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In the digital age, the development of students’ career intentions requires serious concentration since these are associated with the students’ future employment and, ultimately, their survival. This study attempted to demonstrate in Pakistan’s Higher Educational Institutes (HEIs) the role of soft skills towards the students' career development (CD) and their future career intentions (CI).

In this study, the researchers used a quantitative approach and a questionnaire to collect the data from the surveyed participants. Finally, the researchers based this study’s findings on 392 useable samples.

By employing the structural equation model (SEM), this study’s findings show that soft skills, such as Creative Self-Efficacy (CSE), Problem-Solving Confidence (PSC) and Teamwork (TW) have a positive and significant effect on CD and CI. However, while Critical thinking and Creativity (CRC) has a positive and significant effect on CD, it has no effect on CI. In addition, this study’s findings confirm, also, that CD has a positive and significant effect on CI.

This study’s findings assist policymakers and university administrators to understand the importance of soft skills in creating CD and CI. These promote the development of employability skills and fulfill its part in preparing graduates for the unpredictable job market. This study’s findings help, also, to develop logical reasoning in making decisions and in dealing with complex organizational issues.

In a practical way, in Pakistan, this study’s findings confirm the role of soft skills towards students' CD and CI.

This study aims to demonstrate how pressures (incentives) in the audit environment can lower audit quality because of a breakdown between professionally skeptical (PS) judgment (risk assessment) and PS action (testing).

The authors used a Qualtrics-based experiment with attitude change as a proxy measure of cognitive dissonance (CD). The authors analyze the results using a one-way independent between-group ANOVA with post hoc tests and t-tests.

The authors find that auditors experience CD when they fail to take appropriate high PS action (audit tests) that are in line with high PS judgment (risk assessments). The motivational force to reduce CD drives auditors to revise their assessments upward (rank higher), lower diagnostic audit tests (PS actions) and lower risk assessments (PS judgments). This leads to lower overall professional skepticism, and hence lower audit quality.

This investigation provides an empirical investigation of Nelson’s (2009) model of professional skepticism and demonstrates a specific mechanism for how incentives in the audit environment lower audit quality. Based on the findings, treatments to enhance audit quality can benefit by strengthening the critical link between PS judgments (risk assessments) and PS actions (audit tests).

Recent developments in the psychometric assessment of youth psychopathic traits suggest that the inclusion of a conduct disorder (CD) factor to the traditional three factors of the psychopathy construct may improve the incremental validity of these measures. The purpose of the current study is to examine whether the addition of a CD factor incrementally improves the ability of the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory Short version (YPI-S) to predict criminal recidivism.

A longitudinal quantitative research design was used with a sample detained male youth (N = 214, M_age = 16.4 years, SD_age = 1.3 years).

Results using the area under the curve analysis suggest that the inclusion of a CD factor slightly improves the capacity of the YPI-S to predict one-year general criminal recidivism, but it does not significantly increase its capacity to predict violent criminal recidivism. Results also indicate that a CD scale outperforms the YPI-S, even with an additional CD factor included, in terms of predicting one-year general and violent recidivism.

Self-reported youth psychopathic trait measures, even those that include a CD factor as a fourth factor, should be used with caution when the aim is to predict youth criminal recidivism.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study using a self-reported youth psychopathic traits measure with a CD factor to examine youth criminal recidivism.

This paper aims to examine whether the cultural distance between an international audit firm and target audit clients in emerging countries is associated with auditor choice decisions.

Based on a sample of 104,699 firm-year observations from 20 countries over 2009–2020, logit regression analysis is used to investigate the research questions.

The authors find strong evidence that cultural distance affects the auditor selection decision. The results suggest Big N auditors are more likely to be chosen by target audit clients in emerging countries with less cultural distance. In other words, target audit clients in emerging countries prefer to choose international audit firms whose cultural characteristics are similar. Moreover, results from two-stage least squares regression further suggest that the observed effect of cultural distance on auditor choice is unlikely to be driven by potential endogeneity.

The auditor choice is limited to companies hiring Big N auditors; the authors exclude any switches to non-Big N auditors or switches between Big N auditors. The study also suffers from the concerns about methodological and conceptual criticism that most studies about national culture have to deal with. Finally, through this paper, the authors carry out the auditor selection process from the target audit clients’ side; the authors do not discuss the supply side of the process.

The authors contribute to the audit choice literature by providing evidence that the cultural distance between the countries of audit firms and target audit clients plays a role in the auditor choice decision. The study complements the prior auditor choice literature, focusing primarily on Western economies, by structuring the sample scope to emerging market economies.

This study aims to examine the impact of corporate governance (CG) on anti-corruption disclosure (A-CD), paying particular attention to the FTSE 100. Notably, it examines how board and audit committees’ characteristics affect the quantity and quality of anti-corruption disclosure.

Data from FTSE 100 firms, spanning the period from 2014 to 2020, were analysed using the regression of the Poisson fixed effect and GEE analyses.

The findings show that gender diversity, audit committee expertise and the independence of the audit committee are positively associated with both quantity and quality of anti-corruption disclosure. Notably, no statistically significant relationships were identified between anti-corruption disclosure and factors such as board size, role duality or board meetings.

The findings provide valuable insights for decision-makers and regulatory bodies, shedding light on the elements that compel UK companies to enhance their anti-corruption disclosure and governance protocols to alleviate corruption and propel efforts towards ethical behaviour.

This study makes a notable contribution to the sparse body of evidence by examining the influence of board and audit committee attributes on anti-corruption disclosure subsequent to the implementation of the UK Bribery Act in 2010. Specifically, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study assesses for the first time the impact of board and audit committee mechanisms on both the quantity and quality of anti-corruption disclosure.

The purpose of this study is determination of cadmium using silver-gold bimetallic nanoparticles (Ag-Au BMNPs) and an aptamer modified glassy carbon electrode.

The maximum response of modified electrode was obtained with, 50 mV pulse amplitude, 20 mV/s scan rate in phosphate buffer of pH 4.0. Ag-Au BMNPs, as the mediators improved electron transmit during the entire electron transfer process and the aptasensor response. Herein, the authors used aptamer as the capture probe to prepare an aptasensor with enhanced stability.

The proposed aptasensor exhibited a wide linearity to cadmium in the range of 0.001–0.100 µg/L with a low detection limit of 0.005×10⁻³ µg/L. The glassy carbon electrodes with Ag-Au BMNPs showed a lower detection limit.

This aptasensor has good reproducibility, stability and repeatability and is cost-effective to regenerate. The specificity and selectivity of the novel modified electrode is tested in the presence of other interfering metal ions such as Fe²⁺, Mn²⁺, Mg²⁺, Sb³⁺ and Bi³⁺. The aptasensor shows 10 times more sensitivity and selectivity for Cd²⁺ ions.

A semiparametric stochastic frontier model is proposed for panel data, incorporating several flexible features. First, a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production frontier is considered without log-transformation to prevent induced non-negligible estimation bias. Second, the model flexibility is improved via semiparameterization, where the technology is an unknown function of a set of environment variables. The technology function accounts for latent heterogeneity across individual units, which can be freely correlated with inputs, environment variables, and/or inefficiency determinants. Furthermore, the technology function incorporates a single-index structure to circumvent the curse of dimensionality. Third, distributional assumptions are eschewed on both stochastic noise and inefficiency for model identification. Instead, only the conditional mean of the inefficiency is assumed, which depends on related determinants with a wide range of choice, via a positive parametric function. As a result, technical efficiency is constructed without relying on an assumed distribution on composite error. The model provides flexible structures on both the production frontier and inefficiency, thereby alleviating the risk of model misspecification in production and efficiency analysis. The estimator involves a series based nonlinear least squares estimation for the unknown parameters and a kernel based local estimation for the technology function. Promising finite-sample performance is demonstrated through simulations, and the model is applied to investigate productive efficiency among OECD countries from 1970–2019.

This paper aims to present a novel multi-objective version of the Gorilla Troops optimizer (GTO), based on crowding distance, to achieve the optimal design of a brushless direct current motor.

In the proposed algorithm, the crowding distance technique was integrated into the GTO to perform the leader selection and also for the external archive refinement from extra non-dominated solutions. Furthermore, with a view to improving the diversity of non-dominated solutions in the external archive, mutation operator was used. For constrained problems, an efficient strategy was adopted. The proposed algorithm is referred to as CD-MOGTO.

To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, it was initially tested on three constrained multi-objective problems; thereafter, it was applied to optimize the design variables of brushless direct current motor to concurrently fulfill six inequality constraints, maximize efficiency and minimize total mass.

The results revealed the high potential of the proposed algorithm over different recognized algorithms in solving constrained multi-objective issues and the brushless direct current motors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the antecedents of organizational ambidexterity of foreign ventures in an emerging market. Organizational ambidexterity, the simultaneous pursuit of exploration and exploitation, represents a key innovation strategy. Yet, the driving factors of such innovation strategies for foreign ventures competing in emerging markets have been underresearched. In this study, unpacking the construct of organizational ambidexterity into two dimensions (i.e. the combined dimension [CD] and the balance dimension [BD]), the authors aim to investigate how firm-level and industry-level factors drive foreign ventures in pursuing exploration and exploitation and maximizing the benefits of both.

This study adopts the hierarchical multiple regression approach using a sample of foreign ventures operating in high-tech manufacturing industries in China.

The authors find that the firm-level factor of strategic flexibility leads positively to the CD of organizational ambidexterity, whereas the industry-level factor of technological turbulence has a significantly positive impact on the BD.

This study provides important insights into the driving factors of organizational ambidexterity for foreign ventures competing in emerging markets.

The rate of project failure across the globe seems to reinforce poor performance as a norm. However, engagement with construction digitalisation (CD) represents a departure point for improving project performance. Amidst researchers' recent empirical engagement with CD, the knowledge of the relationship model between CD and project delivery (PD) is abysmal. As a result, developing a business case for CD in developing countries has been slow due to the dearth of empirical evidence. This paper aims to investigate the influence of digitalisation on project performance.

Anchored on cross-sectional survey research design using a questionnaire survey in which a total of 183 copies of structured questionnaires were randomly distributed to medium- and large-sized construction firms operating in Abuja, Nigeria's federal capital. A total of 126 valid responses were received giving an overall response rate of 68.8%. The responses were analysed using mean item score, principal component analysis and multiple linear regression.

Findings from the regression analysis reveal that digitalisation has varying levels of impact on PP measured using quality, time and cost. The relationship model with time performance is weak (r = 0.526, r² = 0.277); on cost performance, the significant model is also weak (r = 0.502, r² = 0.252) and moderate on quality (r = 0.663, r² = 0.439). CD influences project cost, time and quality performance despite the weak relationship model. The results indicate that the most effective benchmark of CD is quality performance.

This study established the relationship between digitalisation and construction PD within the construction industry context, an area lacking research attention in emerging economies. This study is the first study in emerging economies that established the influence of digitalisation on construction PD statistically.