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This study aims to investigate whether temperature affects the product quality of exporters and whether the effect is non-linear. More specifically, whether the impact of high temperatures differs from the impact of low temperatures, and whether different types of companies or industries are affected differently.

The paper uses detailed data covering all Chinese exporters from 2000 to 2016 to estimate the effects of temperature on the product quality of export firms. To clarify the relationship between them, the authors use a semi-parametric regression method, trying to test whether there is a non-linear relationship between temperature and the export quality of firms.

The increase in the number of high temperature days significantly reduces the quality of exported products, and this negative effect increases as the temperature rises. High temperature has the most significant negative impact on export quality for firms with low technical complexity, private firms and firms with no intermediate imports and located in historical hot cities. Product quality of both labor-intensive and capital-intensive firms will be affected by heat. High temperatures have the greatest negative impact on the export quality of newly entering products, followed by exiting products, with the least negative impact on persisting product.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to examine the impact of temperature on the quality of economic development. The findings of this paper again show that the potential economic impacts of global warming are huge. In addition to some potentially devastating impacts in the future, global warming is already causing imperceptible impacts in the present. Public and economic agents need to fully understand the possible adverse impacts of climate change and take corresponding adaptation measures to cope with global warming.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the root cause of a large number of quality problems in the current Chinese construction market.

Information economics theory is used to analyze the cause of construction quality problems related to the specific case of the Wenchuan earthquake of China.

The single low price competition in the construction tender market leads to the serious adverse selection and moral hazard behavior of bidding firms. The main solution to this problem is the introduction and improvement of an independent inspection/supervision mechanism.

The paper systematically analyzes the evaluation method of the lowest price winning bidding policy, which is the fundamental cause of adverse selection and moral hazard problems in the Chinese construction market.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the online DVD market in Australia, which has not been researched so far, and to examine whether the pricing patterns in this market exhibit any regularity consistent or inconsistent with research findings in other markets.

A longitudinal data set of 27,030 price observations were collected weekly over one year. Various statistical tests – in particular, a least‐squares dummy variable (LSDV) panel data model with serial correlation – were applied to the data.

In general, the online branches of multi‐channel retailers have higher average prices and standard deviations than pure internet retailers. Overall, market prices decrease over time significantly within the sample period – about 17.4 per cent decrease for all titles, however, with popular titles' prices decreasing faster than those of random titles. Furthermore, prices do not seem to converge between the two types of online retailers. For individual retailers, brand name effect seems to matter in the results, with a significant difference on prices.

This is an empirical study on a specific market. More data, testing and comparison are needed for any generalization of the findings whether they are consistent in the global sense.

Online marketers of different types of retailers may need to reflect on their pricing policies whether their pricing strategies have any space for improvement on profitability.

This study investigates the price movement of the Australian online DVD market using data collected over a one year time span.

The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically the sources of economic growth based on an augmented Mankiw, Romer, and Weil's model which considers human capital in the forms of both health and education for a group of East Asian economies including China.

Empirical results are based on the analysis of a panel dataset from 1961 to 2007. Sub‐sample estimation for the post‐1997 Asian Financial Crisis period is also considered for comparison purposes.

The impact of the stock of health and education on economic growth is statistically significant for both the whole sample and sub‐sample period. However, the impact of investment in education on economic growth is a little “fragile”. The statistical results show that the statistical impact of health on economic growth is stronger than that of education. It seems that it is more plausible for the policymakers in East Asia to invest more in health than educational human capital.

This paper is one of the first empirical studies to analyze the effect of human capital in the form of both health and education on economic growth in East Asia.

Supply chain resilience (SCR) has recently become an important issue for organizations all around the world. In order to decrease the risk of failures, managers and decision makers are constantly looking for practices to enhance SCR. The purpose of this paper is to propose a research model that mainly focuses on the effect of information sharing (IS) to enhance SCR.

Survey method is used in this research. Data were collected from the supply chain, procurement, executive and IT managers of 82 of Tehran’s stock exchange production companies. Structural equation modeling with SmartPLS3 software is used to analyze the collected data.

Research results show that IS significantly enhances SCR.

Data were collected at one point in time, and therefore a longitudinal study can further investigate the results of this study. The research was carried out in production companies in Iran. Future research can examine the research model in other industry sectors, e.g. services, in other countries to validate the accuracy of the findings.

The findings of this research should help managers, and decision makers create more resilient supply chains for their own and partners’ organizations.

The research model provides insightful results regarding the significance of IS in the SCR context.

This case discusses Qihoo 360's free business model, how it used this free model to overpower competitors, and how the model evolved over time. Qihoo 360 is a company that took just six years to become a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange (with a market value of over US$ 2 billion). At Qihoo 360's Initial Public Offering (IPO) at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Qihoo's founder Zhou Hongyi reflected on how Qihoo's free business model had brought its current success and speculates on its future challenges.

The authors used both secondary data and field interviews when preparing this case. After reading through various company reports, competitor information, and financial filings, the authors interviewed five top manager team (TMT) members of Qihoo 360, three TMT members of its competitors, and two partners of venture capital investors who have invested in these companies in Beijing or Shenzhen during the last three years. The authors collected 347 media reports related to these companies in Chinese covering seven years of history. This long span of data collection improves the interpretation of the company and helps construct the storyline of the case.

This case is suitable for an MBA course or an advanced undergraduate course in strategic management or a technology-oriented entrepreneurship course, focussing on the topic of the free business model, business model innovation, disruptive innovation, and evolution of the business model during the entrepreneurial process.

As more women are now being appointed to senior and top management positions and invited to sit on boards of directors, they are now directly participating in strategic company decision-making. As female directors have been found to provide new ideas, increase company competitiveness, efficiency and performance and bring a greater number of external resources to a company than male directors, this paper aims to put female directors as a variable into the data envelopment analysis (DEA) and statistical models to explore the effect of female directors on operating performances. The DEA first quantified and measured the company efficiencies, after which the statistical model analyzed the correlations between the variables to specifically identify the impact of female decision makers on the operating efficiencies in state-owned and private enterprises.

A novel two-stage, meta-hybrid dynamic DEA was developed to explore Chinese cultural media company efficiencies under optimal input and output resource allocations, after which Tobit Regression was applied to determine the effect of female executives on these efficiencies.

From 2012 to 2016, the overall efficiencies in Chinese state-owned cultural media enterprises were better than in the private cultural media enterprises. The overall technology gaps (TGs) in the state-owned cultural media enterprises were better than in the private cultural media enterprises.

Previous research has tended to focus on the causal relationships between female senior executives and business performances; however, there have been few studies on the relationships between female executives and company performance from an efficiency perspective (optimal resource allocation). This paper, therefore, is the first to develop a novel two-stage, meta-hybrid dynamic DEA to examine Chinese cultural media enterprise efficiencies, and the first to apply Tobit Regression to assess the effect of female executives on those efficiencies.

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship and effect of management support on individual creativity performance by focusing on the individual learning opportunity, adaptability to change and learning motivation in Hong Kong manufacturing companies.

This study is based on survey data collection by using a respondent-driven approach from 266 employees working in Hong Kong-based manufacturing firms. The model and hypotheses were tested by employing variance-based structural equation modeling.

The findings indicate that management support has a positive effect on individual learning opportunity and creativity performance. Also, a significant positive relationship between individual creativity, performance, individual learning opportunity, adaptability to change, and learning motivation has been yielded. The management support has an overall positive link with all variables directly and indirectly.

Top management can foster employee creativity by supporting and providing learning opportunities and motivating employees to develop adaptive capability at an individual level.

An empirical study of how management support can foster individual creativity performance and individual learning opportunity. This study is one of the first to examine the positive relationship between management support and individual creativity by validating a purposed model, especially in the context of the Hong Kong manufacturing industry.