The pandemic COVID-19 has severely affected the global economy. The strict lockdown measures have also changed the daily live, including consumer behavior in retail banking. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on consumer behavior in retail banking, with a special focus on the Romanian banking sector. To achieve our goal, we performed a survey among the Romanian consumers in retail banking, using as research method the field survey based on questionnaire. The final sample comprised 738 valid responses from the metropolitan area retail banking consumers. The research brings a fresh insight on retail banking services consumption during the pandemic and validates a conceptual model regarding the internet and mobile banking services acceptance. The research’ results highlighted, among others, that the variable concerning the perception of the COVID-19 pandemic effect on consumers’ lifestyle has a direct and positive influence on the variable regarding the attitude toward internet and mobile banking services, mediated by other variables like safety of internet and mobile banking use and trust in banks. Several social and managerial implications are also discussed, because it is possible that the tendency to use internet and mobile banking services will prevail even after the post pandemic stage, as new consumption behavior models are developing. Banks in Romania should increase their initiatives to offer financial education courses and online tutorials to familiarize customers with the use of digital channels. Banks should also improve communication with clients and design new products and services to increase the attractiveness of saving process. They should demonstrate flexibility in negotiating lending and refinancing conditions as well.

In this increasingly globalized era, foreign direct investments are considered to be one of the most important sources of external financing for all countries. This paper investigates the causal relationship between trade openness and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in Romania during the period 1997–2019. Throughout this study, Trade Openness is the main independent variable, and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Real Effective Exchange Rate (EXR), Inflation (INF), and Education (EDU) act as control variables for investigating the relationships between trade openness (TOP) and FDI inflow in Romania. The Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bounds test procedure was adopted to achieve the above-mentioned objective. Trade openness has negative and statistically significant long-run and short-run relationships with FDI inflows in Romania throughout the period. Trade openness negatively affects the FDI inflow, which suggest that the higher the level of openness is, the less likely it is that FDI will be attracted in the long run. The result of the Granger causality test indicated that Romania has a unidirectional relationship between trade openness and FDI. It also showed that the direction of causality ran from FDI to trade openness.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the impact of telework on the work-life balance, productivity, and health of different generations of Romanian employees. Qualitative and quantitative methods provide the means to exploit the richness of data and deepen the understanding of the phenomenon studied. The quantitative data derived from a research instrument was associated with qualitative data collection. Quantitative research was conducted to achieve the stated purpose using the survey method, the number of respondents being 1098 persons. The research tool was an online questionnaire. Results highlight how telework affected each generation of employees. The satisfaction towards teleworking achieved by Generation Z and Baby Boomers is, on average, higher than that of Generation Y and X. The differences between the age groups (Generation Z, Y, X, and Baby Boomers) in terms of telework satisfaction levels were also tested, considering each of the three aspects examined and presented in the article’s title. At the conceptual level, research brings a new methodological approach as an element of originality that can be used for similar future research. Moreover, new concepts on the effects of telework on employees were connected and analysed simultaneously: work-life balance, productivity, and health of employees during teleworking. At the operational level, this type of research can determine the degree of satisfaction of employees in different companies/organizations and identify solutions to increase employee engagement.

In the context created by the COVID-19 pandemic, the aim of the research in this article is to highlight how the consumer experience is constructed, starting from the consumer’s attitudes—which we consider to be implicitly positive—and from the formation of habits of using mobile applications for food supply. Data were collected from 610 people—users of applications for food delivery in urban areas—in the spring of 2021, using a quantitative type of research in the form of a field survey based on questionnaire completion; for the model validation, we used confirmatory factor analysis. The online questionnaire link was sent out in April 2021, followed by the consumers’ completion of the questionnaire in the same month. The proposed theoretical model highlights the influence of variables that are specific for technology acceptance models on the perceived utility and development of implicit attitudes based on it, as well as the habits of using the application. The results of the research validate the proposed model, showing that attitudes in the form of an implicit-type attitudes developed in time are influencing habits and aid the development of a certain usage behavior depicted by a consumption experience that has specific content. Our paper contributes to a better understanding of the consumer experience development process within the context of technology acceptance in the field of food delivery services, emphasizing the importance of satisfying hedonic motivations as an integral part of the compensatory mechanisms determined by the effects of the pandemic.

Food security is a complex phenomenon that determines multiple concerns and initiatives worldwide. The research presented in this paper aims to analyze the food security of children in rural areas, following a project funded by the European Union (EU). The main objective of the research is to investigate the opportunity to implement sustainable programs to ensure hot meals for children in schools located in rural areas of Romania. No similar academic studies were conducted in Romania focused on food security from an economic perspective. An exploratory qualitative research methodology was chosen based on in-depth nondirective interviews among experts. The research results highlight the necessity of optimizing the relationship between the needs of children in rural areas and the food resources available to them within families and schools. The results also suggest that serving hot meals in primary schools in needy areas is appropriate, as poor nutrition among children has negative effects on the educational process and on their long-term development. The conclusions of this paper lead to managerial implications for policymakers wishing to assess the impact of projects employed in schools financed by national and EU funds.