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The purpose of this paper is to explore the causes that determine the UK’s civilian research and development (R&D) expenditure to forecast its possible evolution in a post-Brexit scenario.

The authors use the Johansen’s co-integration analysis for time series.

The authors find a co-integration relationship between R&D and variables such as exports, military expenditure, patents, EU GDP per capita and USA GDP per capita. The authors also observed a stagnation in the foreseen R&D expenditure over the next five years.

The authors warned that the results can only be viewed as a glance into the understanding of the complex elements that undergird the UK’s civilian, scientific and technological policy-making. But the authors see them as an interesting starting point for scrutinizing current shortcomings in policy-making, while providing clues for corrective action that would otherwise lead the UK to a structural crisis in its economic performance.

This study constitutes a first attempt to account for the loss of the UK’s innovative influence all over the world.

The aim of this research is to improve the responsiveness of the healthcare network of a large city to a major earthquake, by applying a combined methodology to reduce human suffering and death.

Scenario analysis, a non-linear programming (NLP) model, and the analytical network process are sequentially applied to find the “best location pattern”.

When considering the occurrence of major earthquakes in cities with high population density, as a rule of thumb, the location of healthcare facilities should prioritize areas characteristically overcrowded and/or that were built based on poor standards of seismic resistance.

The proposed research design does not include a cost criterion in the set of decision variables involved. Furthermore, the results derived from the NLP-model are restricted by the input simulation data.

The performance of the “best location pattern” is compared with the current location of healthcare facilities in terms of their distances to the affected zones. Metropolis areas worldwide with similar conditions to the city under consideration could be benefited from applying the general methodology for relocation of healthcare facilities described in this research.

This research implements a diverse combination of methodologies to examine the problem of relocating of healthcare facilities in a large city in the wake of an assumed earthquake. In addition, to the best of authors' knowledge, this is the first study of its kind that proposes improvements in the responsiveness of the healthcare facilities' network in the city in question.

This chapter presents the development of Comparative Education in the most representative countries for this discipline in Western Europe, taking into account the diachronic evolution (since the first texts of Jullien de Paris in 1718 or the written work of Sadler in 1900) and the synchronicity of the discipline from which our patterns of committed intellectual activism have been perceived and have consequently allowed the regulation of its current mapping.

Special reference will be given to some of the classic and renewed dilemmas that have prevailed over the decades as cross-cutting themes of interest for specialists in Comparative Education with issues related to denomination, its purposes of ideographic or nomothetic nature, its sometimes problematic entailment with International Education, the significance of the lending and transferring policies in the current scenarios or the present increasing globalization phenomenon in our educational reality, among others.

The chapter also aims at recognizing the possibilities and, at the same time, the limitations currently faced by “Comparative Educations” in Cowen´s words, through working effectively with the most idiosyncratic signs of identity in the discourse and its most immediate future projection in the coming years.

We focus our article on the reasons that support the importance of the discipline: the global evolution of the current supranational scenarios from a social, economic or cultural perspective; the state of education since the contribution of educational policies or the situation of higher education in the context of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) that, among other aspects, mark the good stage through which the analyzed discipline is experiencing.

Finally, the ratification of this statement is complemented by the firm consolidation of Comparative Education in the European context, giving reference not only to the articulation of its own associations or societies created but also to the journals emerged from them, with a notable impact on the rest of the world and their special contribution to the dissemination of the purposes of the discipline related to the generation and diffusion of policies and practices from a comparative view.

Though working in the ambulance service implies persistent confrontation with human suffering and exposure to significant work-related stressors, previous research revealed comparatively low self-reported stress in paramedics. This study investigated stress, personality traits, sensation seeking and resilience in paramedics. Moreover, the impact of psychological variables on individual differences in paramedics' stress burden was explored.

A convenience sample of 395 paramedics and 397 professionals from other disciplines completed the Perceived Stress Questionnaire, Stress Coping Style Questionnaire, Big Five Inventory, Sensation Seeking Scale and Resilience Scale. Multivariate group comparison and regression analysis were performed.

Compared to other professionals, paramedics reported lower stress burden, more positive and less negative coping strategies, lower neuroticism and higher extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, agreeableness, adventure seeking and resilience. In the regression analysis conducted on paramedics, positive coping, resilience, extraversion and conscientiousness negatively predicted perceived stress; negative coping and neuroticism were positive predictors.

The cross-sectional design of the study limits the interpretability of the data.

Training in stress management and resilience should be core elements in the education of paramedics.

The findings confirm the notion of reduced stress burden and increased resilience in paramedics. Regarding personality traits, a pattern of emotional stability, conscientiousness, extraversion, prosocial attitudes and propensity to exciting experiences might characterize this group. Moreover, the use of adaptive coping strategies, high levels of resilience, extraversion and conscientiousness and low neuroticism are associated with lower stress burden in paramedics.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and performance of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The aim is to contribute to the extant literature about the role of EO for SMEs development, and more specifically to identify implications that can inform knowledge-based initiatives of entrepreneurship universities focussing on the development and diffusion of the entrepreneurial culture and capacity.

This research paper adopts a quantitative approach to investigate a conceptual framework linking EO to SME’s performance. The central postulated hypothesis is that EO positively affects performance of SMEs. This hypothesis has been tested by using a system of partial least squares of structural equations modelling, adopting the SmartPLS® 3.0 software (Ringle et al., 2015). The empirical context analysed 170 SMEs operating in the Bajio Region (México) in the leather–footwear sector.

The results provide evidence that Mexican companies that manifest EO have a positive effect on their firm performance. Similarly, findings emphasise that both risk taking and innovativeness are currently the central axes of EO for the analysed companies. Accordingly, entrepreneurial universities should be engaged in the development of EO of students, academic staff and companies by focussing on knowledge-based actions that can foster the improvement of some specific features of the EO.

The results provide insights about the relationships between EO and the performance of SMEs indicating that potentials initiatives of entrepreneurship universities aiming to support the development capacity of SMEs as well as of students and academic staff should be focussed on the critical dimensions characterising EO.

This paper provides insights into the role of EO for SMEs performance. It provides three main contributions. First, derived from literature research, it proposes a working definition of EO. Second, the empirical research findings support an understanding of the relationship between EO and Mexican SMEs performance and propose a multiple and reflective dimension of EO’s model. Moreover, finally, this research provides some implications for entrepreneurship universities aiming to create and diffuse an entrepreneurial culture and capabilities by fostering the development of the EO.

The intellectual and academic legitimacy of Comparative Education has been a critical issue in the international debate for a long time now. The fragility of the field is well known and understood. Despite frictions and misunderstandings, there are academic and professional structures robust enough to sustain the identity of the field in numerous countries on all continents. In Romania, there are no systematic concerns related to Comparative Education as an epistemologically autonomous field. Moreover, we cannot even argue for the existence of enough academic infrastructures to support Comparative Education as a research direction. But as countries in the world cannot afford to ignore global trends in terms of economy, technology, culture, Romania cannot disregard developments of educational policies and practices in Europe and throughout the world. Globalization and interconnections between contemporary societies raise common challenges for education systems in the world, and these are eventually reflected in national academic discourses. The major objectives of the present chapter are the following: (1) proposing an inventory of causes that led to the delay in establishing Comparative Education as an autonomous research field in Romania and (2) identifying progresses and accumulations that could lead to establishing Comparative Education as an explicit rather than tangential research field in Romania.

This chapter looks at the state of current research in comparative and international education, and argues that much research is focused on practical policy concerns and driven by funding or other rewards for publishing. Theoretical explorations have been moved from the agenda, partly by external forces, and partly by internal movements that militate against ambitious theory building and critical analysis of key concepts. With a focus on the meliorative purposes of comparative and international education, too much research says little more than could have been found with a little reflection. And this is especially true of research that seeks to illuminate the attitudes of one or another group of stakeholders in the educational process.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of venture capital (VC) funding as a form of ownership on lobbying strategies of venture-backed companies.

The sample consists of venture-backed IPO companies between 1999 and 2014. The authors collected IPO data from the Thompson Securities Data Company (SDC) database. The authors collected VC data from SDC VentureXpert database and lobbying data from the Center for Responsive Politics database (opensecrets.org).

Consistent with the hypotheses, the authors find that VC-backed companies spend less on lobbying compared to non-VC-backed counterparts. However, this relationship is moderated by companies’ R&D intensity. R&D intensive VC-backed companies choose to spend more on lobbying.

The research indicates that although VC backing has a negative impact on lobbying efforts, R&D intensity creates an incentive for VC-backed companies to spend more on lobbying in order to shape public policy to their benefit. The study consists of VC-backed companies that are public. The authors believe that future research can explore political strategies of VC-backed companies during their pre-IPO stage.

The authors believe that political strategies are powerful yet underutilized resources that VC-backed companies can rely on to shift industries and invest in innovative products that challenge norms and fight the status quo. Lobbying and other forms of political involvement can help them shape public policy.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study makes a unique contribution to the literature by exploring the political strategies of VC-backed companies.