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This paper aims to examine the effect of family ownership on the payment method of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deals. It also investigates the market reaction around the announcement of these M&A deals.

Archival data of M&A deals of a sample of Taiwanese listed firms during 2008–2018 are collected and examined using probit, event study and OLS models. This study addresses the endogeneity concern using the two-stage least squares statistical technique and Heckman’s two-step estimation method.

This study finds that family firms are more likely to use cash as an exchange medium in M&A deals to avoid the problem of diluting control rights. This study further finds that family firms receive a positive market reaction around the announcement of M&A deals relative to non-family counterparts. The empirical results support the notion that family ownership is a value-creation structure.

The findings provide additional evidence-based insights into the debate about family ownership with the aim of informing policy and offering practical recommendations to expand the US-based literature.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to provide empirical evidence on the impact of family ownership on payment method choice in M&A activities in Taiwan. It also provides novel evidence that family firms experience value gains when taking M&A investment decisions relative to non-family firms.

The majority of emerging adults in the United States spend time in cohabiting unions. Prior research has suggested that higher levels of sexual non-exclusivity may exist among those in cohabiting relationships compared to marital unions. Although these basic patterns have been explored in prior work, research examining the potential reasons why levels of sexual non-exclusivity differ by union status has been limited. Drawing on a relational perspective and using the fifth wave of data from the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study (TARS), the present study found that higher levels of sexual non-exclusivity in cohabiting relationships were explained by intimate relationship characteristics and sexual histories rather than sociodemographic factors, partner heterogamy, or partner- and couple-level drug use. These findings highlighted that understanding the higher rates of sexually non-exclusive experiences in cohabiting relationships, compared to marital relationships, requires attention to specific dynamics of the intimate partnership and prior relational experiences of both partners. The study concluded that cohabitation has a unique place in emerging adults’ relationship landscape and may set the groundwork for future relationship functioning.

This study aims to identify the publication phase, performance and scientific contributions of research papers related to enterprise risk management (ERM) and to visualise the emerging themes in addressing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA).

The biblioshiny technique based on the bibliometrix R package was used to draw journal papers’ performance and scientific contributions by displaying distinctive features from the bibliometric method used in prior studies. The data was extracted from the Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus databases.

Since the 1990s, ERM publication has gained momentum, and it is generally categorised into four main themes. Studies by Miller (1992) and Bromiley et al. (2015) scored the highest in global and local citations, respectively. However, the Economic Outlook ranked first in quality of publications while the Journal of Risk and Insurance topped in quantity of publications. Collaborative research mainly exists between two authors, and the dynamic number of collaborative networks is evident in the USA.

This study is limited by the filtered keywords used to generate the search on journal papers’ in WOS and Scopus. It is imperative to have more comprehensive and rigorous analytics on ERM research to enable a direction for future research. Finally, ERM implementation better equips firms to mitigate risk in a VUCA environment.

This study attempts to fill a vacuum of ERM literature, specifically in business economics, in addressing VUCA. Moreover, it covers a comprehensive predetermined period of from its inception in 1983 until 2022.

During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, public health risk communication has been a vital work. Students account for a large proportion of the population and are often highly mobile; thus, they face a high risk of contagion and spreading the disease. Therefore, risk communication to this group during the pandemic has been essential. This research examines the relationship between risk communication to students and their appropriate behaviors (compliance with COVID-19 preventive measures and COVID-19 information sharing).

This research used structural equation model (SEM) and generalized structural equation model (GSEM) to analyze the data collected from students during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The findings revealed that risk communication in mass media was positively associated with students' compliance with preventive measures and sharing pandemic-related information. Additionally, their compliance behavior was positively associated with their information-sharing behavior.

This research offers some implications regarding the containment of a highly-infectious virus, especially for the context when the risk of outbreak is high and an effective vaccine is not available, by focusing on risk communication and compliance and information-sharing behaviors.

This research is one of the early attempts to examine the risk communication to students, their compliance with preventive measures and their information-sharing behavior during a pandemic.

Safety and security (S&S) are critical concerns in South Africa, especially in Cape Town, one of the country’s most crime-ridden cities. The University of Cape Town (UCT), situated on a large, open campus, has experienced increased malefaction. Facilities management (FM) services at universities bear the primary responsibility for providing S&S to their communities. To comprehensively understand and address the community’s demands regarding S&S, the current study was conducted to investigate the challenges specific to open universities. This study aims to determine whether implementing community-based FM (CbFM) principles and using technological innovations could offer a more effective and sustainable solution.

The study adopted interpretivist overarching case study methodology, which is ontologically based. A mixed-method approach was used to incorporate the strengths and limitations of the weaknesses of both methods. The data collection took the form of an online survey of the university community and semi-structured interviews with university executive management to obtain data from the single case study of UCT. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the quantitative data, and thematic analysis was used to identify emergent themes from the qualitative data.

The study presents an overall view of the provision of S&S at UCT, the unique challenges faced by management and the main S&S issues affecting the community. Moreover, the study reveals that UCT has implemented community participation processes in the past with limited success. This is because the strategies implemented constitute a narrow perspective of community participation. Therefore, a much smarter and more inclusive perspective using technological innovation is required for successful community participation to occur and to be successfully used in providing S&S toward achieving future-proofing facilities.

This research has demonstrated the influence of CbFM and innovative technologies on the S&S of the open campus. Hence, future-proof facilities can be achieved when FM actively engages university communities in managing campuses through technological innovation.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.

With the rapid development of social media, the occurrence and evolution of emergency events are often accompanied by massive users' expressions. The fine-grained analysis on users' expressions can provide accurate and reliable information for event processing. Hence, 2,003,814 expressions on a major malignant emergency event were mined from multiple dimensions in this paper.

This paper conducted finer-grained analysis on users' online expressions in an emergency event. Specifically, the authors firstly selected a major emergency event as the research object and collected the event-related user expressions that lasted nearly two years to describe the dynamic evolution trend of the event. Then, users' expression preferences were identified by detecting anomic expressions, classifying sentiment tendencies and extracting topics in expressions. Finally, the authors measured the explicit and implicit impacts of different expression preferences and obtained relations between the differential expression preferences.

Experimental results showed that users have both short- and long-term attention to emergency events. Their enthusiasm for discussing the event will be quickly dispelled and easily aroused. Meanwhile, most users prefer to make rational and normative expressions of events, and the expression topics are diversified. In addition, compared with anomic negative expressions, anomic expressions in positive sentiments are more common. In conclusion, the integration of multi-dimensional analysis results of users' expression preferences (including discussion heat, preference impacts and preference relations) is an effective means to support emergency event processing.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, it is the first research to conduct in-depth and fine-grained analysis of user expression in emergencies, so as to get in-detail and multi-dimensional characteristics of users' online expressions for supporting event processing.

This study aims to explore the intelligibility of communication with stakeholders as a result of accrual accounting adoption. It focuses on changes in the use of visual forms and the readability of text that occurred immediately after the adoption of accrual accounting in performance reports of Italian public universities.

The authors collect the stakeholder section of performance reports published before and after accrual accounting adoption. Then, the authors use manual and computer-assisted textual analysis. Finally, the authors explore the data using principal component analysis and qualitative comparative analysis.

This study demonstrates that switching from cash to accrual accounting provokes immediate changes in communication patterns. It confirms the significant reduction of readability and increase in visual forms after accruals accounting adoption. The results indicate that smaller universities especially put effort into increasing intelligibility while implementing a more complex accounting system. This study also finds a relation between the change in readability and the change in visual forms that are complementary, with the exception of several very large universities.

The findings underline the possibility of neutralising the adverse effects of accounting reform associated with its complexity and difficulties in understanding by the use of visual forms and attention to the document’s readability.

This paper adds a new dimension to the study of public sector accounting from the external stakeholder perspective. It provides further insight into the link between accrual accounting adoption and readability, together with the use of visual forms by universities.

Although service researchers have long suggested that customer mistreatment adversely impacts service employees' outcomes, statistical integration of current empirical findings has been lacking. This meta-analysis aims to review and statistically synthesize the state of research on the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes.

The authors included 221 effect sizes of 135 independent samples from 119 primary studies (N = 47,964). The authors used a meta-analytic approach to quantitatively review the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Meta-analysis structural equation modeling was used to explore the mediation mechanism of service employees' affective outcomes on the relationships between customer mistreatment and employees' attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Meta-regression was applied to explore the impact of contextual-level moderators (i.e. service provider type and service delivery mode) on these relationships. Furthermore, we compared the effects of customer mistreatment with the effects of other organizational-related factors on some commonly measured employee outcomes.

The results show that customer mistreatment has a significant negative impact on service employees' affective outcomes (i.e. negative emotions), attitudinal outcomes (i.e. job satisfaction, organizational commitment, work engagement and turnover intention) and behavioral outcomes (i.e. job performance, surface acting and emotional labor). Additionally, service employees' negative emotions mediate the association between customer mistreatment and employees' job satisfaction, turnover intention, surface acting and emotional labor. Furthermore, the relationships between customer mistreatment and service employees' negative emotions and job performance are influenced by a contextual-level moderator (i.e. service delivery mode).

The authors contribute to the literature by providing robust meta-analytic estimates of the effects of customer mistreatment on a variety of service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes, as well as the different magnitudes of the effect sizes between customer mistreatment and other job-related and personality-related factors by quantifying the true variability of the effect sizes. The authors draw on current theories underpinning customer mistreatment to test a theoretical model of the mediation mechanism of service employees' affective outcomes (i.e. service employees' negative emotions) on the relationships between customer mistreatment and employees' attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. The authors explore the effects of two contextual-level factors (i.e. service provider types and service delivery mode) related to the service delivery context that may account for the variability of effect sizes across empirical studies.

No study has investigated the effects of different parameters on publication bias in meta-analyses using a machine learning approach. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the impact of various factors on publication bias in meta-analyses.

An electronic questionnaire was created according to some factors extracted from the Cochrane Handbook and AMSTAR-2 tool to identify factors affecting publication bias. Twelve experts were consulted to determine their opinion on the importance of each factor. Each component was evaluated based on its content validity ratio (CVR). In total, 616 meta-analyses comprising 1893 outcomes from PubMed that assessed the presence of publication bias in their reported outcomes were randomly selected to extract their data. The multilayer perceptron (MLP) technique was used in IBM SPSS Modeler 18.0 to construct a prediction model. 70, 15 and 15% of the data were used for the model's training, testing and validation partitions.

There was a publication bias in 968 (51.14%) outcomes. The established model had an accuracy rate of 86.1%, and all pre-selected nine variables were included in the model. The results showed that the number of databases searched was the most important predictive variable (0.26), followed by the number of searches in the grey literature (0.24), search in Medline (0.17) and advanced search with numerous operators (0.13).

The results of this study can help clinical researchers minimize publication bias in their studies, leading to improved evidence-based medicine.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to model publication bias using machine learning.