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This study examines the impact of trade openness, human capital, public expenditure and institutional performance on unemployment in various income groups of Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries.

Traditional panel data methodologies neglect the issue of cross-sectional dependence and provide ambiguous outcomes. A novel approach, “dynamic common correlated effects (DCCE)”, is utilized in this study to tackle with aforementioned issue. Pooled mean group (PMG) estimation is also applied to verify the robustness of the findings.

The long-run estimates show that trade openness has a significant and negative relationship with the unemployment rate in overall and lower-income OIC economies and a positive correlation with unemployment in higher-income OIC countries. Public expenditure is negatively and significantly correlated with unemployment in higher-income and overall OIC economies. Moreover, human capital reduces unemployment in higher-income and overall OIC countries while increases unemployment in lower-income OIC economies.

The research tends to endorse the argument for continuous trade openness policy along with efficient use of public expenditure and improved institutional performance to reduce unemployment in OIC countries.

The DCCE approach in this research considers heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence between cross-sectional units and thus gives robust outcomes.

This paper aims to assess the impact of green purchasing behavior (GPB) of a young generation in Pakistan.

The data were collected from students of different colleges affiliated with Shah Abdul Latif University from Sukkur and Larkana regions of Upper Sindh. A total of 400 questionnaires were administrated among students and 361 completed questionnaires were returned. A pen-and-paper method was applied to collect the data.

Model 1 revels that interpersonal influence and environmental knowledge were found positively related to GPB, whereas media and price were found positively but insignificantly related to GPB. Lastly, trust in green products was also found negatively and insignificantly related with GPB. Model 2 was used to test the moderating impact of price on the relationship between EA and GPB.

To promote GPB, government can play significant role by sponsoring environmental campaigns and environmental culture and these campaigns may include broadcasting promotional messages, distributing leaflets with utility bills, speeches in schools and colleges and advertisements with the help of printing and electronic sources.

Regarding green food purchase, this study’s results contribute to the literature by providing some theoretical contributions in literature. Green purchasing is so far a very new notion in Pakistan and therefore, literature on promotion of GPB is still lacking in the said country.

Adoption of latest technological advancements (e.g. lecture capture system) is a hallmark of market-driven private universities. Among many other distinguishing features, lecture capture system (LCS) is the one which is being offered to enhance the flexibility of learning environment for attracting executive business students. Majority of foreign universities are offering the facility of LCS to their students in offshore campuses established in Malaysia. Yet, very little is known about perception and behaviour of executive business students towards acceptance and use of this facility. Therefore, to bridge the identified gap in academic literature, this study is an effort to explore the causal relationship between existing constructs of extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2), personal innovativeness (PI), intention and use behaviour (UB) towards LCS. Moreover, this study is aimed to extend the UTAUT2 by introducing a new variable, namely, PI in the domain of information technology (IT) (PIIT).

SmartPLS-3.2.6 was used for data analysis and all PLS-related calculations. For this purpose, a self-administered questionnaire was designed to collect data regarding acceptance and UB towards LCS. A sample size of 481 responses from executive business students, who were enrolled in offshore campuses of five selected foreign universities in Malaysia, was used for testing the proposed theoretical model.

The results of structural equation modelling (SEM) revealed that, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, price value, hedonic motivation, habit and PIIT have a significant and positive influence on acceptance and use of LCS among executive business students. Unique to this study is that, findings of this study have highlighted PIIT as an important factor that affects intention and UB towards LCS among executive business students.

By validating and extending the UTAUT2, the findings of this study provide a number of practical implications along with a comprehensive, robust and useful framework for universities to successfully implement technological advancements, such as LCS, to enhance overall learning outcomes.

By investigating the factors determining acceptance and use of LCS among executive business students, using a partial least square (PLS)-based SEM approach, this study makes a sizeable theoretical, methodological and contextual contribution to the overall body of knowledge.

The security of the stored biometric template is itself a challenge. Feature transformation techniques and biometric cryptosystems are used to address the concerns and improve the general acceptance of biometrics. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of different techniques and processes for securing the biometric templates. Furthermore, the paper explores current research trends in this area.

In this paper, the authors provide an overview and survey of different features transformation techniques and biometric cryptosystems.

Feature transformation techniques and biometric cryptosystems provide reliable biometric security at a high level. There are many techniques that provide provable security with practical viable recognition rates. However, there remain several issues and challenges that are being faced during the deployment of these technologies.

This paper provides an overview of currently used techniques for securing biometric templates and also outlines the related issues and challenges.

The purpose of the research is to analyze the impact of world uncertainty and pandemic uncertainty on Islamic financial markets. For representing Islamic financial markets four different Islamic indices (DJ Islamic index, DJ Islamic Asia–Pacific index, DJ Islamic-Europe index and DJ Islamic-US) are taken.

The study employs quantile-on-quantile regression approach to see the overall dependence structure of variables based on quarterly data ranging from 1996Q1 to 2020Q4. This technique considers how quantiles of world uncertainty and pandemic uncertainty asymmetrically affect the quantiles of Islamic stocks by giving an appropriate framework to apprehend the overall dependence structure.

The findings of the study confirm a strong negative impact of world uncertainty and world pandemic uncertainty on regional Islamic stock indices but the strength of the relationship varies according to economic conditions and across the regions. However, the world pandemic effect remains the same and does not change. Conversely, pandemic uncertainty has a larger effect on Islamic indices as compared to world uncertainty.

Our findings have significant implications for investors and policymakers to take proper steps before any uncertainty arise. A coalition of the central bank, government officials and investment bank regulators would be needed to tackle this challenge of uncertainty.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, none of the current works has considered the asymmetric impact of world and pandemic uncertainties on Islamic stock markets at both the bottom and upper quantiles of the distribution of data.

The increasing interest of organizations to innovate and survive in the market, combined with a decreasing level of trust in their leaders, has now led thinkers and researchers to begin exploring beyond traditional leadership theories. The literature indicates that, due to the lack of a strong and explicit moral dimension, positive leadership may be incomplete. The purpose of this study is to understand the creativity mechanism that is fostered by authentic leadership through empowerment and commitment to the supervisor.

The data of 214 employees were collected from the strategic units (product generation, customer services, marketing and sales) of all five telecoms which are currently operating in Pakistan. The parallel mediation model was used to analyze the hypothesized model.

Results confirmed that authentic leadership leverages creativity. Mediation results further confirmed that creativity increases when employees feel empowered and are committed to an authentic leader. However, contrast analysis indicated that empowerment has a stronger role in increasing creativity.

Not limited to theoretical debate, the present study emphasized that organizations improve creativity by adopting a management model which delivers moral values along with an efficient, transparent system and empowered culture. Managers should be trained to develop authentic traits so that they can then identify and address critical areas which will serve to nurture creative and innovative behavior in their followers.

Authentic leadership is an emerging concept, yet debate on authentic leadership and creativity is in the establishment phase. The present study highlights that authentic leadership is not simply a consequence of success or the development of a pool of loyal subordinates; rather, empowered leadership at all levels is at the heart of a successful organization.

In artificial intelligence, the optical character recognition (OCR) is an active research area based on famous applications such as automation and transformation of printed documents into machine-readable text document. The major purpose of OCR in academia and banks is to achieve a significant performance to save storage space.

A novel technique is proposed for automated OCR based on multi-properties features fusion and selection. The features are fused using serially formulation and output passed to partial least square (PLS) based selection method. The selection is done based on the entropy fitness function. The final features are classified by an ensemble classifier.

The presented method was extensively tested on two datasets such as the authors proposed and Chars74k benchmark and achieved an accuracy of 91.2 and 99.9%. Comparing the results with existing techniques, it is found that the proposed method gives improved performance.

The technique presented in this work will help for license plate recognition and text conversion from a printed document to machine-readable.

Presentation of the different industrial carbon linkages of India. The purpose of this paper is to understand the direct and indirect impact of these industrial linkages.

This study uses a hypothetical extraction method with its various extensions. Under this method, different carbon linkages of a block are removed from the economy, and the effects of carbon linkages are determined by the difference between the original and the post-removal values. Energy and non-energy carbon linkages are also estimated.

“Electricity, gas and water supply (EGW)” at 655.61 Mt and 648.74 Mt had the highest total and forward linkages. “manufacturing and recycling” at 231.48 Mt had the highest backward linkage. High carbon-intensive blocks of “EGW” plus “mining and quarrying” were net emitters, while others were net absorbers. “Fuel and chemicals” at 0.08 Mt had almost neutral status. Hard coal was the main source of direct and indirect emissions.

Net emitting and key net forward blocks should reduce direct emission intensities. India should use its huge geographical potential for industrial accessibility to cheaper alternative energy. This alongside with technology/process improvements catalyzed by policy tools can help in mitigation efforts. Next, key net-backward blocks such as construction through intermediate purchases significantly stimulate emissions from other blocks. Tailored mitigation policies are needed in this regard.

By developing an understanding of India’s industrial carbon links, this study can guide policymakers. In addition, the paper lays out the framework for estimating energy and non-energy-based industrial carbon links.

Outstanding features such as thermal conductivity and superior electrical conductivity of nanofluids unfold a new window in the context of their extensive applications in engineering and industrial domains. The purpose of this study to simulate numerically the magneto-nanofluid flow and heat transfer over a curved stretching surface. Heat transport is explored in the presence of viscous dissipation. At the curved surface, the convective boundary condition is adopted. Three different nanoparticles, namely, copper, aluminium oxide and titanium dioxide are taken into consideration because of easily available in nature.

The basic flow equations are framed in terms of curvilinear coordinates. The modelled partial differential equations are transformed into a system of non-linear ordinary differential equations by means of appropriate similarity transformation. The subsequent non-linear system of equations is then solved numerically by using the Runge–Kutta–Felhberg method with the shooting scheme via bvp4c MATLAB built-in function. Impacts of various physical parameters on velocity, pressure and temperature distributions, local skin-friction coefficient, local Nusselt number and wall temperature are portrayed through graphs and tables followed by a comprehensive debate and physical interpretation.

Graphical results divulge that augmenting values of the magnetic parameter cause a decline in velocity profiles and stream function inside the boundary layer. The magnitude of the pressure function inside the boundary layer reduces for higher estimation of curvature parameter, and it is also zero when the curvature parameter goes to infinity. Furthermore, the temperature is observed in a rising trend with growing values of the magnetic parameter and Biot number.

This research study is very pertinent to the expulsion of polymer sheet and photographic films, metallurgical industry, electrically-conducting polymer dynamics, magnetic material processing, rubber and polymer sheet processing, continuous casting of metals, fibre spinning, glass blowing and fibre, wire and fibre covering and sustenance stuff preparing, etc.

Despite the huge amount of literature available, but still, very little attention is given to simulate the flow configuration due to the curved stretching surface with the convective boundary condition. Very few papers have been examined on this topic and found that its essence inside the boundary layer is not any more insignificant than on account of a stretching sheet. A numerical comparison with the published works is conducted to verify the accuracy of the present study.

This study aims to explain the relationship of employee voice and turnover intention with the mediating role of top management team (TMT) conflicts. Moreover, this study also aims to find the moderating influence of union instrumentality among employee voice and TMT conflicts.

The study was conducted by using a quantitative approach and data was collected from 300 employees of the manufacturing sector of Pakistan through questionnaires. Data were analyzed by applying different statistical tools and tests through SPSS-21 and AMOS.

Results demonstrate that employee voice has a significant negative impact on employee turnover intention; TMT conflicts significantly mediate employee voice and intention to quit. However, union instrumentality is only initiated to moderate the relationship between employee voice and cognitive conflict.

This research focuses on the manufacturing sector and data have been collected from manufacturing firms situated in Gujranwala, Pakistan only. Moreover, the sample size of the study is also small. Therefore, the current study is an addition to the knowledge and understanding of the studied variables.

This study is of great use for managerial level employees because the adequate implication of employee voice can reduce turnover intention.

This study aims to add value to the existing exit-voice theory and discuss the internal organizational factors that generate quitting intentions. Moreover, it provides insights about union instrumentality and its significant role as a moderator and the significant mediating role between employee voice and intention to quit paving new ways for future researchers.