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This paper examines how firms respond to local government’s environment initiatives through textual analysis of government work reports (GWRs). This study aims to provide insights into how firms strategically respond to government’s environmental initiatives through their disclosure and investment practices.

This study uses a textual analysis of GWRs from China’s provinces. The frequency and change rate of environmental keywords in these reports are used as a measure of the government’s environmental initiatives.

This study finds that environmental disclosure scores in environmental, social and governance (ESG) reports increase with the frequency or change rate of environmental keywords in provincial GWRs. This effect is more pronounced for non-state-owned enterprises, firms in highly marketized provinces or those listed in a single capital market. However, there is no significant relationship between firms’ environmental investments and government initiatives, except for cross-listed firms in provinces with consistently high frequency of environmental keywords in their GWRs.

The findings indicate that government environmental initiatives can shape firms’ disclosure behaviors, yet have limited influence on investment decisions, suggesting that environmental disclosure could potentially be opportunistic. This underscores the need for more effective strategies to stimulate firms’ environmental investments.

This study provides valuable insights into the differential impacts of government environmental initiatives on firms’ disclosure and investment behaviors, contributing to the understanding of corporate environmental responsibility in the context of government initiatives.

The study investigates the linkage between personality traits and firm performance. It examines the role of the pursuit of excellence, perseverance, a proactive mindset and formal education in determining the entrepreneurial success of MSMEs.

Data were collected from 432 MSME entrepreneurs using a structured questionnaire from India's two major industrial towns to analyze the impact of personality traits on firm performance. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to assess the direct and indirect relationships with the help of mediation analysis.

The findings assert that personality traits improve firm performance and determine the success of MSMEs. The results reveal that the need for achievement, a proactive mindset and the pursuit of excellence are crucial to firm performance. In addition, formal education mediates between perseverance and the pursuit of excellence personality attributes on the one side and firm performance on the other.

The research has various theoretical and practical implications for entrepreneurs, financial institutions and policymakers. The results could be productively used to nurture the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India.

Although research on personality traits as a driver of firm performance is growing, the pursuit of excellence, perseverance and proactive mindset attributes as enablers of firm performance have not garnered much attention. The study presents a precise conceptual model by integrating the aforementioned dimensions in the backdrop of an emerging market.

This study investigates theoretical relationships among personality characteristics, preferences for different types of rewards and the propensity to choose a job in auditing by management-related higher education students. Specifically, the authors consider motivation, locus of control (internal and external) and self-efficacy (SE) as personality characteristics and financial, extrinsic, support and intrinsic as types of rewards.

Data were collected through a questionnaire targeted at management-related higher education students in Portugal. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data.

The full sample results show that different types of motivation, locus of control and SE are related to different reward preferences. The authors also find a positive association between a preference for extrinsic rewards and the propensity to choose a job in auditing. Moreover, when the authors consider the role of working experience in the model, the authors find that the reward preferences that drive the choice of an auditing job differ according to that experience.

This study enriches the literature by assessing preferences for different types of rewards, considering multiple personality characteristics and a comprehensive set of rewards. Furthermore, the authors identify the reward preferences that drive the choice of an auditing career. This knowledge empowers auditing firms to devise recruitment strategies that resonate with candidates’ preferences, which boosts the capacity of these companies to attract new auditors.

This study investigates the relationships among digital transformation, technological innovation, industry–university–research collaborations and labor income share in manufacturing firms.

The relationships are tested using an empirical method, constructing regression models, by collecting 1,240 manufacturing firms and 9,029 items listed on the A-share market in China from 2013 to 2020.

The results indicate that digital transformation has a positive effect on manufacturing companies’ labor income share. Technological innovation can mediate the effect of digital transformation on labor income share. Industry–university–research cooperation can positively moderate the promotion effect of digital transformation on labor income share but cannot moderate the mediating effect of technological innovation. Heterogeneity analysis also found that firms without service-based transformation and nonstate-owned firms are better able to increase their labor income share through digital transformation.

This study provides a new path to increase the labor income share of enterprises to achieve common prosperity, which is important for manufacturing enterprises to better transform and upgrade to achieve high-quality development.

This paper aims to identify and report the differential effects of activity control and capability control on role stressors, which subsequently affect salespeople’s job satisfaction and sales performance.

Drawing on job demands-resources (JD-R) theory, the authors defined active control and customer demandingness as the job demands and capability control as the job resource, and designed their relationship with role stressors, which are indicated as role ambiguity, role conflict and role overload. The authors enrolled a sample of 223 industrial salespeople from pharmaceutical companies. After collecting the data, the authors used structural equation modeling using AMOS to test and estimate causal relationships along with a two-step approach to examine the interaction effect. The authors have also tested the simple slope of two-way interactions. All of the measured variables were identical to those used in previous studies.

The study findings indicate that behavior-based control can be counterproductive. Reducing activity control can decrease role stress, increase job satisfaction and improve job performance; increasing capability control, however, can reduce role stress and increase job satisfaction and performance. It is also important to acknowledge the external environment of the sales context in which behavior-based control is most effective: whereas high customer demandingness and capability control are related to reduced role stress, high customer demandingness and activity control are related to increased role stress.

Sales managers should recognize that different control management regimes reinforce or mitigate salespeople’s job stressors and outcomes under specific conditions (i.e. work environments marked by higher or lower customer demandingness).

Drawing on JD-R theory, the research shows that a behavior control (i.e. activity control and capability control) has differential, and even opposite, psychological consequences.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe challenges to ethnic minorities in the UK. While the experiences of migrants are both complex and varied depending on individuals' social class, race, cultural proximity to the host country and acculturation levels, more in-depth studies are necessary to fully understand how COVID-19 affects specific migrant groups and their health. Taiwanese migrants were selected because they are an understudied group. Also, there were widespread differences in pandemic management between the UK and Taiwan, making this group an ideal case for understanding how their acculturation journey can be disrupted by a crisis.

Qualitative data were collected at two different time points, at the start of the UK pandemic (March/April 2020) and six months on (October/November 2020), to explore migrant coping experiences over time. Theoretically, the authors apply acculturation theory through the lens of coping, while discussing health-consumption practices, as empirical evidence.

Before the outbreak of the pandemic, participants worked hard to achieve high levels of integration in the UK. The pandemic changed this; participants faced unexpected changes in the UK’s sociocultural structures. They were forced to exercise the layered and complex “coping with coping” in a hostile host environment that signalled their new marginalised status. They faced impossible choices, from catching a life-threatening disease to being seen as overly cautious. Such experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society.

It is important to note that the Taiwanese sample recruited through Facebook community groups is biased and has a high level of homogeneity. These participants were well-integrated, middle-class migrants who were highly educated, relatively resourceful and active on social media. More studies are needed to fully understand the impact on well-being and acculturation of migrants from different cultural, contextual and social backgrounds. This being the case, the authors can speculate that migrants with less resource are likely to have found the pandemic experience even more challenging. More studies are needed to fully understand migrant experience from different backgrounds.

Public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. In particular, this paper has shown how separation, especially if embraced temporarily, is not necessarily a negative outcome to be corrected with specific policies. It can be strategically adopted by migrants as a way of defending their health and well-being from an increasingly hostile environment. Migrants' home country experience provides vicarious learning opportunities to acquire good practices. Their voices should be encouraged rather than in favour of a surprising orthodox and rather singular approach in the discussion of public health management.

The paper has clear public health policy implications. Firstly, public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. Acknowledging migrants' voice is a critical first step to contribute to the development of a fair and inclusive society. Secondly, to retain skilful migrants and avoid a future brain-drain, policymakers are advised to advance existing infrastructure to provide more incentives to support and retain migrant talents in the post-pandemic recovery phase.

This paper reveals how a group of previously well-integrated migrants had to exercise “coping with coping” during the COVID crisis. This experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society. It contributes to the understanding of acculturation by showing how a such crisis can significantly disrupt migrants' acculturation journey, challenging them to re-acculturate and reconsider their identity stance. It shows how separation was indeed a good option for migrants for protecting their well-being from a newly hostile host environment.

Objectively evaluating the fairness of the algorithm, exploring in specific scenarios combined with scenario characteristics and constructing the algorithm fairness evaluation index system in specific scenarios.

This paper selects marketing scenarios, and in accordance with the idea of “theory construction-scene feature extraction-enterprise practice,” summarizes the definition and standard of fairness, combs the application link process of marketing algorithms and establishes the fairness evaluation index system of marketing equity allocation algorithms. Taking simulated marketing data as an example, the fairness performance of marketing algorithms in some feature areas is measured, and the effectiveness of the evaluation system proposed in this paper is verified.

The study reached the following conclusions: (1) Different fairness evaluation criteria have different emphases, and may produce different results. Therefore, different fairness definitions and standards should be selected in different fields according to the characteristics of the scene. (2) The fairness of the marketing equity distribution algorithm can be measured from three aspects: marketing coverage, marketing intensity and marketing frequency. Specifically, for the fairness of coverage, two standards of equal opportunity and different misjudgment rates are selected, and the standard of group fairness is selected for intensity and frequency. (3) For different characteristic fields, different degrees of fairness restrictions should be imposed, and the interpretation of their calculation results and the means of subsequent intervention should also be different according to the marketing objectives and industry characteristics.

First of all, the fairness sensitivity of different feature fields is different, but this paper does not classify the importance of feature fields. In the future, we can build a classification table of sensitive attributes according to the importance of sensitive attributes to give different evaluation and protection priorities. Second, in this paper, only one set of marketing data simulation data is selected to measure the overall algorithm fairness, after which multiple sets of marketing campaigns can be measured and compared to reflect the long-term performance of marketing algorithm fairness. Third, this paper does not continue to explore interventions and measures to improve algorithmic fairness. Different feature fields should be subject to different degrees of fairness constraints, and therefore their subsequent interventions should be different, which needs to be continued to be explored in future research.

This paper combines the specific features of marketing scenarios and selects appropriate fairness evaluation criteria to build an index system for fairness evaluation of marketing algorithms, which provides a reference for assessing and managing the fairness of marketing algorithms.

Algorithm governance and algorithmic fairness are very important issues in the era of artificial intelligence, and the construction of the algorithmic fairness evaluation index system in marketing scenarios in this paper lays a safe foundation for the application of AI algorithms and technologies in marketing scenarios, provides tools and means of algorithm governance and empowers the promotion of safe, efficient and orderly development of algorithms.

In this paper, firstly, the standards of fairness are comprehensively sorted out, and the difference between different standards and evaluation focuses is clarified, and secondly, focusing on the marketing scenario, combined with its characteristics, key fairness evaluation links are put forward, and different standards are innovatively selected to evaluate the fairness in the process of applying marketing algorithms and to build the corresponding index system, which forms the systematic fairness evaluation tool of marketing algorithms.

Studies on land acquisition (LA) and recovery simulations have garnered considerable attention amidst climate change. Previous literature has reported that LA and relocation contribute to reducing repetitive disaster losses or downzoning (limiting development). However, studies on decision-making about resettlement or relocation for landowners or decision-makers for disaster-impacted lands are limited. This study aims to qualitatively illustrate LA program schemes for recovery, and identify the underlying concepts of LA in Italy, the United States and Japan. By doing so, this study contributes to construction of future agent-based recovery simulations.

This study seeks to identify a variety of LA models in different contexts to provide input for future works. This study employed multiple case studies to explore common and contrasting results, and identify varied LA concepts. The methodology involved a literature review, including official reports, to examine the timeframes of LA projects qualitatively, complemented using aerial photos to confirm related land use changes pre- and post-LA.

The results indicate that buyout programs in the United States enhance renaturalization in flood-prone areas as a downzoning approach. In contrast, LA in Japan focuses on the continuation of communities or neighborhoods through the recovery and relocation process. In Italy, LA is used to contribute to supporting the tradition/legacy of historic housing and facilities for post-disaster temporary dwellings, reflecting an underlying concept of “tradition and legacy.”

This comparative study fills a research gap by focusing on LA concepts, and its novelty lies in finding the underlying concepts of LA in three countries. Through international comparison, it suggests that LA in Japan could incorporate conservation of the historical town center or the opportunity for downzoning.

We develop a credit-risk model to study the informational role of investment in an economy susceptible to large liquidity shocks. Firms' investment decisions carry information about their asset quality, thereby mitigating informational frictions when firms enter bankruptcy. An increase in aggregate investment can reduce the informational value of investment, depressing firms' recovery values. Therefore, policies boosting investment can decrease debt and firm values by reducing the informational value of investment. The presence of debt overhang may enhance firm value by making firms' investment decisions more informative. We present suggestive empirical evidence consistent with model predictions on the relation between firms' investments and recovery rates.