Search results

Investor risk perception is a personalized judgement on the uncertainty of returns pertaining to a financial instrument. This study identifies key psychological and demographic factors that influence risk perception. It also unravels the complex relationship between demographic attributes and investor's risk attitude towards equity investment.

Exploratory factor analysis is used to identify factors that define investor risk perception. Multiple regression is used to assess the relationship between demographic traits and factor groups. Kruskal–Wallis test is used to ascertain whether the factors extracted differ across demographic categories. A risk perception framework based on these findings is developed to provide deeper insight.

There is evidence of the relationship and influence of demographic factors on risk propensity and behavioural bias. From this study, it is apparent that return expectation, time horizon and loss aversion, which define the risk propensity construct, vary significantly based on demographic traits. Familiarity, overconfidence, anchoring and experiential biases which define the behavioural bias construct differ across demographic categories. These factors influence the risk perception of an individual with respect to equity investments.

The reference for the framework of this study is limited as there has been no precedence of similar work in academia.

This paper establishes that information seekers make rational decisions. The paper iterates the need for portfolio managers to develop and align investment strategies after evaluation of investors' risk by including these behavioural factors, this can particularly be advantageous during extreme volatility in markets that concedes the possibility of irrational decision making.

This study highlights that regulators need to acknowledge the investor's affective, cognitive and demographic impact on equity markets and align risk control measures that are conducive to market evolution. It also creates awareness among market participants that psychological factors and behavioural biases can have an impact on investment decisions.

This is the only study that looks at a three-dimensional perspective of the investor risk perception framework. The study presents the relationship between risk propensity, behavioural bias and demographic factors in the backdrop of “information” being the mediating variable. This paper covers five characteristics of risk propensity and eight behavioural biases, such a vast coverage has not been attempted within the academic realm earlier with the aforesaid perspective.

With the rapid development of internet technology, open online social networks provide a broader platform for information spreading. While dissemination of information provides convenience for life, it also brings many problems such as security risks and public opinion orientation. Various negative, malicious and false information spread across regions, which seriously affect social harmony and national security. Therefore, this paper aims to minimize negative information such as online rumors that has attracted extensive attention. The most existing algorithms for blocking rumors have prevented the spread of rumors to some extent, but these algorithms are designed based on entire social networks, mainly focusing on the microstructure of the network, i.e. the pairwise relationship or similarity between nodes. The blocking effect of these algorithms may be unsatisfactory in some networks because of the sparse data in the microstructure.

An algorithm for minimizing the influence of dynamic rumor based on community structure is proposed in this paper. The algorithm first divides the network into communities, and integrates the influence of each node within communities and rumor influence probability to measure the influence of each node in the entire network, and then selects key nodes and bridge nodes in communities as blocked nodes. After that, a dynamic blocking strategy is adopted to improve the blocking effect of rumors.

Community structure is one of the most prominent features of networks. It reveals the organizational structure and functional components of a network from a mesoscopic level. The utilization of community structure can provide effective and rich information to solve the problem of data sparsity in the microstructure, thus effectively improve the blocking effect. Extensive experiments on two real-world data sets have validated that the proposed algorithm has superior performance than the baseline algorithms.

As an important research direction of social network analysis, rumor minimization has a profound effect on the harmony and stability of society and the development of social media. However, because the rumor spread has the characteristics of multiple propagation paths, fast propagation speed, wide propagation area and time-varying, it is a huge challenge to improve the effectiveness of the rumor blocking algorithm.

This paper aims to investigate the nonlinear effects of bank regulation stringency on bank lending in 23 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries over the period 1997–2017.

This study employs the dynamic panel threshold regression (PTR) model, which addresses endogeneity and heterogeneity problems within a nonlinear framework. It also uses indices of entry barriers, mixing of banking and commerce restrictions, activity restrictions and capital regulatory requirements from the updated databases of the World Bank's Bank Regulation and Supervision Surveys as measures of bank regulation.

The linearity test results support the existence of nonlinear effects in the relationship between bank lending and entry barriers or capital regulations in the selected SSA economies. The dynamic PTR estimation results reveal that bank lending responds positively when the stringency of entry barriers is below the threshold of 62.8%. However, once the stringency of entry barriers exceeds that threshold level, bank credit reacts negatively and significantly. By contrast, changes in capital regulation stringency do not affect bank lending, either below or above the obtained threshold value of 76.5%.

These results can help policymakers design bank regulatory measures that will promote the resilience and safety of the banking system but at the same time not bring unintended effects to bank lending.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the nonlinear effects of bank regulatory measures on bank lending using the dynamic PTR model and SSA context.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the influence factors of their preferences for urban forest, marginal values of various properties and relative values of different scheme portfolios, thus arriving indirectly at the city residents’ demand for urban forest improvement.

This paper, based on the data from the 2015–2017 field survey questionnaire of city residents over the radius of Beijing’s 5th Ring Road, uses the choice experiment method (CEM) to conduct a study of its residents’ demand for urban forest.

Beijing’s city residents are generally inclined to accept a relatively low payment of urban forest while hoping to access a relatively high urban afforestation coverage with the construction of relatively many city parks, especially focusing on the specialized park management; the marginal values of biodiversity and greenery coverage are far higher than those of greenbelts in quantity and the maximum marginal value of biodiversity remains as high as RMB29.42, indicating that the city residents do not favor much the number of greenbelts over other aspects but they generally hope to achieve a higher greenery coverage and a richer biodiversity.

Generally speaking, what Beijing City needs most is not continuing the increase in the number of greenbelts, but engaging in the rational retrofit of its existing greenbelts and optimizing its urban forest structure.

This paper may provide reference for determining the city residents’ payment criteria for urban forest and will be of equally great significance to developing cities and their urban forest.

Based on the service eco-systems perspective, this paper evaluates the strategies and actions adopted by the Government of Pakistan to handle the COVID-19 crisis with the involvement of multiple actors including public, private, third-sector organizations and civil society.

The paper is based on an in-depth analysis of secondary sources including research articles, policy documents, policy briefs, governmental reports, third party evaluations/reports and media publications.

A multi-stakeholder approach was evident during the pandemic with an effort to better manage the crisis which has exerted immense social, cultural, economic and political impacts on the lives of the citizens. Collaborative efforts among stakeholders (government, private and third sector) were witnessed, resulting in a coherent response. The successful management of COVID-19 in Pakistan is attributed to multiple factors including the formation of a specialized public organization which effectively and proactively took data-driven informed decisions and aggregated the efforts of the federal and provincial governments for a timely response.

This paper gives insights for policymakers to create a sustainable post-pandemic socio-economic environment by building resilient structures across the government while promoting cooperation and collaboration. It suggests strategies for policymakers responsible for providing sustainable societal solutions to combat the social, economic and administrative challenges under the pandemic. As Pakistan has managed and contained the pandemic in a relatively efficient way, it is hoped that this paper can provide a learning experience for other countries with similar national contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the evolution of service supply chain management from a behavioural operations perspective, pointing out future research directions for scholars.

This study searched five databases for relevant literature published between 2009 and 2018, selecting 64 papers for this review. The selected literature was categorised according to two dimensions: a service supply chain link perspective and a behavioural factor perspective. Comparative analysis was used to identify gaps in the literature, and five future research agendas were proposed.

In terms of the perspective of service supply chain link, extant literature primarily focuses on service supply and service co-ordination management, and less on service demand and integration management. In terms of the behavioural factor’s perspective, most focus on classic behaviour factors, with less attention paid to emerging behaviour factors. This paper thus proposes five research agendas: demand-oriented management and integrated supply chain-oriented behavioural research; broadening the understanding of the scope of behavioural operations; integrating the latest backgrounds and trends of service industry into the research; greater attention to behavioural operations in service sub-industries; and multimethod combination is encouraged to be used to dig into the interesting research problems.

This study constitutes the first systematic review of service supply chain research from a behavioural perspective. By categorising the literature into two dimensions, the state of existing research is evaluated with an eye towards future research avenues.

China has proposed two-stage goals of carbon peaking by 2030 and carbon neutralization by 2060. The carbon emission reduction effect of the power industry, especially the thermal power industry, will directly affect the progress of the goal. This paper aims to reveal the spatial-temporal characteristics and influencing factors of carbon emission efficiency of the thermal power industry and proposes policy suggestions for realizing China’s carbon peak and carbon neutralization goals.

This paper evaluates and compares the carbon emission efficiency of the thermal power industry in 29 provinces and regions in China from 2014 to 2019 based on the three-stage slacks-based measure (SBM) of efficiency in data envelopment analysis (DEA) model of undesired output, excluding the influence of environmental factors and random errors.

Empirical results show that during the sample period, the carbon emission efficiency of China’s thermal power industry shows a fluctuating upward trend, and the carbon emission efficiency varies greatly among the provincial regions. The carbon emission efficiency of the interregional thermal power industry presents a pattern of “eastern > central > western,” which is consistent with the level of regional economic development. Environmental factors such as economic level and environmental regulation level are conducive to the improvement of carbon emission efficiency of the thermal power industry, but the proportion of thermal power generation and industrial structure is the opposite.

This paper adopts the three-stage SBM–DEA model of undesired output and takes CO₂ as the undesired output to reveal the spatial-temporal characteristics and influencing factors of carbon emission efficiency in China’s thermal power industry. The results provide a more comprehensive perspective for regional comparative evaluation and influencing factors of carbon emission efficiency in China’s thermal power industry.

A city is a spatial carrier of innovation activities. Improving the level of urban innovation can play a significant supporting role in building an innovative country. China began to implement the innovative city pilot policy in 2008 and continued to expand the policy into more areas for exploring the path of innovative urban development with Chinese characteristics and improving urban innovation.

Based on mechanism analysis, this paper used the panel data of 269 cities from 2003 to 2016 to empirically test the effect of the pilot policy on the level of urban innovation by using different methods, such as the difference-in-differences model.

The results show that the innovative city pilot policy significantly improves the level of urban innovation. However, according to the findings of the heterogeneity analysis, the effect of the pilot policy on improving the innovation level in direct-controlled municipalities, provincial capitals and sub-provincial cities is weaker than that in ordinary cities, and the effect of the pilot policy on improving the innovation level in cities with a higher quality of science and education resources is weaker than that in cities with lower quality of science and education resources.

Moreover, as the level of urban innovation increases, the effect of the pilot policy on improving the level of urban innovation is an asymmetric inverted V shape, which means the effect is first strengthened and then weakened. The research also finds that the locational heterogeneity of the pilot policy for improving the level of urban innovation is not notable. In addition, the innovative city pilot policy can strengthen the government's strategic guidance, promote the concentration of talent, incentivize corporate investment and optimize the innovation environment, having a positive impact on urban innovation. Moreover, the effect of concentration of talent and the effect of corporate investment incentive are the important reasons for the pilot policy to promote the improvement of the level of urban innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to propose policy recommendations that resort to the domestic market to achieve inclusive growth from an open perspective.

How will economic globalization based on domestic demand affect economic growth and income distribution in an open and large country? With the aim of discussing the mechanism of the impact of expanding domestic demand on the inclusive growth from an open perspective, this paper incorporates the Global Value Chains vs National Value Chains (GVC-NVC) competition, which is triggered by foreign investments attracted by the domestic demand scale into an endogenous growth model with “Schumpeterian Innovation.”

Theoretical analysis indicates the following findings: although domestic demand-based economic globalization can promote transnational inclusive growth across countries, it is not conducive to national (domestic) inclusive growth; the impacting effect of domestic demand scale on inclusive growth across countries is subject to the moderating effect of the development maturity of the labor market; and the impacting effect of domestic demand scale on national inclusive growth is subject to the joint moderating effect of the development maturity of the labor market and labor skill structure.

First, this paper examines the impact of domestic demand-based economic globalization on the inclusiveness of economic growth from an open perspective, which deepens the existing theory of intra-product specialization and inclusive growth. Second, the paper puts the sequential production process into Schumpeterian growth model and reveals the mechanism that domestic demand affects inclusive growth. Third, the study finds that the enhancement of labor market efficiency, transfer payments to low-skilled labor and the creation of a fair competitive market environment will contribute to the globalization of a domestic demand-oriented economy, which provides a policy-making basis for government sectors.

Global climate change is a serious threat to the survival and development of mankind. Reducing carbon emissions and achieving carbon neutrality are the keys to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting sustainable human development. For many countries, taking China as an example, the electric power sector is the main contributor to the country’s carbon emissions, as well as a key sector for reducing carbon emissions and achieving carbon neutrality. The low-carbon transition of the power sector is of great significance to the long-term low-carbon development of the economy. Therefore, on the one hand, it is necessary to improve the energy supply structure on the supply side and increase the proportion of new energy in the total power supply. On the other hand, it is necessary to improve energy utilization efficiency on the demand side and control the total primary energy consumption by improving energy efficiency, which is the most direct and effective way to reduce emissions. Improving the utilization efficiency of electric energy and realizing the low-carbon transition of the electric power industry requires synergies between the government and the market. The purpose of this study is to investigate the individual and synergistic effects of China’s low-carbon policy and the opening of urban high-speed railways (HSRs) on the urban electricity consumption efficiency, measured as electricity consumption per unit of gross domestic product (GDP).

This study uses a panel of 289 Chinese prefecture-level cities from the years 1999–2019 as the sample and uses the time-varying difference-in-difference method to test the relationship between HSR, low-carbon pilot cities and urban electricity consumption efficiency. In addition, the instrumental variable method is adopted to make a robustness check.

Empirical results show that the low-carbon pilot policy and the HSR operation in cities would reduce the energy consumption per unit of GDP, and synergies occur in both HSR operated and low-carbon pilot cities.

This study has limitations that would provide possible starting points for future studies. The first limitation is the choice of the proxy variable of government and market factors. The second limitation is that the existing data is only about whether the high-speed rail is opened or not and whether it is a low-carbon pilot city, and there is no more informative data to combine the two aspects.

The findings of this study can inform policymakers and regulators about the effects of low-carbon pilot city policies. In addition, the government should consider market-level factors in addition to policy factors. Only by combining various influencing factors can the efficient use of energy be more effectively achieved so as to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality.

From the social perspective, the findings indicate that improving energy utilization is dependent on the joint efforts of the government and market.

The study provides quantitative evidence to assess the synergic effect between government and the market in the low-carbon transition of the electric power industry. Particularly, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first to comprehend the role of the city low-carbon pilot policy and the construction of HSR in improving electricity efficiency.