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The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) on the productivity of parent firms over the food industry.

The main data in this paper are derived from the China Industrial Enterprise Database 2005–2013 and a data set of Chinese firms’ OFDI information. Then this paper uses propensity score matching to match the treatment and control groups with firm characteristics and combines that with the differences-in-differences method to estimate the real effect of OFDI on total factor productivity.

The food firm’s OFDI significantly improves the parent firm’s productivity (known as the OFDI own-firm effect), but this promotion only exists in the short term. The OFDI own-firm effect of food firms differs remarkably as the sub-sectors, regions and ownership of firms vary. The food firm’s OFDI in “non-tax havens” and high-income destinations has a significantly stronger effect on the parent firm’s productivity. FDI, R&D and exporting can effectively strengthen the OFDI own-firm effect of food firms.

The effect of OFDI on food industry productivity has not been researched yet. This paper aims to fill this gap. This paper further divides the characteristics of food firms into different sub-sectors, regions and ownership types for a comparative analysis, with the aim of conducting a more comprehensive study at the micro-level of firms. In addition, an investigation into which factors influence the degree of the OFDI own-firm effect at the micro-level has not been found in the literature. This paper will draw its own conclusions.

Presents over sixty abstracts summarising the 1999 Employment Research Unit annual conference held at the University of Cardiff. Explores the multiple impacts of globalization on work and employment in contemporary organizations. Covers the human resource management implications of organizational responses to globalization. Examines the theoretical, methodological, empirical and comparative issues pertaining to competitiveness and the management of human resources, the impact of organisational strategies and international production on the workplace, the organization of labour markets, human resource development, cultural change in organisations, trade union responses, and trans‐national corporations. Cites many case studies showing how globalization has brought a lot of opportunities together with much change both to the employee and the employer. Considers the threats to existing cultures, structures and systems.

In a world where every competitive advantage must be fully exploited, productive diversity – utilising Australia’s linguistic and cultural diversity to economic benefit – offers a practical resource, which no organisation, including government, can afford to ignore. Astute employers have begun to tap this resource – people who speak the language, understand the culture and often maintain business and personal contacts in countries where they want to do business. The respondents in this research tell the story of the potential bottom line value of this unique human resource, termed productive diversity (that has been coined to describe the use of our language, skills and cultural diversity for economic benefit). This is a resource‐based study focussing on cultural resources and links to the country of origin as a sustained competitive advantage and a strategy for success of the ethnic business operations in Australia. It presents case studies/stories of ethnic entrepreneurs who have succeeded in business through productive diversity.

The product‐mix decision has received considerable attention in management accounting and economics literatures. However, many studies in these literatures are contradicting, inconclusive and lack rigorous analysis of this complex decision. They seek to develop weights for the products in the product mix based on one objective, to maximize the firm’s profit ability. But before developing these weights, the studies must first rank these products, Ranking is a complex endeavor since it is often driven by a multitude of hierarchical financial and non‐financial goals and objectives. Ranking is also difficult due to the use of complex concepts such as time, uncertainty, cost and interdependencies between accounting systems and manufacturing systems and among the products of the product mix. These concepts are inherently fuzzy and coextensively applied often with a confluence of variables operating simultaneously. This paper applies an advanced mathematical model to account for the product mix decision. The model combines the powers of fuzzy‐set theory (Zadeh, 1965) and the analytic hierarchy process (Saaty, 1978). The fuzzy‐analytic‐hierarchical process (FAHP), developed by de Korvin and Kleyle (1999), is sufficiently powerful to account for the ambiguous variables and the web of prioritized strategies and goals of cost leadership, product differentiation, financial objectives of earnings, cash flows and market share and non financial goals such as tradition and owners’ convictions and philosophies underlying the ranking of the products in the product mix. By way of example, the paper applies the FAHP model to rank order four products subject to these strategies and goals.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether negative network externalities would contribute to social networking site (SNS) fatigue and how this mechanism works.

A research model was proposed integrating two dimensions of negative network externalities and three dimensions of mediators (impression management concern, privacy concern, and social overload) to indicate how negative network externalities affect users’ SNS fatigue. Online questionnaires were adopted to collect data, and 307 valid samples were analyzed by structural equation modeling approach.

The findings indicate that negative network externalities have significant indirect effects on SNS fatigue through impression management concern, privacy concern, and social overload, and among the three dimensions, privacy concern plays a more important role.

This study offers a solidly grounded and well-demonstrated conceptual model that not only indicates the effects of negative network externalities in the context of SNS but also facilitates the understanding of SNS fatigue. Some theoretical and practical implications are also provided.

This study is novel in exploring users’ SNS fatigue a perspective of negative network externalities. Besides, the mediating roles of impression management concern, privacy concern, and social overload have been employed to indicate the formation of SNS fatigue.

This study investigated the mediating role of job satisfaction and the moderating role of career growth opportunity in the relationship between public service motivation (PSM) and public employees' turnover intention.

The authors recruited 587 public employees from Yunnan Province, China to test moderation and mediation hypotheses. The authors conducted confirmatory factor analysis to determine the discriminant and convergent validity of the measures of PSM, turnover intention, job satisfaction and career growth opportunity. Finally, the authors carried out bootstrapping to ascertain direct, indirect and conditional indirect effects.

PSM had a negative effect on public employees' turnover intention, but this relationship was partially mediated by job satisfaction. Career growth opportunity moderated the association between job satisfaction and turnover intention. In particular, the indirect effect of PSM on turnover intention through job satisfaction weakened under high career growth opportunities.

The results highlighted the significance of PSM and career growth opportunity in shaping public employees' work-related attitudes and behaviors. Public organizations should consider PSM a key criterion in recruitment and selection and pay more attention to the significance of intervening in career growth to satisfy public employees' psychological needs related to individual career development.

This study contributes to the literature on the disputed link between PSM and turnover intention and uncovered the underlying mechanism through which PSM affects public employees' turnover intention by proposing job satisfaction and career growth opportunity as a mediator and moderator, respectively.

To meet the demands for effective leadership, leadership educators should integrate high-impact practices for students to develop, practice, and evaluate their leadership knowledge, skills, and abilities. The purpose of this application brief is to describe how undergraduate leadership teaching assistant (ULTA) experiences can be a high- impact practice for undergraduates studying leadership. The ULTA experience at Texas A&M University in the Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communications (ALEC) department was examined using the six characteristics purported by Kuh (2008) to describe effective high- impact practices: considerable time and effort to purposeful tasks, interaction with faculty and peers on substantive matters, increased likelihood of experiencing diversity, frequent feedback on performance, application of learning to different settings, and better understanding of self in relation to others. The ULTA experience can be a high-impact practice that provides leadership students with the opportunities to apply their leadership learning to their teaching roles and reflect on their experience to gain new leadership perspectives. Recommendations for implementing this practice include: purposeful interactions with ULTAs, feedback and assessment of experience, training, and a rigorous recruitment process.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of chief executive officer (CEO) international work experience, functional background and career concerns on managerially-distorted investment decisions.

This paper focuses on S&P 500 publicly held US manufacturing companies during the period from 2009 to 2012. The data related to the CEOs’ international experience and their functional background experience are manually collected from Business Week’s Corporate Elite. Financial data is retrieved from COMPUSTAT database. The data for CEO tenure and age are retrieved from the ExecuComp database. Besides ordinary least squares regression, this paper conducts two-stage least squares regression analysis. Endogeneity and additional tests are also considered in this paper.

The findings show that CEO international work experience may not reduce under-investment, but it may exacerbate over-investment. CEO throughput functional background may exacerbate under-investment, but it may not reduce over-investment. Furthermore, CEO career concerns are useful in reducing the inefficient investments caused by international work experience and throughput functional background. These results remain similar when potential self-selection bias, as well as alternative measures of career concerns and investment efficiency, are considered.

This paper contributes to the existing literature in the following ways: first, while a significant amount of attention has been paid to how investment decisions are affected by financial reporting quality and material internal control weaknesses, there has been little evidence accumulated related to how managers’ international experience, professional background and career concerns affect investment inefficiency. The authors attempt to fill this gap. Second, the authors manually collect the international experience and functional backgrounds of CEOs working for S&P 500 US manufacturing companies. This unique data set makes it possible to complement previous studies by investigating the effects of managerial international experience and functional background on investment behavior. Finally, previous theoretical studies have long recognized that managers’ career concerns affect their corporate investment decisions. These studies suggest that young CEOs have a greater incentive to signal their abilities by adopting more active and possibly riskier investment strategies, thus raising the moral hazard problem with regard to firm investments. The authors enrich these studies by showing that work experience alleviates the moral hazard problem with respect to young CEOs’ investment decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the light scattering of nonspherical particles that is very important for the research on the aerosol optical properties.

In this paper, the authors use the spheroid model as the characteristic particle shape to study the single scattering albedo of real nonspherical particles. Meanwhile, the extinction and scattering cross section of spheroids are calculated with the T matrix method combined with the improved geometric optics approximation method (IGOM).

Through this combination, the extinction and scattering cross section of spheroids can be obtained in the larger size range and aspect ratio range. Furthermore, the comparison of the single scattering albedo for the spheroids and their equivalent spheres is conducted in order to investigate the difference of the spherical and nonspherical particles.

Simulation experiments indicate that the single scattering albedo of spheroids can be calculated well with this combination, and it has some obvious influence on the variation of the aspect ratio, incident wavelength, and complex refractive index of spheroid particles.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the existence and determinants of the credit gap in the cinnamon value chain development in Northwestern Vietnam.

A multi-stage sampling of 548 cinnamon households and a Heckman Selection Model were applied to examine their credit access constraints. In-depth interviews with cooperatives, enterprises, banks and relevant government agencies were further conducted to explain the credit gap.

In the total 52.74 percent of households that received credit, 24.56 percent of them received an insufficient amount of credit as registered. In addition, 35.77 percent of total households are credit rationed. Although all enterprises and cooperatives had been successful in applying for credit as long as they have collateral, none of them received the full credit amount requested. The credit amount received satisfied 80.64, 43.03 and 44.28 percent of the demand by households, cooperatives and enterprises, respectively. The lack of valuable collateral assets is the most important factor explaining this credit gap. Moreover, membership in a farmer-based union or ownership of a bank account increases the probability of access to credit. Educated household heads with a larger farm size and the Kinh ethnic majority are positively associated with a larger amount of credit. Households with conventional cinnamon farming, more dependents and union non-membership are more likely to be credit rationed.

A reform on collateral management, facilitating access to bank accounts, capacity building for local farmer-based unions, organic certification, granting land use rights and facilitating a platform to share reliable information between relevant actors are needed to bridge the credit gap.

This paper analyses the determinants of credit access constraints by key actors in a medicinal plant value chain that was insufficiently discussed by previous studies in the field.