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There is substantial evidence of discrimination at work across countries and powerful evidence that antidiscrimination laws can make a difference. This study examines the extent of protections from discrimination at work in countries around the world and which groups were best covered.

This study assesses legal protections in hiring, pay, promotions/demotions, terminations and harassment for 13 different groups across 193 countries using a database the authors created based on analysis of labor codes, antidiscrimination legislation, equal opportunity legislation and penal codes. Differences in levels of protection were examined across social groups and areas of work, as well as by country income level using Chi-square tests.

Protection from gender and racial/ethnic discrimination at work was the most common, and protection across migrant status, foreign national origin, sexual orientation and gender identity was among the least. For all groups, discrimination was more often prohibited in hiring than in promotion/demotion. There was inconsistent protection from harassment and retaliation.

Addressing discrimination at work will require a broad range of synergistic approaches including guaranteeing equal legal rights, implementation and enforcement of laws and norm change. This study highlights where legislative progress has been made and where major gaps remain.

This article presents findings from an original database containing the first data on laws to prevent discrimination in the workplace in all 193 countries around the world. The study analyzes legal protections for a wide range of groups and considers a full range of workplace protections.

The teaching and learning of anatomy has experienced a significant paradigm shift. The present study assessed the level of knowledge in anatomy in medical postgraduate students and explored the impact of interventions in the form of anatomical videos on knowledge obtained. An awareness of the importance of human anatomy for clinical skills was created to ensure a certain level of competence be achieved by the end of the anatomy course.

Postgraduate medical students were recruited from various specialties on voluntary basis. The first step was to conduct a preliminary screening exam to determine the level of anatomical knowledge. The students were then divided into two groups at random, one of which received no intervention (the control group), and the other of which watched the videos with content that was pertinent to the practical demonstrations (intervention). To assess the effects of the video intervention, a post-test was administered to all students.

Both spot tests (SPOTs) and short answer question (SAQ) components for scores of all the regions from the intervention groups were comparable to the scores obtained by the post-test control group, although the findings were not significant (p > 0.05). However, the intervention group from the abdomen (ABD) region did perform significantly better (p < 0.05) than the screening test score.

The results of the research study imply that interventions like anatomical videos can bridge the postgraduate trainee’s anatomy knowledge gap in a practical method which will immensely help in increasing their knowledge.

(1) A concern often expressed in relation to cryptocurrencies is the environmental impact associated with increasing energy consumption and mining pollution. Controversy remains regarding how environmental attention and public concerns adversely affect cryptocurrency prices. Therefore, the paper aims to introduce the index of cryptocurrency environmental attention (ICEA), which aims to capture the relative extent of media discussions surrounding the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies. (2) The impacts of cryptocurrency environmental attention on long-term macro-financial markets and economic development remain part of undeveloped research fields. Based on these factors, the paper will further examine the effects of the ICEA on financial markets or economic developments.

(1) The paper introduces a new index to capture cryptocurrency environmental attention in terms of the cryptocurrency response to major related events through gathering a large amount of news stories around cryptocurrency environmental concerns – i.e. >778.2 million news items from the LexisNexis News & Business database, which can be considered as Big Data – and analysing that rich dataset using variety of quantitative techniques. (2) The vector error correction model (VECM) and structural VECM (SVECM) [impulse response function (IRF), forecast error variance decomposition (FEVD) and historical decomposition (HD)] are useful for characterising the dynamic relationships between ICEA and aggregate economic activities.

(1) The paper has developed a new measure of attention to sustainability concerns of cryptocurrency markets' growth, ICEA. (2) ICEA has a significantly positive relationship with the UCRY indices, volatility index (VIX), Brent crude oil (BCO) and Bitcoin. (3) ICEA has a significantly negative relationship with the global economic policy uncertainty (GlobalEPU) and global temperature uncertainty (GTU). Moreover, ICEA has a significantly positive relationship with the industrial production (IP) in the short term, whilst having a significantly negative relationship in the long term. (4) The HD of the ICEA displays higher linkages between environmental attention, Bitcoin and UCRY indices around key events that significantly change the prices of digital assets.

The ICEA is significant in the analysis of whether cryptocurrency markets are sustainable regarding energy consumption requirements and negative contributions to climate change. Understanding of the broader impacts of cryptocurrency environmental concerns on cryptocurrency market volatility, uncertainty and environmental sustainability should be considered and developed. Moreover, the paper aims to point out future research and policy legislation directions. Notably, the paper poses the question of how cryptocurrency can be made more sustainable and environmentally friendly and how governments' cryptocurrency policies can address the cryptocurrency markets.

(1) The paper develops a cryptocurrency environmental attention index based on news coverage that captures the extent to which environmental sustainability concerns are discussed in conjunction with cryptocurrencies. (2) The paper empirically investigates the impacts of cryptocurrency environmental attention on other financial or economic variables [cryptocurrency uncertainty (UCRY) indices, Bitcoin, VIX, GlobalEPU, BCO, GTU index and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development IP index]. (3) The paper provides insights into making the most effective use of online databases in the development of new indices for financial research.

Whilst blockchain technology has a number of useful implications and has great potential to transform several industries, issues of high-energy consumption and CO2 pollution regarding cryptocurrency have become some of the main areas of criticism, raising questions about the sustainability of cryptocurrencies. These results are essential for both policy-makers and for academics, since the results highlight an urgent need for research addressing the key issues, such as the growth of carbon produced in the creation of this new digital currency. The results also are important for investors concerned with the ethical implications and environmental impacts of their investment choices.

(1) The paper provides an efficient new proxy for cryptocurrency and robust empirical evidence for future research concerning the impact of environmental issues on cryptocurrency markets. (2) The study successfully links cryptocurrency environmental attention to the financial markets, economic developments and other volatility and uncertainty measures, which has certain novel implications for the cryptocurrency literature. (3) The empirical findings of the paper offer useful and up-to-date insights for investors, guiding policy-makers, regulators and media, enabling the ICEA to evolve into a barometer in the cryptocurrency era and play a role in, for example, environmental policy development and investment portfolio optimisation.

Under the Directive 2011/24/EU, medical tourism and cross-border health are interrelated terms regarding the freedom to move to get the most accessible medical treatment into EU Member State within the defined procedures for reimbursement. Little known empirically regarding the efficiency of the cross-border health/medical tourism industry. This study aims to measure its efficiency in Europe for the years 2010-2014, by using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA).

Data obtained from OECD and the European Core Health Indicators (ECHI), which is collecting the data through Eurostat. Eurostat collects data on health-care activities and provides data on hospital discharges, including the hospital discharges of non-residents and these include hospital discharges of in-patients and day care patients. The analysis uses “DEA.P, 2.1 for windows” by Coelli (1996).

The results show that the Members States health systems were very efficient in handling non-residents in-patients; however, when managing day cases/outpatients, the efficiency scores dropped.

The findings would have significant associations affecting intentions to revisit clinics and the destination country. In addition, will be useful to those seeking a better understanding of the cross-border health and medical tourism industry efficiency.

Extending the findings of the European Commission report (2015c) by examining how well medical tourists are informed about the decision they are making, would be of perceived value. These are important indicators at European level by helping each Member State to measure its medical tourism services.

Ethics is fundamentally a science of social and collective responsibility. Ethics concerns human behavior as responsible or accountable. Because of the nature of social interaction, certain members of the society will bear greater authority, and hence, greater individual and social responsibility than others. In our world, personal responsibility and social responsibility are hardly separable. Personal responsibility becomes responsibility for the world because the person and the world are inseparable. In this chapter, we use the term responsibility from a legal, ethical, moral, and spiritual (LEMS) standpoint as some promise, commitment, obligation, sanctioned by self, morals, law, or society, to do good, and if harm results, to repair harm done on another. Hence, responsibility from a moral perspective is trustworthiness and dependability of the agent in some enterprise. Its inverse is exoneration – the extent to which one is excused from commitment and repairing the harm done to others by one’s actions. We apply the theories and constructs of executive responsibility to two contemporary cases: (1) India’s Super Rich in 2014 and (2) the Fall and Rise of Starbucks. After exploring the basic notion of responsibility, we present a discussion on the nature and obligation of corporate responsibility into three parts: Part I: Classical Understanding and Discussion on Corporate Responsibility; Part II: Contemporary Understanding and Discussion on Corporate Responsibility, and Part III: A synthesis of classical and contemporary views of responsibility and their applications to corporate executive responsibility.

This paper aims to investigate the relevance of two groups of valuations models as follows: the accounting models based on the residual income (RIM) and the standard market model, on equity price, return and volatility relevance.

The models are tested on companies traded on Palestine exchange from 2009 to 2018, using panel regression analysis. Two-price and two-return models derived from RIM to compare with the market model and four volatility models.

The standard RIM outperformed other models in equity price modeling. The dividend discount model (DDM) outperformed the rest of the models in terms of return estimation. However, the authors find that the market model can explain equity variance better than RIM and DDM models.

For investors, market beta does not necessarily capture all relevant factors of value and traditional financial statements are still important in providing relevant information and different models are used for different values perspectives (price, return and volatility).

Previous studies focus on comparing the price and return relevance of accounting-based models (RIM and cash flow models). Three aspects differentiate this paper and contribute to its originality, namely, the uniqueness of the context, incorporating the market model into the picture along with the accounting-based models and adding Volatility dimensions of relevance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the underlying reciprocity mechanism which governs the relationship between employer and employee at their workplaces in a perspective whereby intrinsic and extrinsic factors of job satisfaction are considered as proxy to organizational offerings, while multi overall job satisfaction and dimensional organizational commitment as employee’ attitudinal reaction to the organizational offerings. Under the aforementioned notion, the present study intends to examine the influence of job characteristics on employees’ attitudes, such as, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and employee’ turnover intentions as psychological response to job characteristics. In a way, the study attempts to insight into how employee’ reciprocate to the perceived obligation toward its organization. The study also aims to supplement the empirical evidence about the competing power of intrinsic and extrinsic factors of job in determining the job satisfaction. Although various studies exhibit positive relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment has been consistently reported. However, for the managerial implication, the identification of employee physiological and psychological needs to gauge the understanding of mechanism by which of employee’ reacts to its environment and develop attitude toward their job and organization is imperative. In this context, this study makes a humble attempt to clear the relationships in the perspective of reciprocation between organization and its employees. Thus, this study attempts to illustrate how feeling a need to reciprocate, those who experienced strong satisfaction with job characteristics appear to have had a sense of moral duty to the organization can be helpful in understanding the processes by which organizational inducements exert their influence on other employee attitudes and behaviors. Evidently, while the link between employees’ satisfaction with their job and high organizational commitment, on the one hand, and low intentions to leave on the other is fairly straightforward, yet there in need to study these variables as exogenous and endogenous to inquire about their causation. Also, the available present literature on the understudy concern genuinely lacks adequate empirical material about the competing power of intrinsic and extrinsic factors of job in determining the job satisfaction as such some author hold that intrinsic characteristic of job better predict job satisfaction while as another set of behavioral scientists found extrinsic job characteristics as prime determinant of job satisfaction compare to the intrinsic worth of their jobs. The present study was conducted in the state of depressed economy where unemployment rate is as high as 194 percent it was found interesting to investigate the about the competing power of intrinsic and extrinsic factors of job in determining the job satisfaction. The present study also attempts to supplement the empirical evidence in this direction.

Since the study use the tenets of situational theories of employee’ attitude which assume that employee’ attitude results from the psychological evaluation of one’s job characteristics or other aspects of the environment in the organization; therefore, the study integrates the job characteristics as the organizational offerings to its employee and employees attitude like job satisfaction, organizational commitment and employee’ turnover intentions as reciprocity reaction to the organizational offerings. The structural equation model was used to frames the intricacy job characteristics, job satisfaction and organizational commitment and employee turnover intentions. Ten job characteristics were identified with which employees experience at the workplace as organizational offerings. These include salary, recognition, co-workers, supervision, organizational policies, promotion, working condition, task requirement, job security and nature of work. Subsequently, these identified facets were divided into intrinsic and extrinsic factors of job satisfaction, and were considering as proxy to the organizational offerings to its employees. These job characteristics were identified during in-depth interviews and discussions with the respondents, while overall job satisfaction, organizational commitment and employees’ turnover intentions were considered as employee’s psychological reactions to the organizational offerings. The sample consists of 654 hospital employees, working at the different hospital across state. In order to ensure the representation of the entire human capital, employees working under different levels of occupational status and different sectors of economy were included in the for the purpose of data collection. The number of employees from each hospital has been selected through proportionate method. Employees from each hospital were selected on the basis of the chit method. Measurement tools Questionnaire method was used to collect the data for the present study. A five-point likert type scale was used for the sake of maintaining uniformity in measuring the variables. All the variables were measured with multiple-item scales, questionnaire item used to measure different constructs in this study are derived from the previously established studies. As such, multidimensional organizational commitment construct was measured using items drawn from Meyer and Allen (1991) scale. Job characteristics and employee’ turnover intentions scale was adapted from the study conducted by Ali Muhammad et al. (2008). The instrument used for the present study has universal application. Therefore the results thus produce are of universal significance. The reliability and validity of measurement tools for the study was established by the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

The findings from the study reveal employees’ subjective evaluation to the intrinsic and extrinsic factors of job contribute to the formation of their reciprocal perspective of psychological attitude toward its job and organization characterized as their job satisfaction and organizational commitment. As such, better evaluation of job content and job context by the employees leads to the sense of obligation and commitment toward the organization, hence reduces their intentions to discord organizational membership. The findings also reveal that employees tend to incline their job satisfaction more toward the extrinsic worth of job than the intrinsic worth. While as both, job satisfaction and organizational commitment, explains relatively equal variation in the employees’ turnover intentions. The relatively strong correlation of extrinsic characteristics of job could be attributed to the fact that professionals generally have limited control over extrinsic factors and have high degree of control over intrinsic elements. Therefore, their perceptions of the job are particularly dependent on the degree of satisfaction with the extrinsic factors (Pearson and Seiler, 1983).

Although there are various studies manifested the relationship between job satisfaction, organizational commitment and employee turnover intentions, for all that, the present work is an attempt to deem these relationships in a different panorama to bring more insight in the subject of organizational behavior. In this study, the relationship among the job characteristics, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and employee’ turnover intentions were considered in a perspective of reciprocity norms. The study opens new horizons to the researchers across the globe, whereby organizational and job characteristics are considered as catalyst for the employee’ attitude and can be study and analyze in a functional relationship model. A new regime of paradigm may investigate the functional relationship between employer offerings as an input and employee attitudes as an output, with more emphasis on the organizational equilibrium. Hence, study encompass the managerial implication by gauging the understanding of mechanism by which of employee’ reacts to the workplace environment and develop attitude toward their job and organization. In this way, the propositions expatiated in the present work improves the understanding for the implications of various motivational theories, different organizational theories and human resource management models. Moreover, this work substantiates and provides insight about the competing power of intrinsic and extrinsic job factors on job satisfaction and opens debate for the generalization of Herzberg’s motivation theory.

Contrary to the traditional technology project perspective, real estate investors see building-specific renewable energy (on-site energy) investments as part of the property and as something affecting the property’s ability to produce a (net) cash flow. This paper aims to show the value-influencing mechanism of on-site energy production from a professional property investors’ perspective.

The value-influencing mechanism is presented with a case study of a prime logistics property located in the Helsinki metropolitan area, Finland. The case study results are compared with the results of a survey answered by over 70 property valuation professionals in the Finnish real estate market.

Current valuation practice supports the presented value-creation mechanism based on the capitalisation of the savings generated by a building’s own energy production. Valuation professionals see benefits beyond decreased operating expenses such as enhanced image and better saleability. However, valuers acted more conservatively than expected when transferring these additional benefits to the cash flows of the case property.

Because the savings in operating expenses can be capitalised into the property value, property investors should consider on-site energy production when the return of on-site energy exceeds the return of the property. This enhances the profitability of on-site energy, especially in urban areas with low initial yields.

This is the first research paper to open the value-influencing mechanism of on-site energy production from a professional property investors’ perspective in commercial properties and to confirm it from a market study.

Many national retailers have complained about increases in business rates tax bills since the 2017 revaluation. What impact has the 2017 business rates revaluation had on independent high street retailers in market towns in the north of England? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The study uses Valuation Office Agency rating list data to determine rateable value and business rates payable for independent high street retailers in eight northern market towns either side of the 2017 rating revaluation. The data were analysed using business rates matrices to reveal the impact of the new rating list on independent retailers in the eight locations.

Analysis reveals that the majority of independent retailers in the northern market towns sampled have experienced reductions in both the rateable value of their premises and business rates payable. Increase in the rates relief threshold has extended relief to almost half of the independent retailers in the study, most of whom receive 100 per cent relief.

Charity shops receive at least 80 per cent rates relief which means they are able to afford to pay higher rents. This “sets the tone” for landlords setting market rents in that location which are then used as comparable evidence by the VOA when determining rateable values at revaluation further polarising the gap between rate payers and those to are exempt.

Focussing on independent retailers on high streets in markets towns in north of England, this study provides an alternative perspective to the orthodox view of business rates revaluations having a negative impact on retailers.

Applying the institutional logics perspective to applicant attraction, this study investigates the level of uniformity among preferences for consulting job attributes associated with the institutional logics of the corporation, the profession and the family, and tests for the influence of anticipatory socialization differences.

The study uses a discrete choice experiment with 232 business students. A hierarchical Bayes approach to conjoint analysis uncovers part-worth heterogeneity and allows for subsequent cluster and regression analysis of the choice data.

The findings identify a dominant job-oriented preference type and a minor career-oriented preference type. Anticipatory socialization through personal prior work experience and the occupation of friends decreases adherence to the logic of profession and increases the relevance of the family logic. The parents' occupation has only a minimal influence on preferences.

The study provides attribute-based recommendations on how professional service firms can effectively address the complex expectations of potential applicants in their job ads for an entry position and underlines the role of intra-generational reference groups as important anticipatory socializers.

By testing individual socialization effects at the pre-hire stage and beyond the organizational level, the study fills a void in both the recruitment and the institutional literature.