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European countries are likely to increasingly adopt integrated reporting (IR) voluntarily, after the 2014/95/EU Directive is revised and other initiatives are implemented. Therefore, the present study provides insights on the relevance of IR in voluntary contexts by exploring analysts' reactions to the release of integrated reports in diverse institutional settings.

Drawing on voluntary disclosure theory, a quantitative empirical research method is used to explore the moderating role of country-level institutional characteristics on the associations between voluntary IR release and analyst forecast accuracy and dispersion.

IR informativeness is not uniform in the voluntary context and institutional settings play a moderating role. IR release is associated with increased consensus among analyst forecasts. However, in countries with weak institutional enforcement, a reverse association is detected, indicating that analysts rely largely on IR where the institutional setting strongly protects investors. Although a strong institutional setting boosts the IR release usefulness in terms of accuracy, it creates noise in analyst consensus.

Academics can appreciate the usefulness of voluntary IR across the institutional enforcement contexts.

Managers can use these findings to understand opportunities offered by IR voluntary release. The study recommends that policymakers, standard setters and regulators strengthen the institutional enforcement of sustainability disclosure.

This study is a unique contribution to recent calls for research on the effects of nonfinancial disclosure regulation and on IR “impacts”. It shows on the international scale that IR usefulness for analysts is moderated by institutional patterns, not country-level institutional characteristics.

Research on grey systems is becoming more sophisticated, and grey relational and prediction analyses are receiving close review worldwide. Particularly, the application of grey systems in marine economics is gaining importance. The purpose of this paper is to summarize and review literature on grey models, providing new directions in their application in the marine economy.

This paper organized seminal studies on grey systems published by Chinese core journal database – CNKI, Web of Science and Elsevier from 1982 to 2018. After searching the aforementioned database for the said duration, the authors used the CiteSpace visualization tools to analyze them.

The authors sorted the studies according to their countries/regions, institutions, keywords and categories using the CiteSpace tool; analyzed current research characteristics on grey models; and discussed their possible applications in marine businesses, economy, scientific research and education, marine environment and disasters. Finally, the authors pointed out the development trend of grey models.

Although researches are combining grey theory with fractals, neural networks, fuzzy theory and other methods, the applications, in terms of scope, have still not met the demand. With the increasingly in-depth research in marine economics and management, international marine economic research has entered a new period of development. Grey theory will certainly attract scholars’ attention, and its role in marine economy and management will gain considerable significance.

In a current trend of a growing amount of short city trips, it becomes crucial to understand how local residents perceive the presence of tourists and tourism in their cities and how their socio-cultural context influences those perceptions. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this understanding which will enable the city planners to take actions to create the well-balanced and resilient communities in which the needs of residents and tourists are equally met.

To understand residents’ perceptions’ about tourism in Bruges, this research applied photo-elicitation interviews with 28 residents who lived in various locations in the historical center to understand socio-cultural background of residents, their tourism-related concerns and whether they are in line with what is commonly perceived as problematic in Bruges.

Results show that as long as residents can benefit from tourism and tourism-related infrastructure, they support tourism. On the other hand, tourism decreases the liveability of the historical center due to supersession of infrastructure serving the residents by tourist-oriented amenities.

To build a sustainable and resilient city in the future, the authorities of Bruges should cease further “museumification” of the historical city by breaking the hegemony of tourism industry, providing affordable housing and rethinking the concentration model of tourism.

The photo-elicitation method proved to produce rich content and good-quality data by stimulating respondents’ memories and evoking experiences and emotions. Thus, this paper recommends that future research about residents’ attitudes is developed around visual methods as they give voice to the residents and are able to uncover issues which are difficult to capture with other methods.

Interphase forces between the gas and liquid phases determine many phenomena in bubbly flow. For the interphase forces in a multiphase rotodynamic pump, the magnitude analysis was carried out within the framework of two-fluid model. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relative importance of various interphase forces on the mixed transport process, and the findings herein will be a base for the future study on the mechanism of the gas blockage phenomenon, which is the most challenging issue for such pumps.

Four types of interphase forces, i.e. drag force, lift force, virtual mass force and turbulent dispersion force (TDF) were taken into account. By comparing with the experiment in the respect of the head performance, the effectiveness of the numerical model was validated. In conditions of different inlet gas void fractions, bubble diameters and rotational speeds, the magnitude analyses were made for the interphase forces.

The results demonstrate that the TDF can be neglected in the running of the multiphase rotodynamic pump; the drag force is dominant in the impeller region and the outlet extended region. The sensitivity analyses of the bubble diameter and the rotational speed were also performed. It is found that larger bubble size is accompanied by smaller predicted drag but larger predicted lift and virtual mass, while the increase of the rotational speed can raise all the interphase forces mentioned above.

This paper has revealed the magnitude information and the relative importance of the interphase forces in a multiphase rotodynamic pump.

The purpose of this paper is to present a procedure to design an experimental setup meant to validate an innovative approach for simulating, via computational fluid dynamics, a high-pressure gas release from a rupture (e.g. on an offshore oil and gas platform). The design is based on a series of scaling exercises, some of which are anything but trivial.

The experimental setup is composed of a wind tunnel, the instrumented scaled (1:10) mock-up of an offshore platform and a gas release system. A correct scaling approach is necessary to define the reference speed in the wind tunnel and the conditions of the gas release to maintain similarity with respect to the real-size phenomena. The scaling of the wind velocity and the scaling of the gas release were inspired by the approach proposed by Hall et al. (1997): a dimensionless group was chosen to link release parameters, wind velocity and geometric scaling factor.

The theoretical scaling approaches for each different part of the setup were applied to the design of the experiment and some criticalities were identified, such as the existence of a set of case studies with some release parameters laying outside the applicability range of the developed scaling methodology, which will be further discussed.

The resulting procedure is one of a kind because it involves a multi-scaling approach because of the different aspects of the design. Literature supports for the different scaling theories but, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, fails to provide an integrated approach that considers the combined effects of scaling.

The innovation creation literature primarily focuses on urban firms/regions or relies heavily on these data; less studied are rural firms and areas in this regard. The purpose of this paper is to employ a new firm-level data set, national in scale, and analyze characteristics that potentially influence innovation creation across rural and urban firms.

The authors use the 2014 National Survey of Business Competitiveness (NSBC) covering multiple firm-level variables related to innovation creation combined with secondary data reflecting the regional business and innovative environments where these firms operate. The number of patent applications filed by these firms measures their innovation creation, and the paper employs a negative binomial regression estimation for analysis.

After controlling for industry, county and state factors, rural and urban firms differ in their innovation creation characteristics and behaviors, suggesting that urban firms capitalize on their resources better than rural firms. Other major findings of the paper provide evidence that: first, for rural firms, the influence of university R&D is relevant to innovation creation, but their perception of university-provided information is not significant; and second, rural firms that are willing to try, but fail, in terms of innovation creation have a slight advantage over other rural firms less willing to take on the risk.

This paper is one of the first to analyze the 2014 NSBC, a firm-level national survey covering a wide range of innovation-related variables. The authors combine it with other regional secondary data, and use appropriate analytical modeling to provide empirical evidence of influencing factors on innovation creation across rural and urban firms.

This study investigates the effect of user fees on access and waiting time in Nigeria. For access, the effect of user fees on both preventive and curative care; and the effect of user fees on waiting time at public healthcare facilities were examined. User fees are vital for the fiscal sustainability of healthcare provision for most African economies. Its imposition could debar healthcare access by the poor while its removal can reduce quality of care and induce longer waiting time.

The wave 3 of the Nigerian General Household Survey (2015/16) data was used for users of public health facilities. Access to healthcare was modelled using utilization data in a logistic regression model while waiting time was through the Negative Binomial Regression Model (NBRM).

The analyses showed significant effects of user fees on access to both preventive and curative care and on time spent waiting to make use of healthcare services. Individuals were able to access healthcare services regardless of amounts paid. Also, there was a non-negative effect of user fee imposition on waiting time.

Nigeria should improve healthcare facilities to address the enormous demand for healthcare services when designing policy for health sector.

This paper shows that even with the imposition of user fees, healthcare facilities could still not cater for the rising healthcare needs of the populace but cautioned that its abolition may not be a preferred option.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether market conditions have an effect on investors’ propensity to herd in an emerging economy’s stock market. Additionally, given the lack of research on Islamic behavioral finance, the authors further investigate if the herding phenomenon is distinct in Islamic versus conventional stocks.

The authors used daily data for the period of 1995–2016 according to the herding behavior model of Chang et al. (2000), which relies on cross-sectional absolute deviation of returns.

Findings reveal the herding behavior of investors among Shariah-compliant during up and down market exits with non-linear relationship to the market return, while for conventional stocks herding behavior does not exist with linear nor nonlinear relationships during the up and down market. Furthermore, for the whole market, herding behavior only exists during upmarket with a nonlinear relationship to the market return. However, this relationship is not significant. Moreover, the results of this study are robust with respect to the effect of the Asian and global financial crisis.

The findings are useful for investors to identify which market conditions are associated with rational and irrational behavior of investors.

Most of the theoretical and empirical studies on herding behavior have focused on developed countries. Only a few studies have paid attention to the herding behavior in Islamic financial markets, particularly in the context of an emerging market such as Malaysia. This study fills this void.

While the value of human capital for technological innovation is well acknowledged, literature on the role of vocational training in corporate innovation is notably scarce. The purpose of this study is to assess the effect of government support for small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) competencies on Korean firms’ innovation. The author investigates SMEs’ patent applications (supported by the government to varying degrees) while accounting for firms’ market position, ownership and management structure, as well as prior changes in firms’ technologies, products, processes and other characteristics. Alternative hypotheses about management motivation – the “lazy manager”, “career concerns” and “special East Asian institutional constraints” hypotheses – are also evaluated.

Censored and count data analysis methods are used on a panel of 595 Korean firms covering 2005–2015 from the Korean Human Capital Corporate Survey, Intellectual Property Office and National Investment Commission. A regression discontinuity estimator accounts for potential endogeneity because of support for vocational training at firms.

Firms receiving training support are more innovative than firms without support, but latent effects may play a role. The regression-discontinuity model suggests that firms that succeeded only marginally in obtaining support had higher innovative output than non-recipients near the eligibility threshold.

The findings of this study establish that government support had the intended effect on SMEs’ technological capacity. This cannot be discounted as a simple crowding-out effect. The author also establishes that management–ownership separation within firms was conducive to innovation, that product competition had an inverse U-shaped effect and that management–ownership separation had a substitutable relationship with competition in overcoming managers’ effort avoidance. The findings support the “lazy manager” hypothesis over the “career concerns” and the “special East Asian institutional constraints” hypotheses.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the evidence of herding phenomenon, spill-over effects related to herding and whether herding is driven by fundamentals or non-fundamentals for various sub-periods and sub-samples.

The cross-sectional absolute deviation model is applied to China’s A- and B-share markets in combination with fundamental information.

Herding is prevalent on both A- and B-share markets. In detail, investors on A-share market herd for small and growth stock portfolios irrespective of market states while they only herd for large or value stocks in down market, therefore leading the whole herding behaviour to be pronounced in down market. Comparatively, on B-share market, herding is robust for various investment styles (small or large, value or growth) or market situations. Additionally, spill-over effects related to herding do not exist no matter from A-shares to B-shares or from B-shares to A-shares. Moreover, investors on B-share markets tend to herd as the response to non-fundamental information more frequently during financial crisis.

Investors on A- and B-share markets tend to herd as the response to non-fundamental information more frequently during financial crisis. Analysing the herding behaviours could be helpful in controlling the financial risk.