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Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic crisis is considered as one of the worst global recessions in history, caused by non-economic factors such as the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic crisis has increased the financial stability and vulnerability across different markets and sectors. These changes required the central banks, governments, and other authorities to take a variety of policy assistance steps to help limit immediate financial stability threats. The goal of this study is to examine how the monetary policies of the Republic of North Macedonia and Republic of Albania, as one of the two key macroeconomic policies, have reacted in response to COVID 19 for the year 2020. This study looks at how the central banks of both countries have altered conventional and unconventional monetary policy tools to combat the pandemic. The analysis is based on the data published by the monetary officials in both countries. The results show that interbank interest rates in the Republic of North Macedonia and Republic of Albania were reduced from 2.00% to 1.50% and from 1.00% to 0.50%, respectively, while overnight loan interest rates were reduced from 2.50% to 2.00% and from 1.90% to 0.90%, respectively. An overview of the unconventional measures is also presented.

This study aims to analyse how the monetary policies of the Republic of North Macedonia and the Republic of Albania, as one of the two critical macroeconomic policies, have reacted in response to COVID-19 for the year 2020. Last year, the year 2020, the pandemic caused these two countries to react through monetary policy. This research examines how central banks of both countries have changed traditional monetary policy tools for tackling the pandemic, starting with open market operations, required reserve ratio, the overnight loans interest rate, and the available deposits interest rate. The research continues with analyzing whether they were used and what non-traditional tools were applied in that period. The study analysis concludes which monetary policies have been pursued in the Republic of North Macedonia and the Republic of Albania, whether there have been non-traditional tools and how the scope for interbank interest rate volatility has changed. Our study revealed that both countries had pursued an expansive monetary policy, there were also non-traditional tools, and the scope for interbank interest rate volatility has shifted towards narrowing. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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The "Financial Behavior" in the field of "decision making" is the topic that awarded the economist Richard H. Thaler the Nobel Prize in 2017. According to him, after many investigations made on human decisions, it is noticed that they often depend on nature, intuition, habits, cognitive biases, emotional biases which lead the investor to wrong decisions. Given that the investments play an important and central role in the economy, the main purpose of the paper is to analyze the investment decision making process based on emotional bias, or more specifically the overconfidence bias. This study captures the impact of gender, and level of education on overconfidence during investment decision making in North Macedonia. The results show that investors' decisions were significantly influenced by the overconfidence bias. Although men and women are found to be overconfident, studies have shown that the degree of overconfidence varies among them and men are more overconfident than women. Also, overconfidence increases with the level of education. Based on the results certain recommendations are provided in order to assist future investment decision-making processes by notifying and eliminating the overconfidence bias identified during this research as a key factor leading to wrong and failing, non-rational investment decision making.