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We identify methodological weaknesses in a paper by Skocpol, Abend-Wein, Howard, and Lehmann (1993) on the origins of mothers’ pensions in the American states in the early twentieth century. These include a sub-optimal and potentially biased strategy for assessing the impact of state characteristics on the time to adoption of pensions, as well as the use of a backward stepwise regression procedure for selecting independent variables. To determine whether Skocpol et al.’s conclusions remain valid, we recreated most of their dataset and used methods that are more appropriate for the analysis of duration data, including the Cox and complementary cloglog event history procedures. While we find support for several of their claims, our findings allow for a more straightforward interpretation of the role of explanatory variables, and the temporal dependence of the adoption process.

The aim of this paper is to identify the factors that influence rice farmers' decisions to adopt crop insurance and premium payments (willingness to pay [WTP] amounts). The paper also demonstrates the usefulness of the complementary log-log (cloglog) truncated Poisson double-hurdle model as an alternative hurdle model.

The study first investigated the nature of the dependent variable, which had non-normal residuals and was overdispersed. The probit truncated normal regression double-hurdle model was tried but it failed the normality and homoscedasticity tests; hence, the cloglog truncated Poisson double-hurdle model was employed in the study.

An estimated 61% of respondents would purchase crop insurance, despite farmers not having prior experience with this product. Amongst others, the factors that influence insurance adoption amongst rice farmers are the share of rice in total income, reliability perception of crop insurance schemes and the probability of failure to achieve target yields. The latter helps the authors to address adverse selection, a central issue to the viability of such an insurance programme. The determinants of farmers' WTP are also identified.

Sampling was limited to farmers using irrigation and living in one region of Ghana, which may limit the study’s wider applicability.

As far as the authors are aware, this study is the first to select the appropriate hurdle model based on established properties of the dependent variable on this topic – crop insurance decisions.

This chapter aims to investigate to what extent differences in legal systems affect cross-border insolvency. Specifically, it aims to answer the following research questions: What is the relationship between multinational status and firm death rates? To what extent can the legal system affect the pattern of firms’ death across countries? How can the cross-border insolvency legal rules produce firms’ death or survival through corporate restructuring and bailout?

We apply survival methods and estimate a discrete-time hazard model in which we look for the effect of foreign ownership on firm death, controlling for firm- and industry-specific covariates. In doing this we analyse the determinants of firms’ death and crisis distinguishing Italian foreign-owned firms according to the legal system of the country where they have their ‘centre of main interests’ (COMI).

Our main findings reveal that Italian firms owned by foreign multinationals are more likely to exit and to be in crisis than national firms. In addition, Italian foreign-owned firms which have their COMI in a Common law country, compared with those having their COMI in a Civil law country, exhibit a lower risk of death and a higher likelihood of surviving the crisis.

This analysis was limited to all Italian firms. Therefore, it might be interesting to verify if there is a sort of country/sectoral heterogeneity in the firms’ behaviour. In addition, the analysis could be extended to the Italian firms investing abroad (i.e. Domestic MNEs).

Overall, our study enriches our understanding of the determinants of foreign-owned firms’ survival in Italy and highlights the important role assumed by the countries’ legal environment. Although the vast majority of legal systems establishes that business crisis management is no longer aimed at repressing and sanctioning, but rather at preserving the entrepreneurial complex, and rescuing and maintaining business activity, we provide some insights into how differences between Common law countries and Civil law countries affect cross-border insolvency.

To investigate the determinants of e‐commerce adoption in the retail sector using duration analysis.

The study proposes a conceptual model based on technology adoption and population ecology models. It identifies specific determinant factors organized under three areas: perceived benefits, organizational readiness, and external influences. Duration analysis is applied to data on 392 retailers.

Organizational readiness and external influences were the main driving factors of the adoption decision. There is no strong support for the perceived benefits construct. This suggests that e‐commerce adoption was to a great extent responsive to external pressures.

Major limitations include insufficient data. Future research can collect other types of data. Other extensions include the investigation of the effect of e‐commerce adoption, the construction of a formal theoretical model, and the collection of data from other countries.

The study provides guidelines to entry anticipation. It appears that many retailers mimetically responded to the online entry of other retailers. Managers should be also aware of the suitability of e‐commerce adoption to their organization. In order to be proactive, firms can put more emphasis on internal factors and rely less on outside signals in their strategies.

The paper investigates the e‐commerce adoption decision among retailers using a unique database collected from public sources, avoiding potential subjectivity bias. It traces the timing of e‐commerce adoption incorporating both fixed and time‐varying covariates.

Natural disasters profoundly influence agricultural trade sustainability. This study investigates the effects of natural disasters on agricultural production imports in China within 2002 and 2018. This exploration estimates the mediating role of transportation infrastructure and agriculture value-added and the moderating role of government effectiveness and diplomatic relations.

This investigation uses Probit, Logit, Cloglog and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) models.

The results confirm the mediating role of transportation infrastructure and agriculture value-added and the moderating role of government effectiveness and diplomatic relations in China. According to the findings, natural disasters in trading partners heighten the risk to the agricultural imports. This risk raises, if disasters damage overall agricultural yield or transportation infrastructure. Moreover, governments’ effective response or diplomatic ties with China mitigate the risk. Finally, the effect of disasters varies by the developmental status of the country involved, with events in developed nations posing a greater risk to China’s imports than those in developing nations.

China should devise an early warning system to protect its agricultural imports by using advanced technologies such as data analytics, remote sensing and artificial intelligence. In addition, it can leverage this system by improving its collaboration with trading partners, involvement in international forums and agreement for mutual support in crisis.

This article will select 25 years of subdivided data to perform Kaplan–Meier survival analysis on the export trade relations of Chinese wooden flooring, use discrete-time cloglog models to analyze influencing factors, use logit and probit models to test the robustness, and try to systematically reveal the duration of China's wood flooring export trade and its influencing factors.

This study used Kaplan–Meier survival function estimation method. In the survival analysis, survival function and hazard rate function are often used to characterize the distribution of survival time.

The continuous average export time of China's wooden flooring is relatively long, about 14 years. China's wooden flooring has a negative time dependency. After the export trade exceeds the threshold value of 15 years, the failure rate of trade greatly decreases, which has a “threshold effect.” Gravity model variables have a significant impact on the duration of China's wooden floor export.

Studying the duration of forest products trade is of great significance for clearing deep-level trade relations and promoting sustainable development of forest products trade.

The study examines the impact of income diversification on cost efficiency of Vietnamese commercial banks over the period 2005–2017.

Income diversification indicators are designed based on measures of diversifying loan portfolio. Besides the traditional model, we use the Fractional Regression to estimate the model with dependent variables defined on the unit interval.

Through the two-stage DEA analysis, we find that the income diversification has a positive impact on the cost efficiency of banks. In addition, this impact is stronger for unlisted banks and in the phase of banking system ongoing restructuring.

The use of a variety of income diversification measures and estimation methods for models with bounded dependent variable has provided a reliable empirical evidence of the advantages of implementing a strategy on structural diversity of both interest and non-interest income in the emerging banking markets such as Vietnam.

The purpose of this paper is to measure profitability and marketability efficiencies as well as examine the efficiencies’ determinants of listed manufacturing firms in Vietnam.

This study employs a bootstrap two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach to investigate the profitability and marketability efficiencies of 102 listed manufacturing firms on Vietnam stock market from 2007 to 2018. The study also applies fractional regression models (FRM) to identify the determinants of Vietnam manufacturing firms’ efficiencies.

The results reveal that Vietnam manufacturing firms obtain higher average profitability efficiency scores (0.888) than marketability efficiency scores (0.527) from 2007 to 2018. The high-tech firms achieve better profitability and marketability efficiencies than the traditional (resource-intensive and labour-intensive) Vietnam manufacturing firms in recent years (2016–2018). Further, the financial and non-financial factors have heterogeneous impacts on Vietnam manufacturing enterprises’ profit and market valuation efficiencies.

Due to the nature of DEA technique that requires every decision-making unit to have available data of all inputs and outputs, the listed Vietnam manufacturing firms that have incomplete data or go public after 2007 are not included in the data set.

This study provides a reference for Vietnam manufacturing managers to position their firms competitively in the market as well as make wise operating, financing and management decisions.

This is the first study that attempts to combine bootstrap two-stage DEA and FRM, which are considered advantageous methods for DEA scores’ measurements and determinant evaluations in the current literature.

In this study, I explore the link between workforce downsizing and the predominance of a corporate governance model that espouses a shareholder value maximization principle. Specifically, I examine how top managers’ shareholder value orientation affects the adoption of a downsizing strategy among large, publicly traded corporations in the United States. An analysis of CEOs’ letters to shareholders indicates that firms with CEOs who use language that espouses the shareholder value principle tend to have a higher rate of layoffs, after controlling for various indicators of the firm’s adherence to the shareholder value principle. The finding suggests that corporate governance models, particularly those advocated by powerful organizational elites, have a significant impact on workers by shaping corporate strategies toward the workforce. The key actors in this process were top managers who embraced the new management ideology and implemented corporate strategy to pursue shareholder value maximization.

This study examines the factors which affect the adoption of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure practices in line with Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines in Brazil's banking industry.

The analysis comprised the deposits (demand and savings), fee income, employee expenses, regulatory capital (Basel ratio) and ownership structure of all Brazilian banks from 2006 to 2017. The sample totalled 1,613 firm-year observations. The authors used three binary regression models (logit, probit and complementary log-log) in order to choose the one that best fits the model proposed. The authors controlled for size, profitability, leverage and liquidity.

The main results show positive relationships between CSR reporting and both savings deposits and fee income. The authors also found that state-owned (foreign private-owned) banks have a positive (negative) relationship with probability of CSR disclosure. A negative relationship was found between CSR disclosure and regulatory capital, indicating that banks are more likely to publish GRI reports as they approach the minimum levels of the Basel ratio.

Some banks may disclose CSR reports which do not adhere to the GRI guidelines; these were not captured in this study.

The estimated model aids understanding of factors influencing CSR disclosure in the banking industry in an emerging economy, which may help bank regulators to adopt new approaches in their supervisory and regulatory roles.

This work is the first to document that both fee income and banks' regulatory capital are related to CSR disclosure. Furthermore, this study investigates the entire banking industry of a Latin American country over the longest and most up-to-date period the authors are aware of.