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This study is an exploratory study investigating firm-specific internal factors that influence the profitability performance of selected life insurance firms in eight Asian countries (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Malaysia) from 2008-2014. This paper aims to focus on internal rather than external factors based on the resource-based view suggesting that the internal resources of a firm are key to gaining competitive advantage.

The authors used panel data estimation model to test our six hypotheses on these eight selected countries for the period between 2008 and 2014.

A random effect model reveals that size, volume of capital and underwriting risk are significantly related to the profitability of Asian life insurance firm, measured as return on assets. Premium growth, asset tangibility and liquidity are insignificant predictors of the profitability performance of these life insurance firms.

Three implications of this study are that life insurance firms need to proactively tap new business opportunities by attracting younger generation customers via e-marketing technologies; secure larger capital base to finance their market expansion strategies; and focus on intangible resources such as goodwill, brand equity and reputation.

This study contributes to the literature by conducting an exploratory regional-based panel study of Asian life insurance firms to find common factors that contribute towards profitability. The study is conducted on a collective sample of Asian life insurance firms based on the premise that the firms included in the sample engage in cross-border activities and share the same international financial reporting standards. These commonalities allow us to treat the firms jointly in a somewhat similar Asian macroeconomic environment.

Although wearable health-monitoring technology (WHMT) has become a stimulus for public health, women’s acceptance rate of this technology appears to be low. Thus, this study intends to investigate the factors affecting women’s adoption of WHMT.

The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology–2 model has been used in this study as a research framework that has been extended to include lifestyle and attitude. The proposed extended framework is validated using primary data (n = 314) collected from female respondents using a structured questionnaire; the partial least square-based structural equation modeling technique is subsequently used to test the proposed hypothesis.

The results show that effort expectancy, social influence, price value, habit, attitude and lifestyle have significant positive effects on women’s behavioral intention to use WHMT and accelerate actual usage behavior. Notably, effort expectancy and habit exhibit the largest impact on behavioral intention. However, performance expectancy, facilitating conditions and hedonic motivation are not significantly associated with behavioral intentions.

The findings of this study are important for healthcare practitioners and service providers to comprehensively understand the factors that affect women’s behavioral intentions in line with their actual usage behavior. This insight will help policymakers design viable strategies regarding WHMT to promote its sustainable usage in least developed countries.

This study contributes novelty by using an extended model that links women’s attitudes and lifestyles to their adoption of WHMT. This study also fills the gaps in the existing literature on women’s behavioral intentions in the context of WHMT by showing novel associations in the domain of WHMT uptake.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the survival capability of Chaoshan people in the maritime world of the South China Sea amidst the changing monetary systems of the rival empires and political regimes from 1939 to 1945. It particularly focuses on overseas Chinese remittance business in Shantou under the Japanese rule. Local societies in coastal China and overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia experienced severe hardships due to the Sino-Japanese War, the Pacific War and the Chinese Civil War. As fighting among the rival empires and regimes intensified, Chinese migrant communities straddling between Southeast Asia and South China had to negotiate and adapt to survive these crises, regardless of whether they were government-affiliated or local autonomous subjects.

This research draws on archival materials to investigate the reactions of Chinese migrant communities in Chaoshan region in times of war and regime change. How did local maritime societies and overseas Chinese adapt to the harsh realities of the wartime? How did the Japanese Empire use Wang Jingwei’s puppet government in Nanjing to control the Chaoshan remittance network? How did the remittance network shift its operational structure in face of a wartime crisis?

Faced with the wartime crisis and the Japanese occupation, Chaoshan communities used a variety of survival strategies to protect and maintain the overseas Chinese remittance business. In dealing with remittances from Singapore, British Malay and Indonesia, they cooperated with the Japanese military authority and its puppet government to maximize the autonomy of their business operation in the Japanese-controlled East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. On the other hand, to secure the flow of remittances from French Indochina and Thailand, the indirectly controlled territories in the Japanese Empire, Chaoshan merchants sought an alternative path of delivering remittances, known as the Dongxing route, to bypass the Japanese ban on private remittances from these two regions.

It would be a better research if more resources, including remittance receipts and documents during the Japanese occupation, could be found and used to show more detailed features of Chaoshan local society.

This research is the first one to investigate the contradictory features of local Chaoshan society during the Japanese occupation, an under-explored subject in the Chinese historiography.