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Many refugees and asylum seekers in Germany experience a high disease burden and low health literacy. The current study aims to focus on assessing these issues among African refugees and asylum seekers in Bavaria, Germany. The authors evaluated their self-perceived health status and health literacy, and identified barriers and gaps in health care utilization, intending to improve health care services for this group.

The authors conducted a cross-sectional, questionnaire-based study involving 69 refugees and asylum seekers from Ethiopia, Eritrea and Nigeria. The authors performed descriptive and exploratory statistical analyses.

The authors found a substantial disease burden in the early stages of resettlement in Germany, particularly mental health symptoms (53.6%) and musculoskeletal problems (47.8%). Challenges in health literacy were observed, such as difficulties in understanding health information and managing emergency situations. Access to interpreters was limited, and understanding treatment certificates was more challenging than using electronic health cards, with 18.2% of participants reporting denial of medical treatment.

These findings highlight the need for early and tailored health support for refugees, with a particular focus on mental health. Efforts should be made to reduce language barriers and improve navigational skills within the health-care system, particularly in emergency situations. Addressing the restricted access to health care and bureaucratic obstacles is crucial for improved health outcomes among refugees.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to specifically explore the self-reported health status and health literacy of African refugees and asylum seekers in Bavaria, Germany, providing valuable insights into the unique healthcare challenges of this often underrepresented and overlooked population.

Since the 1990s, the International Olympic Committee has offered nations more medal-winning opportunities at every Winter Games. Meanwhile, many countries are constrained by their limited financial resources to target sports strategically. The purpose of this paper is to examine the targeting approaches to Olympic Winter Sports of National Sports Agencies (NSAs), and to identify the factors they assess in the decision-making process.

The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 11 decision makers of medal-winning NSAs at the 2014 Sochi Games. The data were then analysed with reference to strategic management in an approach which combines a resource-based view (RBV) with a market-based view (MBV) to build a competitive advantage.

The results show that NSAs, like firms, combine an internal analysis that reflects the RBV on resources and capabilities (e.g. athletes’ performance per sport and sport-specific elite sport system), with an external analysis of the competitive environment that reflects an MBV (e.g. sport’s medal market size and intensity of competition at Games) to target sports. Using this information, two phases were distinguished: first, the target sports are identified and finance is prioritised accordingly; second, the allocation of the nation’s resources is constantly reviewed in order to optimise it.

Even though social desirability bias in the responses could not be fully excluded, the findings can help policy-makers to distinguish between the internal and external factors identified in this study, and to make more strategic decisions by combining RBV and MBV approaches to build-up their nation’s competitive advantage.

This paper models the targeting strategies of NSAs during an Olympic cycle by introducing the competitive positioning of firms to sports management.

This paper aims to propose the concept of market potential analysis, which is commonly applied in economics, as a method to enable these investment decisions to be based on sound evidence.

The markets for Olympic awards, i.e. medals (top three places) and diplomas (i.e. top eight places) are compared in alpine skiing, biathlon, cross country, speed skating, freestyle skiing, short track and snowboarding from 1992 to 2018.

The most notable changes are identified in cross country (2002), biathlon (2006), freestyle skiing (2014), snowboarding (2006 and 2014) and speed skating (2018).

In spite of the evidence of nations investing strategically in their elite sport systems to produce Olympic success, there is a lack of knowledge on how national-level decision makers can use a strategy to analyse the competitive environment concerning sports contested in the Olympic Winter Games.

A regression kink design (RKD or RK design) can be used to identify casual effects in settings where the regressor of interest is a kinked function of an assignment variable. In this chapter, we apply an RKD approach to study the effect of unemployment benefits on the duration of joblessness in Austria, and discuss implementation issues that may arise in similar settings, including the use of bandwidth selection algorithms and bias-correction procedures. Although recent developments in nonparametric estimation (Calonico, Cattaneo, & Farrell, 2014; Imbens & Kalyanaraman, 2012) are sometimes interpreted by practitioners as pointing to a default estimation procedure, we show that in any given application different procedures may perform better or worse. In particular, Monte Carlo simulations based on data-generating processes that closely resemble the data from our application show that some asymptotically dominant procedures may actually perform worse than “sub-optimal” alternatives in a given empirical application.

The purpose of this study is to examine the possibility of adverse consequences regarding the recently enacted Dodd–Frank Act (DFA) pay-equity disclosure requirement in the USA, which will likely lead to lower levels of perceived Chief Executive Officer (CEO) pay fairness by subordinates. Specifically, the study examines whether the pay-equity disclosure leads to increased earnings management when business-unit managers have friendship ties with the CEO.

An experiment is conducted wherein participants assume the role of a business-unit manager and are asked to provide an estimate for future warranty expense, which is used as a proxy for earnings management. The study manipulates friendship between the CEO and a business-unit manager and the saliency of CEO compensation pay-equity.

CEO friendship ties, which are associated with lower levels of social distance, result in less earning management in the absence of the DFA CEO pay-equity ratio disclosure. However, CEO friendship may result in negative repercussions in terms of higher earnings management in the post-DFA environment when managers are provided with the pay-equity disclosure.

Future research may expand this study by examining how the adverse consequences of the CEO compensation saliency disclosure can be mitigated.

Management, audit committees and internal auditors should consider the possibility of unintended consequences of the increased transparency of CEO pay-equity while designing management control systems.

This study highlights the importance of understanding how employees’ social relationships with leaders may influence their behavior.

Unlike prior research, which focuses on senior executives’ direct incentives to manipulate earnings and subsequently increase their compensation, this study provides evidence regarding the earnings management behavior of business-unit managers.

Uncertainties in the design variables of non‐linear engineering optimization problems are often neglected. That could result in considerable deterioration of the target function value of an implemented design compared with the computed optimal solution. This effect can be reduced with robust optimization, where it is tried to achieve robust designs by actively embedding the uncertainties and robustness measures in the optimization process. A methodology for robust optimization of non‐linear problems is presented, including practical methods for the solution of such programs. The benefits of the approach are discussed in a numerical field calculation example.

Floods are among the most significant and frequent hazards to affect communities in the downstream part of the Ba River in Western Viti Levu, Fiji Islands. They often leave in their wake displacements and death putting thousands at risk of sliding into poverty. Using the recent 2009 and 2012 floods, we examine how social capital aids in post-disaster response and recovery among residents in five selected villages in the downstream communities of the Ba River. Data were collected from a questionnaire survey administered to 97 households and semi-structured interviews with a further 20 respondents. It is conventionally believed that moving supplies, aid and expertise into flood-affected areas offers the best path to effective response and recovery. By contrast, our results indicate that residents of downstream communities in Ba District are using four approaches to create and deploy social capital among them to facilitate disaster response. The patterns of social capital used for effective response include practices of search and rescue, information, mutual assistance and commercial cooperation. Such strategies help to build resilience at household and community levels and reduce risks of loss of life and costly damage to property. The findings can be used to generate policies concerning the integration of social capital as a component of flood disaster response and recovery mechanisms.