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By replacing traditional fossil fuels, renewable energy (RE) has the potential to become an outstanding sustainable energy supply. However, owing to technological, economic, social and legal constraints, RE is still in its early stages of development. Hence, this paper aims to analyze the sustainable development hindrances in the RE supply chain (RESC).

Twenty-three hindrances to the sustainable development of the RE industry were investigated in this research, which included a review of the expert opinion and literature. Then, a mutual relationship between the hindrances by integrating interpretive structural modeling and decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory in fuzzy environment was established. Furthermore, using the cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to a classification analysis, these hindrances were grouped.

The findings show that the important hindrances are “lack of standards for the RESC (H19), lack of entrepreneurship support (H21), lack of incentives/subsidies to encourage RE producers to compete (H30) and lack of governmental support for sustainable supply chain solutions (H31).

This research provides unique insights into the area of sustainability in RESC. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to analyze the sustainability hindrances in the RESC.

Conductive and non‐conductive epoxies suitable for thick film circuits have been available since about 1970. They were originally intended for mounting semiconductor chips as an alternative to eutectic bonding, but they are now used for a much wider range of applications. This paper discusses the practical problems and results of epoxy mounted semiconductors in the light of five years manufacturing experience, and goes on to look at some of the latest applications for epoxies in thick film hybrids.

Reports the development and successful implementation of a computer‐integrated production and operations management system (POM), encompassing schedule activities such as aggregate production plan, master production schedule and material requirements plan, and capacity activities such as financial plan, resource requirements plan, rough‐cut capacity plan and capacity requirements plan, at the planning level. POM’s icon‐menu driven system which associates icons with decision model spreadsheets makes it very user‐friendly, and facilitates the integration of decisions encountered by industrial/ manufacturing engineers and operations managers.

Taking into account that debtholders bear most of the risks in the case of failure (Jensen and Meckling, 1976), earnings quality is valuable for debtholder decision makers as a monitoring mechanism and as a signal of credibility that reduces information asymmetries. In this sense, this paper aims to analyze whether banks carry out an earnings quality analysis in their lending decision processes and, in particular, how carefully they do it.

The authors focus on data from pre-bankruptcy companies because both earnings management and the potential costs faced by auditors increase considerably during the process towards failure. To test the hypotheses, the authors run separate multivariate regressions of price (cost of debt) and non-price (credit availability) lending decisions on different proxies for earnings quality. The authors use Big N and modified audit reports as a proxy for audit quality. Additionally, they use discretionary accruals as a proxy of accounting numbers quality.

The results show that banks do consider their borrowers’ quality of earnings, but they do it quite cursorily, that is, without taking advantage of all the possibilities offered by an effective combination of external and internal proxies.

The inferences apply only to financially distressed private firms, so they are not generalizable to other contexts with low ownership concentration or with a less severe risk of failure.

The language used by the auditors in the audit report, particularly in generally accepted accounting principles violations, might not be clear enough for the user to undo the specific distortions in the financial statements.

The authors provide evidence of how banks incorporate earnings quality into their lending decisions, prior research has analyzed them either separately or from an equity market perspective. Moreover, the authors also add to the debt-covenant literature by explicitly showing that manipulation helps managers to achieve better lending conditions.

Libraries need to develop information processing systems for evaluation, budgeting, planning, and operations. Electronic spreadsheets lend themselves to a variety of applications, but are time‐consuming to create. A model template and macros that can be used in many different types of library data analysis have been developed here. The procedures demonstrated here can build an essential set of tools for meeting fundamental goals of administrative efficiency, effective use of library resources, staff motivation, and rational policy making.

The paper aims to examine the role played by property tax in influencing strategic decisions regarding marital separation and divorce in Italian municipalities.

The empirical analysis is conducted on a sample of 6,458 Italian municipalities by applying the ordinary least squares (OLS) and instrumental variables (IVs) approaches.

The estimation results show a small increase in marital separations and divorces as the difference between the municipal secondary and primary home tax rate increases. Specifically, an increase of 1‰ in the property tax rate differentials is accompanied by an increase of six marital separations and four divorces per 1,000 inhabitants.

The main limitation of the analysis is that the strategic behavior of the married couple is inferred from econometric analysis with data aggregated at the municipal level. To investigate this phenomenon more precisely, it would be useful to have individual data collected by surveys on strategic divorce decisions due to property tax incentives.

This study contributes to the scant existing literature on the tax incentives for strategic divorce. It is the first study to empirically investigate the effects of property tax on separation and divorce decisions by investigating the Italian context. In Italy, a property tax was introduced in 1993, encouraging “false” divorces by spouses with a second home since the tax on the secondary home was set at a rate higher than that on the primary residence. Moreover, there were no tax deductions and no additional tax breaks on the secondary home, while they were established on the primary one. Higher property taxes and the absence of tax breaks on the secondary home may have encouraged a strategic behavior whereby many married couples filed for false separation and divorce in order to recover part of property tax rebates.

An important concern of economic policy analysis is how income taxes affect labor supply since this is crucial in assessing the efficiency costs of taxation and designing labor income taxation. The focus in the literature has been mostly to study the responses of high earners and women. The authors contribute to this literature by focusing more on how middle earners respond to financial incentives and whether the responses are different between men and women.

The authors exploit substantial expansions in the level of individual income exempt from taxation and taxed at a lower marginal tax rate while the schedule of marginal tax rates remained the same. The authors adopt an empirical framework that is similar to Bosch and van der Klaauw (2012) and condition on the effects of other factors, such as inflows of foreign workers that may have affected the wages, participation and working hours of native males and females. The authors also conduct various sensitivity analyses to examine the robustness of the estimates.

The authors find robust evidence that the tax reforms increased the wages of medium and high educated married males and females significantly. They also had a positive impact on work participation that was more substantial for married women, especially the medium educated. The authors estimate significant positive own wage labor supply elasticities that are small and about the same for men and women when the authors condition on the labor outcome effects of inflows of EU and non-EU foreign workers, which changed the skill distribution of the economy and had a more significant impact on female labor outcomes. Smaller wage labor supply elasticities indicate lower disincentive effects and deadweight losses from the imposition of taxes and have implications on the design of optimal taxation of men and women.

Previous investigations of the labor supply responses of both men and women to a given policy change have been identified mostly by exploiting changes in joint income taxation and marginal tax rates. The authors exploit substantial expansions in the level of individual income exempt from taxation and taxed at a lower marginal tax rate while the schedule of marginal tax rates remained the same. The income effects of these reforms could be limited since the reduced marginal tax rates apply to only part of the income.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key determinants of employability of information technology (IT) graduates in Vietnam and examines their impact on self-perceived employability and the duration of the job search.

This study is based on data collected from the responses to an online survey from more than 500 IT graduates from different higher education institutions in Vietnam. Employability, its outcome and its key determinants were integrated into one model. Exploratory factor, confirmatory factor and path analyses were conducted to test the model by means of structural equation modeling.

The self-perceived employability of IT graduates in Vietnam was determined by graduates’ English language skills, soft skills, adaptability skills, the quality of the institution’s IT program and job seeking efforts. Results also indicated that work experience, professional competencies and employability made the job search duration shorter, but job seeking efforts made job search duration longer.

Only determinants from individual and institutional aspects were considered, and the sample was also limited to one profession in one country.

Results can inform students and educators about the improvable areas of employability enhancement.

This study fills a gap in the employability research by providing a quantitative explanation about relationships among the employability, the job search duration and their key predictors from different aspects.

Algorithms for the construction of the Chomsky and Greibach normal forms for a fuzzy context‐free grammar using the algebraic approach are presented and illustrated by examples. The results obtained in this paper may have useful applications in fuzzy languages, pattern recognition, information storage and retrieval, artificial intelligence, database and pictorial information systems.