European countries: the UK (n = 508), Sweden (n = 1436), Spain (n = 1491), Belgium (n = 508), the Netherlands (n = 324), Germany (n = 1662) and Italy (n = 794). Many parents reported negative effects of homeschooling for themselves and their child, and many found homeschooling to be of poor quality, with insufficient support from schools. In most countries, contact with teachers was limited, leaving parents with primary responsibility for managing homeschooling. Parents also reported increased levels of stress, worry, social isolation, and domestic conflict. A small number of parents reported increased parental alcohol/drug use. Some differences were found between countries and some negative experiences were more common in families with a child with a mental health condition. However, differences between countries and between families with and without a mental health condition were generally small, indicating that many parents across countries reported negative experiences. Some parents also reported positive experiences of homeschooling. The adverse effects of homeschooling will likely have a long-term impact and contribute to increased inequalities. Given that school closures may be less effective than other interventions, policymakers need to carefully consider the negative consequences of homeschooling during additional waves of the COVID-19 pandemic and future pandemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study compares the mechanisms through which employers in England, Wales and Italy may be legally entitled to unilaterally vary the terms of their employment contracts due to the coronavirus pandemic and developing a taxonomy, through which a meaningful side-by-side comparison of these very different jurisdictions can be constructed. To attain the core purpose of this research, the study relied on the comparative legal research method. Despite the fundamental differences between the employment law regimes of the three countries; the mechanisms through which employers from these jurisdictions can vary the terms of their employment relationships in response to COVID-19 fall into one of these categories, force majeure mechanisms; flexibility mechanisms; hardship mechanisms or mechanisms facilitating bilateral variations tantamount to unilateral variations. The study concluded that there are fundamental differences between the employment law regimes that operate respectively in England and Wales and in Italy. England and Wales is a common law jurisdiction, whereas Italy is a civil law jurisdiction; Italy's labour market is significantly more tightly regulated than England's; in England and Wales, the employment contract regulates the employment relationship, whereas in Italy the individual employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Substantial research is available on detecting influencers on social media platforms. In contrast, comparatively few studies exists on the role of online activists, defined informally as users who actively participate in socially-minded online campaigns. Automatically discovering activists who can potentially be approached by organisations that promote social campaigns is important, but not easy, as they are typically active only locally, and, unlike influencers, they are not central to large social media networks. We make the hypothesis that such interesting users can be found on Twitter within temporally and spatially localised contexts. We define these as small but topical fragments of the network, containing interactions about social events or campaigns with a significant online footprint. To explore this hypothesis, we have designed an iterative discovery pipeline consisting of two alternating phases of user discovery and context discovery. Multiple iterations of the pipeline result in a growing dataset of user profiles for activists, as well as growing set of online social contexts. This mode of exploration differs significantly from prior techniques that focus on influencers, and presents unique challenges because of the weak online signal available to detect activists. The paper describes the design and implementation of the pipeline as a customisable software framework, where user-defined operational definitions of online activism can be explored. We present an empirical evaluation on two extensive case studies, one concerning healthcare-related campaigns in the UK during 2018, the other related to online activism in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]