Congratulation to Wang Yan, a second-year Ph.D. in Management Studies student, on her recent publication “Government Policies, National Culture and Social Distancing During the First Wave of the COVID-19 pandemic: International Evidence” in Safety Science.

Her article looks to see which, a nation’s culture or government restrictions, have a larger impact on social distancing measures taken to help fight against the first wave of COVID-19.  This is an excellent achievement especially since her article is published in Safety Science, an ABCD journal ranking.  It is SCI Q1 journal with an impact factor of 4.105. 

Well done Wang Yan!

You can find the abstract from her paper below.
“We assess the impact of national culture and government policies on social distancing to fight COVID-19 across major economies during the first wave of the pandemic. To do so, we regress government stringency index from Oxford COVID-19 government response tracker together with Hofstede’s national culture scores on social distancing data from Google mobility reports. We find that government stringency has a far larger impact on social distancing than national culture. Social distancing increases with government stringency. We find two cultural dimensions matter: social distancing decreases with ‘Long-term Orientation’; the opposite is true for ‘Indulgence’. Our results convey that policymakers must act decisively rather than blaming the culture.”