Search results

This study investigates the connection between corporate governance and zombie firm’s exit time.

With a sample of 2,794 French zombie firms, the analysis focuses on four aspects of corporate governance: board size (BS), managerial ownership (MO), director turnover (DT) and ownership concentration, using tobit regression.

Dimensions of corporate governance have an important role in determining zombie firms’ exit time. MO and ownership concentration increase zombie firm exit time, whereas larger BSs and DT reduce it.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to include corporate governance as a characteristic relevant to zombie firms’ exit time. It provides new insights on why some zombie firms remain in the market longer than expected.

Corporate failure remains a critical financial concern, with implications for both firms and financial institutions; this paper aims to review the literature that proposes corporate failure prediction models for the twenty-first century.

This paper gathers information from 106 published articles that contain corporate failure prediction models. The focus of the analysis is on the elements needed to design corporate failure prediction models (definition of failure, sample approach, prediction methods, variables and evaluation metrics and performance). The in-depth review creates a synthesis of current trends, from the view of those elements.

Both consensus and divergences emerge regarding the design of corporate failure prediction models. On the one hand, authors agree about the use of bankruptcy as a definition of failure and that at least two evaluation metrics are needed to examine model performance for each class, individually and in general. On the other hand, they disagree about data collection procedures. Although several explanatory variables have been considered, all of them serve as complements for the primarily used financial information. Finally, the selection of prediction methods depends entirely on the research objective. These discrepancies suggest fundamental advances in discovery and establish valuable ideas for further research.

This paper reveals some caveats and provides extensive, comprehensible guidelines for corporate failure prediction, which researchers can leverage as they continue to investigate this critical financial subject. It also suggests fruitful directions to develop further experiments.

This study clarifies the integration-related effects of photos and text on consumer information processing and decision-making outcomes.

The authors conducted an experiment by recruiting 162 workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk. These participants were randomly assigned based on a full factorial, between-subject design with four possible conditions (2 [separate vs alternate layout] × 2 [photo-first vs text-first sequence]). The authors conducted a two-way analysis of variance to test the main effects and the interaction effects of layout and sequence on perceived diagnosticity, pleasantness feelings and attitudes toward products or services reviewed through electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM); the authors also applied Process Models 4 and 8 to explore the mechanism of these effects.

The experimental results reveal that text-first sequence is generally more effective than photo-first sequence in enhancing perceived diagnosticity and attitudes toward products or services. However, when a photo is displayed first, a separate layout is more effective than an alternate layout in enhancing perceived diagnosticity and attitudes. By contrast, regardless of the sequence, an alternate layout is more effective than a separate layout in inducing pleasantness feeling.

Future studies should further explore photo-based e-WOM, including other photo characteristics (e.g. visual quality, quantity and content).

This study provides guidelines for businesses to use photos on social media to achieve strategic goals.

This study addresses an identified need; that is, how the presentation of photo cues (e.g. layout and sequence) influences consumer decisions.

Effective teaching, while supplemented by best practice methods and assessments, is rooted in accurate, age-appropriate, and engaging content. As a foundation for history content, elementary educators rely strongly on textbooks and children’s literature, both fiction and non-fiction. While many researchers have examined the historical accuracy of textbook content, few have rigorously scrutinized the historical accuracy of children’s literature. Those projects that carried out such examination were more descriptive than comprehensive due to significantly smaller data pools. I investigate how children’s non-fiction and fiction books depict and historicize a meaningful and frequently taught history topic: Christopher Columbus’s accomplishments and misdeeds. Results from a comprehensive content analysis indicate that children’s books are engaging curricular supplements with age-appropriate readability yet frequently misrepresent history in eight consequential ways. Demonstrating a substantive disconnect between experts’ understandings of Columbus, these discouraging findings are due to the ways in which authors of children’s books recurrently omit relevant and contentious historical content in order to construct interesting, personalized narratives.

Reform is coming too slowly to institutions for adults with intellectual and mental health disabilities in Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia, where chronic neglect, filthy conditions, and the use of physical restraints and high‐dosage drugs to control behaviour remain routine.

LIBRARY Association elections occur shortly and this impels us to repeat the somewhat musty axiom that men, and women now, get the government they deserve. Such axioms, however, apply perhaps more to political and other public elections in a democracy than to those of professional bodies, or semi‐professional ones like our own. Libraries should have their policies framed and pursued by the best minds available to them. It may be that these come to us through the Branches and Sections for, clearly, the candidates who leap to the mind as having national status, and compel our votes, must be a limited number. Our voting is not much assisted in many cases by the bare list of candidates' names and those of their nominators—even when the latter are known names—which are issued officially but it is not clear how this can be bettered. The A.A.L. usually issues a sort of Who's Who of its candidates and other sections might well do the same. There is still a danger that one type of librarianship may dominate the L.A. merely because it attracts a large number of the votes of junior members. It is not so great as it was; the University and Research Section, for example, commands about one thousand votes we are told, enough, if cast for their chosen candidates, to make their election probable. The Section, we note, invites its members to consider individually whether he or she could be a candidate and adds, “It is not compulsory to cast all the votes available … members who do not know enough candidates may still make effective use of their votes by supporting the candidates they do know.” In any case what is rather depressing in past experience is that not more than 12% of voters use their votes for any candidate; no elected candidate for some years past has represented the L.A. at large. We hope librarians will alter this state of affairs.

ONLY as events recede can we view them in proper perspective. It is then that we discover how often initial judgments were wrong, our fears con‐founded or our hopes dispelled. Treaties to end wars, pacts of eternal friendship and alliance are the debris which litter our uneasy world.