Is COVID-19 enough? Which underestimated conditions characterise the adoption of complex information infrastructures in small and medium-sized enterprises.

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has forced firms to leverage information and digital technologies to resist its disruptive effects. The shift to digital, however, requires the availability of information infrastructure, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), that can enable effective digitisation of processes and practices. This paper investigates the role of the pandemic crisis on boosting intentions to adopt ERP systems in SMEs by mitigating the barrier factors that hinder their adoption.

Determinants of life expectancy at birth: a longitudinal study on OECD countries.

This paper analyses the influence of several determinants on life expectancy at birth in 36 OECD countries over the 1999-2018 period. We utilized a cross-country fixed-effects multiple regression analysis with year and country dummies and used dynamic models, backward stepwise selection, and Arellano-Bond estimators to treat potential endogeneity issues. The results show the influence of per capita health-care expenditure, incidence of out-of-pocket expenditure, physician density, hospital bed density, social spending, GDP level, participation ratio to labour, prevalence of chronic respiratory diseases, temperature, and total size of the population on life expectancy at birth.