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This paper presents a method used to validate a spatial load forecasting model based on fuzzy systems implemented in a Geographical Information System. The validation process confirms the adequacy of the rule base, and also it is strictly necessary to define the confidence intervals associated to the predicted spatial demand.

The purpose of this paper is to study the fatigue crack growth (FCG) behaviour of the steel and weldments of a railway bridge.

Tests were carried out on compact tension (CT) specimens using the thickness (B=32 mm) of a structural detail. The test matrix included three R values and three material conditions: base material (BM), heat affected zone (HAZ) and weld metal (WM). An evaluation of opening load behavior was carried out. The full field measurement of the residual stress perpendicular to the crack plane was performed using the contour technique. A simplified finite element analysis supported the interpretation of the results. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) observation of the fracture surface of BM and HAZ specimens was carried out.

Extensive crack closure effects were found in the welded specimens. Important through‐the‐thickness variation of residual stress was found using the contour technique. The residual stress fields of HAZ and WM specimens led to slowing down the FCG rate in the initial stages of crack propagation and to uncommon fracture surfaces. When the opening load effect was taken into consideration it was found that the da/dN vs ΔK of the different types of specimens are approximately identical. The ratio (striation spacing)/(da/dN) decreases up to approximately unity as a/W increases. In the specimens analyzed, FCG rates below approximately 2E‐7 to 3E‐7 m/cycle are associated with approximately constant striation spacing values, which could be considered a conservative upper bound of the real crack growth rate.

Fatigue crack growth behavior of thick welded steel CT specimens was analyzed on the basis of tests including full field residual stress measurements, crack closure behavior and striation spacing, allowing for the simultaneous consideration of all those aspects. It is shown that the striations spacing provides no more than a conservative upper bond of the real crack propagation rate.

This paper aims to investigate the viewpoint of undergraduate Management students at a Brazilian public university regarding the notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR). It theoretically articulates the notion of CSR and the formal education perspective to discuss managerial education.

Stude nts in the Management program were surveyed for their opinion on the notion of CSR. Data were collected through triangulation by combining the application of questionnaire and documentary research. There were 241 valid questionnaires, and this is the size of the sample. Data were analyzed by using the SPSS software (version 20), descriptive statistics and non-parametric tests.

Results reveal that, for undergraduate Management students, the most important CSR dimensions are, in hierarchical order, the philanthropic, the ethical, the legal and the economic. Thus, one can notice an inversion of the original CSR pyramid proposed by Carroll (1991).

The main limitation is the conduction of research in the context of a single public university.

Results indicate a change in how CSR is understood, the philanthropic dimension becoming the main factor for the establishment of organizational goals.

Considering that undergraduate Management students are the future members of the corporate world and decision-makers in society, these results indicate the stance these future professionals will take when confronted by dilemmas involving CSR.

This investigation is original in Brazilian context, for it identifies students’ opinion on CSR using a questionnaire whose development was based on the CSR pyramid.

This paper seeks to analyze the relationship between China and the Northeast region of Brazil, aiming to identify how the renewable energy sector is being developed.

The authors analyzed secondary data from the official databases from China-Brazil chambers of commerce to establish the main points related to renewable energy in Brazil's Northeast.

It is possible to notice the main investments, highlighting the wind energy as a more prominent source recently. The authors also point the huge influence from China on Brazil's Northeast energy sector.

It is difficult to identify the amount of Chinese capital due to the large number of mergers and acquisitions that has been taking place in recent years.

Identification of regions that have been receiving investments and the main interests of Chinese investors in the renewable energy sector.

Demonstration of how the renewable energy sector has taken an important turn in Brazil due to Chinese investment.

To evaluate a regional consortium, analyzing its strategies for partnerships with China to help each other in global questions, as is the case of renewable energy.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between earnings quality and corporate cash holdings in an emerging economy. Existing literature posits that earnings quality is a result of information asymmetry and firms with lower earnings quality increases cash holdings, to shield the firm from future uncertainties. In this paper, the authors propose a ‘private benefits hypothesis’, which suggests that lower earnings quality is an indicator of opportunism and expropriation of resources in the firm, through tunneling or excessive executive compensations. As a result, firms with lower earnings quality increase cash holdings in their control, to increase their private benefits and to avoid the scrutiny of the external stakeholders. The authors further examine the monitoring role played by institutional investors on cash holdings, with varying degrees of earnings quality.

This study uses an unbalanced panel data sourced from Prowessdx, from 2000 to 2019. The analysis employs 20,231 firm-year observations from 2,421 firms. Earnings quality is calculated following Dechow and Dichev (2002).

Empirical analysis confirms that the firms with higher earnings quality reduce cash. Further, institutional investors reduce the cash holdings in firms with higher earnings quality. Institutional investors effectively reduce the cash only in firms with at least 10% of equity shareholding. The results are robust to alternative measures of earnings quality and endogeneity concerns.

This study diverges from the information asymmetry hypothesis in the existing literature on earnings quality and cash holdings and highlights the underlying private benefits hypothesis, that will impact cash holdings. Next, the 10% institutional shareholding is important in the Indian context as it represents the minimum threshold at which block holders can request extraordinary general meetings (Section 100 of the Companies Act 2013) or the involvement of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) (Section 213 of the Companies Act 2013). This study highlights that unlike in Anglo-Saxon economies, institutional investors or other minority shareholders are empowered by the Companies Act 2013 to play a vital role in corporate governance with a mere 10% equity.

This paper aims to investigate the pattern of dependence between crude oil price and energy consumption of the most important economic sectors in the USA, over different time periods, using monthly data set from January 1986 to July 2014 and a comparative study between linear correlation versus copula correlation as a measure of dependence over the single scale and the multiscale analysis.

The proposed method is based on the multiresolution analysis which gives more extensive and detailed description of the dependence price-consumption pattern over different periods of time.

The empirical results show that the dependence between variables is strongly sensitive to the time varying and generally increasing with time scale. In particular, the Pearson coefficients are less than the dependence copula measures. The single-scale analysis covers many time-varying dependences which are made clear, flexible and comprehensive by the description given by the multiscale approach. It explains better the structure of relationships between variables and helps understand the variations and improve forecasts of the crude oil price and energy consumption over different time scales.

The proposed methodology offers the opportunity to construct dynamic management strategies by taking into account the multiscale nature of crude oil price and consumption relationship. Moreover, the paper uses wavelets as a relatively new and powerful tool for statistical analysis in addition to the copula technique that allows a new understanding of variable correlation. The paper will be of interest not only for academics in the field of data dependencies analysis but also for fund managers and market investors.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether Financial Reporting Quality (FRQ), Corporate Governance and IFRS affect investment efficiency of French listed companies.

Based on a sample of 125 French firms listed on the CAC All Tradable index between 2008 and 2017, the study uses Feasible Generalized Least Squares (FGLS) regressions to examine the relationship between FRQ and firms' investment efficiency.

The findings show that FRQ plays a role in reducing overinvestment and does not affect underinvestment, suggesting that in a code-law country, informal and personal relationships tend to replace the role of financial reports in mitigating information asymmetry. The results also reveal that the relationship between FRQ and investment efficiency increases with better corporate governance and with the implementation of IFRS. However, the results provide no evidence between incentives to minimize profits for tax purposes and firms' underinvestment and continues to be negative for overinvesting companies that have more incentives to manage their earnings for tax purposes.

Our study has some limitations. First, we only examine listed firms, so the results cannot be generalized to unlisted companies that represent the vast majority of French economic activity. Second, this research does not distinguish between government companies and private companies. The two types of companies have different governance mechanisms, financial reporting, disclosure environment and concentration of ownership.

This study suggests that in a code-law country with weak investor protection, FRQ acts as a governance mechanism by mitigating asymmetric information and improving firms' investment decisions.

The relationship between FRQ and investment efficiency has been widely examined for companies in “common law” countries. This study extends the scarce evidence of this relation to companies in a code-law country. It also builds on previous research by introducing new factors never discussed before that could change this relationship, namely corporate governance, IFRS implementation and tax purposes.

This paper aims to study the impact of geopolitical uncertainty on corporate cost of debt and the moderating role of information asymmetry between creditors and borrowing firms.

This study uses 5,223 firm-quarter observations on German-listed firms spanning 2010:Q1–2021:Q4. This study regresses the cost of debt financing on the geopolitical risk, accounting quality and other control variables. Information asymmetry is measured using the performance-matched Jones-model discretionary accrual and the stock bid-ask spread. It uses interaction terms to check if information asymmetry moderates the impact of geopolitical uncertainty on the cost of debts and control for the moderating role of business risk. For the sake of robustness check, it uses long-term cost of debt and bond spread as alternative dependent variables. In addition, this study executes instrumental variables regression and propension score matching to control for potential endogeneity problems.

Estimation results show that geopolitical uncertainty exerts a positive impact on the cost of debt. This impact is found to be more important on the cost of long-term debts. Information asymmetry is found to exacerbate the positive impact of geopolitical risk on the cost of debt. These results are robust to the change of the dependent variable and to the mitigation of potential endogeneity. At high levels of information asymmetry, this impact is more important for firms belonging to “Transportation”, “Automobiles and auto parts”, “Chemicals”, “Industrial and commercial services”, “Software and IT services” and “Industrial goods” business sectors.

Geopolitical uncertainty should be seriously considered when setting strategies for corporate financial management in Germany and similar economies that are directly exposed to geopolitical risks. Corporate managers should design a comprehensive set of corporate policies to improve their transparency and accountability during increasing uncertainty. Policymakers are required to implement innovative monetary and fiscal policies that take into consideration the heterogeneous impact of geopolitical uncertainty and information transparency in order to contain their incidence on German business sectors.

Despite its relevance to corporate financing conditions, little is known about the impact of geopolitical uncertainty on the cost of debt financing. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is still no empirical evidence on how information asymmetry between creditors and borrowing firms shapes the impact of geopolitical uncertainty on the cost of debt. This paper tries to fill this gap by interacting two measures of information asymmetry with geopolitical uncertainty. In contrast with previous studies, this study shows that the impact of geopolitical uncertainty on the cost of debt is non-linear and heterogeneous. The results show that the impact of geopolitical uncertainty does not exert the same impact on the cost of debt instruments with different maturities. This impact is found to be heterogeneous across business sectors and to depend on the level of information asymmetry.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of financial statement comparability as a qualitative feature of financial reporting on cash holdings and the mediating role of disclosure quality and financing constraints in firms listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE).

Using panel data from 110 TSE-listed firms from 2011 to 2017 in Iran, this study uses the regression analysis to examine the research hypotheses. The first hypothesis examines the relationship between financial statements comparability and cash holdings and two other hypotheses examine the mediating role of financing constraints and disclosure quality in this relationship.

Based on pecking-order theory and institutional context of Iranian firms, the results show that financial reporting comparability has a significant negative impact on corporate cash holdings. The results also show that disclosure quality and financing constraints have no mediating role in the relationship between accounting comparability and cash holdings. The robustness tests with alternative measures of accounting comparability and cash holdings support the findings of this study.

The limitations of this study are as follows: limited number of TSE companies that have necessary data to conduct research; and using the disclosure quality scores provided by TSE organization.

The findings suggest that creditors should consider the financial status and also the quality of financial reporting of companies, before granting credit to them. It is also recommended that regulators in the capital market publish the ratings of companies in terms of financial statement comparability alongside the disclosure ratings and a continuous regulatory oversight on companies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical research on the effect of accounting comparability on the level of cash holdings that examines the mediating role of financing constraints in the context of Iran market as an emerging economy. Moreover, this is the first empirical research that studies the effect of disclosure quality on this relationship.