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The corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic had devastating impact on sporting activities, education and global health. Given the impact of the pandemic-related restrictions and closed fitness centers and other sports facilities, the coping strategies adopted by athletes while training at home to continue their training remain an important question. The purpose of this review is to examine the findings of key studies focusing on the impact of the pandemic on sport training.

A review was conducted on Google Scholar, Scopus and PubMed to identify articles on physical activity and sport training during the COVID-19 pandemic. Eligibility criteria included peer-reviewed empirical and quantitative studies. The selected articles were reviewed using contextual analysis.

The COVID-19 pandemic had devastating impact on sports activities globally. Studies evaluating the influence of the pandemic on sports training have revealed abysmal decline in training volume and general physical fitness, limited access to facilities and equipment and significant reduction in training load. The damage of the pandemic on the sporting world should serve as a guide for proactive steps that should be taken to prevent recurrence of a similar calamity.

This paper highlights important lessons to be learned from the lockdown imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic by stakeholders in sport, including the importance of improvisation of sports facilities by utilizing available spaces at home and neighborhood for physical training.

This chapter focuses on discussing the Malaysian government's ‘No Plastic Bag Day’ campaign. This is due to the fact that consumers are accustomed to use plastic bag in their daily life activities. However, considering the hazardous impact on the environment, the government has banned the use of plastic bag in most of the states. While many consumers accepted this new rule whole-heartedly, many are still struggling to adopt it. This chapter highlights its journey of implementation and challenges pertaining to this sustainability marketing campaign in Malaysia.

This paper aims to look at the effects of the closing call auction on market quality and behavior by using the natural experiment of its introduction at the Abu Dhabi Stock Exchange.

Current paper studies the effect of closing call auction on various market quality factors such as liquidity, bid-ask spreads, volatility and market efficiency. Liquidity is proxied by trading volume. Bid-ask spreads provide a measure for the cost of trading in the market. Volatility is measured by using Parkinson’s (1980) volatility as in Huang and Tsai (2008). Last but not least, efficiency will be obtained by estimating a relative return dispersion measure as in Huang and Tsai (2008).

The introduction of the closing call auction leads to a significant decrease in the trading volume toward the end of the continuous trading. At the same time, trading activity taking place during the call auction significantly increases. This implies a redistribution of liquidity. The implementation of the closing call auction also improves market quality by reducing market inefficiency in terms of firm-specific noise. The study also documents that there exists no significant change in the cost of trading and intraday volatility in the post-period following the adoption of closing call auction.

This current study is the first one looking at this topic for the Abu Dhabi Stock Exchange. Specifically, this paper looks at the changes in trading volume, bid-ask spreads, intraday return volatility and market efficiency after the implementation of the closing call mechanism.

This case study focuses on basic business approaches in the decision-making by considering owners and stakeholders’ perspective in highlighting the related issues in customer service, marketing (marketing mix and product mix), strategy, business management and operational management of the sport business in the private sector of Abu Dhabi. At the end of this exercise, students should have a clear consideration of the following: understanding of the equestrian business products and services elements, description of the marketing mix the equestrian business products and services elements, definition of the product mix approach of the marketing mix in equestrian business management, distinguishing needs of product mix alternative decisions approach in equestrian business management in the private sector and labeling of two main customer services based issues and propose a solution using product mix alternatives approaches (expand/eliminate).

Mandara Equestrian Club (MEC) was the culmination of a dream for Faysal Urfali, a Lebanese entrepreneur, and his wife, who lived in (and loved) United Arab Emirates (UAE) for more than 20 years ago. The dream started in 2012, when the Urfali family was vacationing in Spain. They fell in love with the Arabian breed of horses, famous for their wide, flat forehead, soulful eyes, broad muzzle, erect ears, slender neck and flowing, shining mane. Arabian horses are also renowned for their beauty, loyalty, strength and intelligence. Arabian horses are an intrinsic part of Arabian tradition and heritage, always described in Arabic literature as a sign of pride, courage and dignity, in recitation legends of wars. The Urafalis did not have experience with horses during that period, but that did not stop them from starting an equine business in the UAE, specifically in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Urfali started MEC in Al Rahba City, a small town in the north site of Abu Dhabi, the Capital of UAE. At its inception in 2013, MEC was open only for private use. In 2014, Urfali decided to open the club to the public due to high demand from visitors and horses’ lovers who were visiting the place to see the horses and request horse rides. MEC carries forward Urfali’s passion for Arabian horses, as it specializes in the care and training of show horses. MEC also offers other equine activities and services for both horse owners and horseback riders. In early 2019, Urfali conducted a meeting to assess MEC’s financial statements and discuss daily business operations. The meeting determined that the club was facing several business challenges to address which, it needs some substantial changes in order to maintain its smooth-functioning. Challenges the club faced involved customer relationship management, customer attraction and skill shortages in the industry. Urfali understood that focusing on MEC as a business operation means raising the marker of success to more than just the fulfillment of a dream. Will MEC be able to keep its focus with such changes?

Undergraduate students majoring in Business Management, Marketing and Strategic Management.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of thin trading on the day‐of‐the‐week effect in the emerging equity markets of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Researchers have stated that emerging markets are typically characterized by low liquidity, thin trading and possibly less well‐informed investors with access to unreliable information and considerable volatility. It is well known that thin trading can affect the results of empirical studies on patterns of equity markets by introducing a serious bias into the results.

This study applies a stochastic dominance approach to detect the day‐of‐the‐week effect. The reason for utilizing this approach is that the parametric tests are not strictly appropriate for assets with non‐normally distributed returns. In fact, stochastic dominance is a useful tool for making comparisons among distributions without relying on parametric assumptions.

The findings indicate that there is day‐of‐the‐week effect in published daily prices, while daily effect vanishes when data are corrected to remove any measurement bias arising from thin trading. The stochastic dominance results show that the day‐of‐the‐week effect in the UAE equity markets is not present when we correct raw data for thin and infrequent trading.

There has been no research in the literature testing the day‐of‐the‐week effect on the emerging financial markets in the UAE. The study provides empirical evidence on their degree of market efficiency. If the day‐of‐the‐week effect exists, this means that the Abu Dhabi Securities Markets and the Dubai Financial Markets are inefficient. These results will help investors to develop a good investment strategy

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between a firm’s net trade cycle, its size and liquidity.

The relation between the firm’s net trade cycle and its liquidity is examined using Generalized Method of Moment Dynamic Panel-Data System Estimation with Robust Standard Errors for a sample of 5,802 US non-financial firms listed in the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange, NASDAQ Stock Market and Over the Counter Market for the period 1990-2004 (87,030 firm-year observations). The analysis is applied at the levels of the full sample and divisions of the sample by size.

The results show negative and significant relationship between net trade cycle, as a comprehensive measure of efficiency in working capital management, and liquidity for small firms.

Most of the existing literature focusses on the large firm’s experience of working capital management. Small firms generally face liquidity problems and have limited access to external capital, and studies on their efficiency in working capital management are scant. Thus the present study is useful in understanding the relation between the firm’s net trade cycle and liquidity of small firms.

This study aims to provide insights on the importance of reconfiguring new and existing enterprise resources in a heterogeneous manner. This will lead to improved efficiencies, strategies and resource usage as such leading to more synergetic and innovative outcomes. This study highlights the importance of dynamic capabilities (DC) during the process of resources recombination (RR). It suggests that DC can be a source of competitive advantage, but the effect is contingent on the RR capabilities of enterprises.

Data were obtained from 349 faculty members of higher education institutions (HEIs) from seven states in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) using SmartPLS was employed as a statistical tool to analyze the structural model.

The findings confirm the proposed role of DC in the realization of RR, in integrating and reconfiguring internal and external organizational skills and resources for efficiency and performance, since DC helps RR to reconfigure the resource base by extending, creating, and modifying innovative RRs.

The study has important implications for resource managers and policymakers of HEIs. By prioritizing DC, firms can develop novel products and services as a result of a heterogenous mix of new RR. Additionally, since firms have limited resources in ever-changing, complex environmental conditions, this study provides explicit directions on how enterprises can strategically manage their resources in an innovative manner to attain a sustainable competitive advantage.

Insights from the DC and RR perspective in HEI sectors, particularly in the Middle East region, are scarce. This is the first empirical study to delve in this area and exemplify the relationship between these significant constructs.