Humans are bad at assessing risk even in the best of times. During a pandemic – when the disease is unfamiliar, people are isolated and stressed, and the death toll is rising – our risk perception becomes even more distorted. This is a recipe for disastrous policy mistakes.

A new working paper by Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Michael Weber use a repeated large-scale survey of (representative) households in the Nielsen Homescan panel to characterize how labor markets are being affected by the covid-19 pandemic. There is some evidence of an effect on early retirement choices.

An increasing number of family firms choose to select a non-family CEO for the highest executive office when there is no suitable family member available. A recent example of this is the Swedish retail giant H&M where the third generation family member Karl-Johan Persson recently handed over to the non-family CEO Helena Helmersson. However, appointing a non-family CEO in a family firm tends to give rise to tensions.

How flexible are you when working from home? Researcher Dr. Lena Lid Falkman addresses the need to set up customized strategies that can help you line up healthy boundaries to reach more productive days.

Sara Rosengren was invited to SVT Morgonstudion to comment on the tough times for physical stores in city centres.

Demand for leadership is always greatest during a crisis. But what characterizes strong leadership? Two leadership researchers from the Stockholm School of Economics take a look at why leadership in Sweden stands out from the rest of the world.

The students in the IKEA Retail Club had a workshop on sustainability.

The State of the Union Secretariat live-streams this year's special online edition of the conference: “Europe: Managing the COVID-19 Crisis”, this coming Friday on 8 May.

In a recent working paper entitled "Optimal epidemic suppression under an ICU constraint", network members Laurent Miclo, Daniel Spiro and Jörgen Weibull analyze this question and show that "flattening the curve" is not theoretically optimal, instead one should "fill the box".

H&M’s Retail Club last activity for the year was a workshop focusing on the expansion of two brands within H&M’s portfolio. The workshop took place via Teams.