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This study attempts to conduct a comparative analysis between dynamic and static asset allocation to achieve the long-term target return on asset liability management (ALM). This study conducts asset allocation using the ex ante expected rate of return through the outlook of future economic indicators because past economic indicators or realized rate of returns which are used as input data for expected rate of returns in the “building block” method, most adopted by domestic pension funds, does not fully reflect the future economic situation. Vector autoregression is used to estimate and forecast long-term interest rates. Furthermore, it is applied to gross domestic product and consumer price index estimation because it is widely used in financial time series data. Based on asset allocation simulations, this study derived the following insights: first, economic indicator filtering and upper-lower bound computation is needed to reduce the expected return volatility. Second, to reach the ALM goal, more stocks should be allocated than low-yielding assets. Finally, dynamic asset allocation which has been mirroring economic changes actively has a higher annual yield and risk-adjusted return than static asset allocation.

This paper aims to shed light on features of successful innovation and on the role played by downstream open innovation (OI) dynamics in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry. It also explores the reasons for the decline in the number of disruptive innovations in this industry in the European Union (EU).

The authors interpret the data in a Kantar consumer panel dataset on disruptive innovations in Spain through an exploratory research including in-depth interviews with 19 managers in the industry.

Results show that downstream open innovation in this industry is mostly limited to the executional stage in the process and highlight the crucial role played by the point of purchase in the success of innovations. The authors build up a virtuous circle of innovation based on features such as the use of OI processes, company focus and marketing support, transparency and collaboration with retailers, as well as the product's uniqueness and its potential to become viral.

The paper focuses on Spain and, thus, results cannot be generalised. Further research in other countries would be interesting.

The study describes the features of disruptive innovators and develops an extensive list of success factors.

The development of disruptive innovation is a source of competitive advantages and one of the most relevant activities of managers today. Nevertheless, the number of disruptive innovations is in decline, and only a few succeed, negatively affecting consumer welfare.

Through this study, the authors provide insights on the features of successful innovators in FMCGs and describe the factors affecting the decreasing trend in the number of breakthrough innovations. Further, this paper fulfils an identified need to study OI in low-tech industries.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and describe the drivers of lean approaches and successful management of wearable technology start-ups. The paper is a descriptive study that employed a case study methodology based on semi-structured interviews with ten start-ups’ managers in Wearable Technology 2017 conference. Participants were selected based on convenience sampling and the pre-set criteria. The current study contributes to this field through the main findings, which suggest that four stages need to be considered by starts-up for a successful market readiness, including the time of entry and overcoming market entry barriers, product attributes, product development process, and commercialization. Finally, findings were categorized in the form of an iterative learning loop model and also, practical strategies and methods were recommended for successfully going through each stage.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize different methods of constructing the financial conditions index (FCI) and analyze current studies on constructing FCI for China. Due to shifts of China’s financial mechanisms in the post-crisis era, conventional ways of FCI construction have their limitations.

The paper suggests improvements in two aspects, i.e. using time-varying weights and introducing non-financial variables. In the empirical study, the author first develops an FCI with fixed weights for comparison, constructs a post-crisis FCI based on time-varying parameter vector autoregressive model and finally examines the FCI with time-varying weights concerning its explanatory and predictive power for inflation.

Results suggest that the FCI with time-varying weights performs better than one with fixed weights and the former better reflects China’s financial conditions. Furthermore, introduction of credit availability improves the FCI.

FCI constructed in this paper goes ahead of inflation by about 11 months, and it has strong explanatory and predictive power for inflation. Constructing an appropriate FCI is important for improving the effectiveness and predictive power of the post-crisis monetary policy and foe achieving both economic and financial stability.

WIth limited research on the effects of variable message sign (VMS) message content and verbiage on revealed driver behavior, this study aims to investigate how different verbiage of crash-related messages are related to the diversion rate.

Using ordered logit models, the associations of message verbiage with diversion rates during crash incidents were assessed using five years of VMS message history within a section of I-15 in the state of Utah.

A significant impact of message verbiage on the diversion rate was observed. Based on the analysis results, the crash message verbiage with the highest diversion was found to be miles to crash + “prepare to stop,” followed by crash location + delay information, miles to crash + “use caution” + lane of the crash, etc. In addition, the diversion rate was found to be correlated to some roadway characteristics (e.g. occupancy in mainline, weather condition and light condition) along with the temporal variations.

These findings could be used by transportation agencies (e.g. state department of transportation [DOTs]) to make informed decisions about choosing the message verbiage during future crash incidents. This study also revealed that higher diversion rates are associated with a shorter distance between the crash location and VMS device location, recommending increasing the number of VMS devices, particularly in crash-prone areas.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the emotion expressed by a fictitious proposer influences the responder’s decision to accept or reject a severely unfair deal, represented by the splitting of a predetermined sum of money between the two players during an ultimatum game (UG). Rejection leads both parts to dissipate that sum. Critically the authors consider the situation in which both players have the best alternative to negotiation agreement (BATNA), which simulates a backup plan to rely on in case of no agreement.

The participants played a UG and, to foster the ecological validity of the paradigm, the parts could both rely on a more or less generous BATNA. The critical manipulation was the emotion expressed by the proposer while their BATNA was either hidden (Exp. 1) or communicated (Exp. 2).

The proposer’s emotions influenced participants’ own emotions, affected their social evaluations about the proposer, the desire for future interactions with the proposer and were used to infer the proposer’s BATNA when it was unknown. In this latter case, proposers’ emotions and in particular his/her happiness, decreased dramatically the participants’ tendency to reject even severely unfair offers.

Past research on UG has been predominantly aimed to investigate the effect of responders’ emotions or the effects of responders’ emotions on the proposer, devoting little attention to how the critical responder’s acceptance/rejection decision might be affected by the proposer’s emotion. Especially in the ecological situation where the parts have a BATNA in case of non-agreement.

This study aims to examine whether the internal locus of control, self-esteem and leadership self-efficacy can predict differences in self–other rating agreement on leader effectiveness. First, the authors predicted that the greater the internal locus of a leader the more their self-rating will be in agreement with others' rating of them (1a). Second, the authors proposed that the greater the self-esteem of a leader the more their self-rating will be in discrepancy with others' rating (1b). Third, the authors hypothesized that the greater the self-efficacy of a leader the more their self-rating will be in agreement with others' rating (1c).

To test the hypotheses, multisource data were collected from 128 banking leaders (who responded about different aspects of leadership self-efficacy, internal locus of control, self-esteem and leadership effectiveness) and 344 subordinates (who rated their leaders' effectiveness in performing leadership tasks).Multivariate regression was performed by jointly regressing both leaders' self-ratings and subordinates' ratings as a dependent variable on internal locus of control, self-esteem and leadership self-efficacy as predictor variables.

Self-esteem of a leader the more their self-rating will be in discrepancy with others' ratings.

The study tried to investigate the leader-subordinate dis(agreement) on leaders’ effectiveness taking banking leaders in the Ethiopian Context. The finding of the results is crucial and important for leadership development programs.

This study aims to estimate the impact of refugee inflows on host countries’ entrepreneurial rates. The refugee crisis led to an increased scientific and public policy interest in the impact of refugee inflows on host countries. One important perspective of such an impact, which is still underexplored, is the impact of refugee inflows on host countries entrepreneurial rates. Given the high number of refugees that flow to some countries, it would be valuable to assess the extent to which such countries are likely to reap the benefits from increasing refugee inflows in terms of (native and non-native) entrepreneurial talent enhancement.

Resorting to dynamic (two-step system generalized method of moments) panel data estimations, based on 186 countries over the period between 2000 and 2019, this study estimates the impact of refugee inflows on host countries’ entrepreneurial rates, measured by the total early-stage entrepreneurial activity (TEA) rate and the self-employment rate.

In general, higher refugee inflows are associated with lower host countries’ TEA rates. However, refugee inflows significantly foster self-employment rates of “medium-high” and “high” income host countries and host countries located in Africa. These results suggest that refugee inflows tend to enhance “necessity” related new ventures and/ or new ventures (from native and non-native population) operating in low value-added, low profit sectors.

This study constitutes a novel empirical contribution by providing a macroeconomic, quantitative assessment of the impact of refugee from distinct nationalities on a diverse set of host countries' entrepreneurship rates in the past two decades resorting to dynamic panel data models, which enable to address the heterogeneity of the countries and deal with the endogeneity of the variables of the model.

With China’s economic growth slowing down and the growth rate of fiscal revenue decreasing, the pressure on local government debts is further increasing. Under this background, it is of great significance to clarify the relation between local government debts and China’s economic growth in order to give full play to the positive role of local debts in stabling growth. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Therefore, this paper explores the impact of Chinese local government debt on economic growth from theoretical and empirical aspects, respectively, and compares the regional differences between different debts and economic growth dynamics.

In the theoretical model part, this paper constructs a three-sector dynamic game model, under the two circumstances of whether local government is subject to debt constraints, and examines the relation between local government debt and economic growth and other variables through numerical simulation. Research shows that when the government is not constrained by debt, there is an inverted “U” relation between government debt and economic growth. When the government is constrained by debt, the economic growth rate gradually decreases as the government debt increases.

In the theoretical analysis part, this paper tries to estimate the amount of local debts under different calibers and examines the impact of different types of local government debts on China’s economic growth and their regional differences. The results show that excessive accumulation of government hidden debts in the eastern region is not conducive to economic growth, while explicit debts in the central and western regions significantly contribute to local economic growth. The results of empirical analysis are basically consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model.

Large displacement misalignment under the action of active faults can cause complex three-dimensional deformation in subway tunnels, resulting in severe damage, distortion and misalignment. There is no developed system of fortification and related codes to follow. There are scientific problems and technical challenges in this field that have never been encountered in past research and practices.

This paper adopted a self-designed large-scale active fault dislocation simulation loading system to conduct a similar model test of the tunnel under active fault dislocation based on the open-cut tunnel project of the Urumqi Rail Transit Line 2, which passes through the Jiujiawan normal fault. The test simulated the subway tunnel passing through the normal fault, which is inclined at 60°. This research compared and analyzed the differences in mechanical behavior between two types of lining section: the open-cut double-line box tunnel and the modified double-line box arch tunnel. The structural response and failure characteristics of the open-cut segmented lining of the tunnel under the stick-slip part of the normal fault were studied.

The results indicated that the double-line box arch tunnel improved the shear and longitudinal bending performance. Longitudinal cracks were mainly distributed in the baseplate, wall foot and arch foot, and the crack position was basically consistent with the longitudinal distribution of surrounding rock pressure. This indicated that the longitudinal cracks were due to the large local load of the cross-section of the structure, leading to an excessive local bending moment of the structure, which resulted in large eccentric failure of the lining and formation of longitudinal cracks. Compared with the ordinary box section tunnel, the improved double-line box arch tunnel significantly reduced the destroyed and damage areas of the hanging wall and footwall. The damage area and crack length were reduced by 39 and 59.3%, respectively. This indicates that the improved double-line box arch tunnel had good anti-sliding performance.

This paper adopted a self-designed large-scale active fault dislocation simulation loading system to conduct a similar model test of the tunnel under active fault dislocation. This system increased the similarity ratio of the test model, improved the dislocation loading rate and optimized the simulation scheme of the segmented flexible lining and other key factors affecting the test. It is of great scientific significance and engineering value to investigate the structure of subway tunnels under active fault misalignment, to study its force characteristics and damage modes, and to provide a technical reserve for the design and construction of subway tunnels through active faults.