The COVID-19 crisis has had a significant impact on UK craft breweries. In this paper we explore and assess the impact of COVID-19 on the UK craft beer sector from a locational perspective, targeting entrepreneurial responses from breweries within and across the urban, suburban and rural dimensions. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative data collected between 2015 and 2022, we identify a marked geographical contextualization in terms of how UK craft breweries adapted and responded to the pandemic crisis, which explains how location shaped and still shape breweries’ strategies in a post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’ world.

We examine how institutional saving mechanisms influence retirement saving decisions under bounded rationality and income risk. Using a life-cycle experiment with habit formation and loss aversion, we test mandatory and voluntary binding savings under deterministic and stochastic income. Voluntary commitment improves saving performance only when income is predictable; under uncertainty, it fails to improve performance. Mandatory savings do not raise total saving, as participants reduce voluntary contributions. These results emphasize the role of income smoothing in enabling behavioral interventions to improve long-term financial outcomes.

In this paper, we provide unique experimental evidence of depositors’ behaviour in presence of a possibility to convert commercial bank deposits into central bank digital currency (CBDC). Theoretically and experimentally we analyse whether such an option incentivises bank runs. We find that the availability of the deposit conversion option does not lead to a significant outflow of deposits. However, when conversion is restricted, depositors are eager to actively use it as a coordination tool.