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A stylized fact in finance literature is the belief in positive relationship between ex ante return and risk. Hence, a rational investor, by utility preference axiom can only consider committing fund in asset which promises commensurate higher return for higher risk. Questions have been asked as to whether this holds true across securities, sectors and markets. Empirical evidence appears less convincing, especially in developing markets. Accordingly, the author investigates the nature of reward for taking risk in the Nigerian Capital Market within the context of individual assets and markets.

The author employed ex post design to collect weekly stock prices of firms listed on the Premium Board of Nigerian Stock Exchange for period 2014–2022 to attempt to answer research questions. Data were analyzed using a unique M Vec TGarch-in-Mean model considered to be robust in handling many assets, and hence portfolio management.

The study found that idea of risk-expected return trade-off is perhaps more general than as depicted by traditional finance literature. The regression revealed that conditional variance and covariance risks reveal minimal or no differences in sign and sizes of coefficients. However, standard errors were also found to be large suggesting somewhat inconclusive evidence of existence of defined incentive structure for taking additional risk in the market.

In terms of choice of methodology and outcomes, this research adds substantial value to body of knowledge. The adapted multivariate model used in this paper is a rare approach especially for management of portfolios in developing markets. Remarkably, the research found empirical evidence that positive risk-expected return trade-off, as known in mainstream literature, is not supported especially using a typical developing country data.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the recovery and resilience tourism strategies and possible future development of four main Chinese tourism cities.

The authors collected data from the official accounts of tourism administrations of these cities, tourist attractions and opinions from media and newspapers in Sina Weibo platform. The authors adopted an inductive approach in observing relevant social media posts and applied content analysis to identify main China’s tourism prevention and recovery strategies.

During the mass pandemic infection period, top-down prevention and control measures were implemented by the Chinese central and local governments, with feasible and regional recovery policies and protocols being adapted according to local situations. Measures related to tourism industrial re-employment, improvement of international images and governmental financial supports to re-boost local tourism in Chinese cities were paid great attention. Digitalization, close-to-nature and cultural heritages became important factors in the future development of China’s tourism. Dark tourism, as a potential tourism recovery strategy, also obtained huge emergence, for the memory of people deceased in the pandemic and for the inheritance of national patriotism.

This study enriches the current literature in urban tourism recovery studies analyzing the specific case of Chinese tourism cities and fulfill some voids of previous research mostly focused on the first wave of the pandemic and the recovery strategies mainly of Western cities. It also provides valuable suggestions to tourism practitioners, destinations and urban cities in dealing with regional tourism recession and finding possible solutions for the scenario associated to the COVID-19 and other similar health crisis.

The purpose of this article is to present the results of empirical research concerning the identification of the impact of the transfer of companies from the alternative market to the regulated market of the Warsaw Stock Exchange on their operating and net performance.

The study was conducted based on the empirical data of the companies that changed the listing place on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Data regarding the years before the transfer were collected from the prospectuses of companies prepared mandatorily in connection with the transition to the regulated market. Data regarding the years of the event and subsequent years were obtained from companies' annual reports. As in other studies in the analysis, the operational metrics were used (operating return on sale, operating return on assets, total asset turnover), which was further extended to net profitability ratios (net return on ale, net return on asset, net return on equity). The significance analysis was based on the Student's t-test and Wilcoxon’s test.

The results show that before the transfer from the alternative market to the regulated market, companies improved financial performance. As a result of the change of listing venues, the results already collapsed in the year of the event. The downward trend continued in the following two years, with a noticeable improvement in the third year after the transfer.

The literature lacks such studies based on the Polish market. To the best knowledge of the author, this is one of the first studies in Poland showing the changes in operating and net performance of companies changing the stock listing venues. The research is based on a large group including all companies that have changed listing venues since the beginning of the alternative market in Poland. The article presents an original empirical result that can be used both by managers and investors in their decisions.

The study consists of a literature study and a case study. The need for a method via which to handle instruction complexity was identified in both studies. The proposed method was developed based on methods from the literature and experience from the case company.

The purpose of the study presented in this paper is to investigate how linking different maintenance domains in a modular maintenance instruction architecture can help reduce the complexity of maintenance instructions.

The proposed method combines knowledge from the operational and physical domains to reduce the number of instruction task variants. In a case study, the number of instruction task modules was reduced from 224 to 20, covering 83% of the maintenance performed on emergency shutdown valves.

The study showed that the other methods proposed within the body of maintenance literature mainly focus on the development of modular instructions, without the reduction of complexity and non-value-adding variation observed in the product architecture literature.

This paper aims to identify the effectiveness, student perceptions and impacts of integrating comics into the English as a foreign language (EFL) writing curriculum for undergraduate Ecuadorian polytechnic students.

This research followed a mixed method design to obtain quantitative information through a researcher-made survey and paired T-test, which would be corroborated by the qualitative data obtained from semistructured interviews.

From the descriptive and T-test results and the interview answers, it is concluded that students have a favorable view of the effectiveness of using comics to improve their writing skills. They also expressed their engagement and motivation to work with comics.

First, the research sample, comprised of 109 students, may restrict the generalizability of the findings beyond the specific context of this study. This constraint suggests caution in extrapolating these findings to broader student cohorts, emphasizing the need for larger-scale studies to validate the robustness and applicability of the outcomes. Second, the study’s focus solely on students from a polytechnic state university introduces a potential limitation concerning the diversity and representativeness of the participant pool. Consequently, the findings might be limited in their applicability and may not fully encompass students’ varied responses and attitudes from other educational backgrounds.

The scaffolding afforded by comics aligns with genre-based literacy perspectives, valuing instruction in textual genres and social purposes. From a practical pedagogical point of view, this paper’s results suggest the potential of comic narratives and storyboarding. Comics writing could be added to classroom activities to vibrantly aboard brainstorming, drafting and peer reviewing before dealing with higher-stakes assignments. Legitimizing alternative mediums like comics for academic writing tasks has social implications for promoting literacies in a multimedia world.

Writing comics nurtures multiliteracies aligned with participatory digital cultures by expanding traditional linguistic-centric norms. This multimodal composing can potentially increase access and representation and amplify voices across identities and cultures.

Although the paper addresses a topic that is not entirely novel in research, its originality lies in its focus on data originating from Ecuador, where specific cultural nuances and educational contexts may influence the effectiveness of using comics to enhance EFL writing skills. Thus, it fills a gap in the existing literature on this subject.

The paper aims to investigate the difference in total factor productivity (TFP) among those firms with and without outsourcing in a developing country like Vietnam. Also, it explores the effect of outsourcing activities on total factor productivity with a specified concentration on the Vietnamese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The panel data set of SMEs used in this study was originated from biannual surveys conducted under the collaboration between educational organizations and government agencies: Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), Department of Economics – the University of Copenhagen, the Institution of Labor Studies and Social Affairs (ILSSA) in the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA). In this study, the model is developed based on the production function in accordance with the model of Girma and Görg (2004). The firms’ TFP is the difference between the actual and the predicted output as with the approach by Levinsohn and Petrin (2003).

This study finds out that firms with outsourcing have higher total factor productivity than those without outsourcing activities. In addition, the more firms spend on outsourcing, the higher total factor productivity they can gain. Outsourcing to SMEs in a developing country can significantly increase its TFP by means of either maintaining core competencies or searching external resources in conducting some internal activities.

Although outsourcing has been widely applied by large firms, the research studying its impact on productivity at firm level is limited. Especially, this study can shed light on the impact for the case of SMEs in a developing economy.

This paper aims mainly at introducing applied statisticians and econometricians to the current research methodology with non-Euclidean data sets. Specifically, it provides the basis and rationale for statistics in Wasserstein space, where the metric on probability measures is taken as a Wasserstein metric arising from optimal transport theory.

The authors spell out the basis and rationale for using Wasserstein metrics on the data space of (random) probability measures.

In elaborating the new statistical analysis of non-Euclidean data sets, the paper illustrates the generalization of traditional aspects of statistical inference following Frechet's program.

Besides the elaboration of research methodology for a new data analysis, the paper discusses the applications of Wasserstein metrics to the robustness of financial risk measures.

The study's objective is to examine the relevance of globalization in affecting the size of the shadow economy in selected African nations.

To do this, the authors employ the KOF globalization index and implement both static and dynamic common correlated mean group estimators on a panel of 24 African nations from 1995–2017. This technique accommodates the issue of cross-sectional dependence, sample bias and endogenous regressors. Panel threshold analysis is also conducted to establish the nonlinearity between globalization and the shadow economy. To examine the causality between the variables, the study employs Dumitrescu and Hurlin's panel causality test.

The results show that globalization reduces the size of the shadow economy. The results of the nonlinear analysis suggest a U-shaped relationship. Overall globalization has a threshold impact of 48.837%, economic globalization has 45.615% and political globalization has 66.661% while social globalization has a threshold value of 35.744%. The results of the panel causality show that there is a bidirectional causality between the two variables.

The results suggest that the government and other relevant authorities need to introduce capital controls and other policy measures to moderate the degree of social, political and cultural diffusion. Appropriate policies should be formulated to monitor the extent of African economic openness to other continents to maximize the gains from globalization.

Apart from being the first study in the African region that evaluates the relevance of globalization in controlling the shadow economy, it also analyzes the dynamics and threshold analysis between the two variables using advanced panel econometrics which makes the study unique. The study suggests that globalization tools are useful for affecting the size of the shadow economy in Africa. This study provides fresh empirical evidence on the impact of globalization on the shadow economy in the case of Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of innovation on the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam.

The paper uses data from the surveys on SMEs in Vietnam conducted by the Development Economics Research Group at the University of Copenhagen, the United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research, Central Institute for Economic Management and Institute of Labor Science and Social Affairs, and applies least squared regressions and 2SLS regressions to examine the effect of innovation on the performance of SMEs.

The authors find that SMEs with innovation tend to perform better than SMEs without innovation. The authors further show that the positive effect of innovation on firm performance mainly comes from the effect of improvement of existing products, an important type of innovation in SMEs. This result is persistent when the authors use propensity matching score and 2SLS regression with instrumental variable approaches. Overall, the results show the important role of innovation in enhancing the firm performance of SMEs, which sheds light on the literature on the controversial relation between innovation and SMEs performance in the world.

The major limitation of the paper is the lack of data. Although the database used in the paper is widely used to analyze SMEs in Vietnam, it covers about 2,500 firms in only nine provinces/cities in Vietnam.

Policymakers should enact relevant policies to support SMEs with innovation activities, thereby increasing firm performance and their competitiveness. For instance, encouragement policies or financial incentives (tax reduction or subsidies) for innovative firms should be implemented and/or fostered.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to examine the effect of different types of innovation on the performance of SMEs in Vietnam.

This research examines the relationship between market power and liquidity creation in the specific context of bank profitability in the Vietnamese banking sector.

The study applies the methodology proposed by Berger and Bouwman (2009) to demonstrate the creation of bank liquidity through a three-step procedure for investigating the relationship between market power and liquidity creation. The three steps include non-fat liquidity (NFLC), fat liquidity (FLC) and system generalized method of moments estimation for panel data.

This study finds that liquidity creation increases when a bank has high market power. Further, highly profitable banks positively impact the market power of banks with regard to liquidity creation, relative to less profitable banks. Moreover, bank size, capital, economic growth and interest rate negatively influence bank liquidity creation, while credit risk positively relates to bank liquidity creation.

Measurements used in this study are based on the works of Berger and Bouwman (2009). There are specific variations, relative to Basel III. In addition, other variables significantly impact bank liquidity creation that have not been considered in the models, and a quadratic model should have been considered to measure market power and bank liquidity creation.

This study suggests that managers should control the liquidity of their banks by supervising vulnerable characteristics that have been mentioned herein and emphasizing improvements in profitability. Further, the government may consider encouraging banks to generate more liquidity by modifying regulations concerned with market power or reinforcing policies about improving the transparent business environment.

This study characterizes an attempt to examine the influence of market power on the liquidity creation of banks in Vietnam, which represents one of the most dynamic systems in Asia, with several varied participating banks. The current study also examines the same within the specific context of the modifying impact of the profitability of banks.