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The phenomenon of student mobility in higher education is influenced by several factors, including the infrastructure provided by institutions in different countries as student support services. These student support services play a pivotal role in fostering students’ adaptability within a new environment, thereby significantly impacting their academic performance and social integration. The study focuses on international students in Uganda and investigates how student support services (as part of institutional infrastructure) support students’ adaptability. Based on Leask’s conceptual model of internationalisation, the study reveals that the presence of such services is essential; in addition, the need to provide newly arriving students with orientation is crucial for them to effectively navigate their surroundings. Offices dedicated to international students are also instrumental in facilitating the students’ orientation and settling-in process and they enhance their overall experience. By recognising the significance of both student support services and orientation, education institutions can create a more conducive and supportive environment for international students, ultimately enriching their academic journey and social interactions.

The purpose of this paper is to understand US federal government policy during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and the connections to graduate education. Using the multiple streams framework, the paper outlines these actions through various streams (problems, policy and political) and perspectives (defining problems, articulating options and mobilizing responses).

The primary sources of data collected for this study were US federal government policies from March 2020 through May 2021. Policies were examined through introduction, implementation and alteration (when possible) within the specific time period of the study. The policies outlined in this paper were connected to the US Department of Education, and to a lesser extent, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies. Data analysis was a two-fold process. First, the individual policy was considered as a single case and second, a cross-case comparison occurred across the multiple cases.

Analysing the study’s data in the problem stream provides a strong indicator of how the pandemic was perceived as a challenge for US graduate education. The pandemic served as a focusing event and illuminated the connections of graduate education to key institutional functions, including research and teaching. Broadly, US federal policy actions in this area focused on giving institutions resources and flexibility to support graduate students and allow them to continue their academic work while also seeding funding and incentives to continue the movement of knowledge, activities and people in the research pipeline. Actions in the policy stream aligned with the decentralized nature of the US higher education system and allowed for choice by academic institutions within the parameters of options.

This paper extends extant literature related to policy-making and graduate education to consider policy-making during a time of crisis. The paper offers methodological and conceptual ideas for consideration in future research.

Introduction: The Republic of Moldova’s economy faces risks caused by the war in Ukraine and the economic crisis, proving that citizens’ prosperity is essential for national stability and that financial knowledge influences the standard of living. A minimum financial education provides information, knowledge, and tools to make correct decisions based on informed consent in an increasingly complex financial system. In the financial-banking and academic environment, in-depth research of consumers’ financial education level helps to optimise, streamline, and balance bank–client relations with fairness. This work is the consequence of studying the level of financial education among consumers of financial-banking services, with direct implications for their financial well-being.

Purpose: The main aim of this research is to measure the financial knowledge of consumers of financial-banking services, developing recommendations for measures to improve the situation.

Methodology: To explain the factors of influence, the following research techniques were used: analysis and synthesis of conceptual approaches to financial education; deduction and induction; analysis of the findings of sociological research on the level of financial education of users of financial-banking services; and recommendation synthesis.

Findings: The research validates that enhancing financial education has a positive effect on individuals and the economy, reinstates confidence in financial markets, makes an innovative contribution to accurately assessing consumers’ financial knowledge enabling the implementation of proactive measures.

Implications: This chapter provides insights into consumers’ financial education level, serving as a crucial indicator for institutions and public authorities in formulating and promoting effective educational initiatives to ensure minimal skill gaps.

There is evidence that quality improvement projects developed with the participation of patients and family members are more likely to result in a sustainable change. To identify the intervening factors is an important step in promoting and supporting patient and family members’ engagement.

A survey was carried out with 90 hospitals. A total of 35 intervening factors were evaluated by the healthcare professionals from the quality area using a Likert scale. Factor analysis was applied to identify the relationship among the factors and cluster analysis and the standardized scores for each new latent variable were obtained to observe the association between them and hospitals profile. Cluster analysis allowed to group the hospitals with similar responses and to analyze whether there was any association with the profile of the institutions.

A total of ten intervening factors are identified: two in the financial dimension, five in the structural and three in the personal and cultural. The standardized scores of latent variables suggest that the financial factors could be affected by the hospital capacity. The structural factors could be impacted by the accreditation status, location (region) and administrative control (ownership). And the personal and cultural factors could be by the location and dominant organizational culture. All of factors are influenced by the performed quality management activities. The cluster analysis allowed the identification of three groups in the financial dimension, and four in the other two dimensions. Except for the accreditation status in the personal and cultural dimension, no evidence of association between the groups and the variables raised to characterize the profile of the hospitals was found.

The study contributed to identify the relationship among the intervening factors turning possible to simplify and reduce them more comprehensively than those originally identified in the literature and at the same time maintaining the representativeness of the original variables.

This study investigates the optimum size for manufacturing firms and the impact of subcontracting on firms' likelihood of achieving their optimal scale in Vietnam.

Using data from the enterprise census in 2017 and 2021, the paper first estimates the production function to identify the optimum firm size for manufacturing firms and then, applies the logit model to investigate factors associated with the optimal firm size.

The study reveals that medium-sized firms exhibit the highest level of productivity. Nevertheless, a consistent trend emerges, indicating that nearly 90% of manufacturing firms in Vietnam operated below their optimal scale in both 2017 and 2021. An analysis of the impact of subcontracting on firms' likelihood to achieve their optimal scale emphasizes its crucial role, especially for foreign firms, exerting an influence nearly five times greater than that of the judiciary system.

The paper's findings offer crucial policy implications, suggesting that initiatives aimed at enhancing the overall productivity of the manufacturing sector should prioritise facilitating contract arrangements to encourage firms to reach their optimal size. These insights are also valuable for other countries with comparable firm size distributions.

This paper provides the first empirical evidence on the relationship between firm size and productivity as well as the role of subcontracting in firms' ability to reach their optimal scale in a country with a right-skewed distribution of firm sizes.

This study aims to investigate limited partners’ (LPs) influence on venture capital (VC) fund returns.

We merge data from Preqin and SDC’s VentureXpert spanning from 1993 to 2014 and conduct multiple regression analysis to examine the influence of LPs on VC fund performance. Additionally, we conduct three distinct robustness tests to verify the credibility of our findings.

Our empirical analysis demonstrates that newbie LPs consistently exert a significant positive influence on VC fund returns.

VC and LP data is self-reported, and there is no comprehensive dataset as some LPs prefer to maintain anonymity.

Extant literature on LPs’ contribution to VC fund performance is limited. The general assumption is that the role of LPs in VC fund performance is confined to funding. We introduce a new variable, LP track record, as a proxy for LP experience to examine if this variable influences VC performance.

This study seeks to explicate how institutional disruptions impact multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiary control choices. It uses institutional theory to understand the influence of formal and informal institutions across countries on the type of control system employed in an MNC manufacturing subsidiary.

This study’s sample is based on a unique dataset from five trustworthy sources. We use multi-level models to account for the hierarchical nature of the sample of 1,630 multinational subsidiaries spread across 26 host countries by firms from 21 home countries.

The institutional distance between the host and the home country has a negative relationship with strategic control. In contrast, the home country’s power distance has a positive relationship with strategic control.

Study findings indicate the need to incorporate formal and informal institutional elements in the control system’s conceptual framing and design. This notion complements existing visualizations of optimizing MNC controls through extant articulations of minimizing governance costs through organizational design choices or strategic needs.

We investigate the effect of the adoption of formal board structure and board processes on firm performance in Colombian family firms, in a context where firms can choose specific aspects of board structure and processes. We deploy insights from the behavioral governance perspective to develop arguments about how family businesses may choose board elements based on their degree of control over the firm (absolute control or less), and its effect on firm performance.

We use an unbalanced data panel of 404 firm-year observations. The data was obtained from the annual financial and corporate governance reports of 62 Colombian stock-issuing firms for the period 2008–2014 – due to change in regulation, data could not be added beyond 2014. Panel data technique with random effects was used.

The results show that board structure is positively associated with financial performance, however, this relationship is negative in businesses where family has absolute control. We also found that there is a negative association between board processes and performance, but positive association in family-controlled businesses.

Our research contributes to research streams on effects of family control in firm choices and on the interactive effect of governance choices and institutional context and more generally how actors interact (rather than react) with their institutional context.

The changing roles of the United Nations (UN) and national institutions have made addressing climate change a critical concern for many multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) survival and growth. This chapter discusses how such institutions, which vary in their nature and characteristics, shape firm strategies for climate change adaptation. Exploring different versions of institutional theory, the chapter demonstrates how and why institutional characteristics affect typical patterns of firm ownership, governance, and capabilities. These, in turn, influence companies’ internationalisation and climate-change strategies. Climate change poses challenges to how we understand firms’ strategic decisions from both an international business (IB) (HQ–subsidiary relations) and global value chains (GVC) (buyer–supplier relations) perspective. However, climate change also provides opportunities for companies to gain competitive advantages – if firms can reconfigure and adapt faster than their competitors. Existing IB and GVC research tends to downplay the importance of climate change strategies and the ways in which coherent or dysfunctional institutions affect firms’ reconfiguration and adaptation strategies in a globally dispersed network of value creation. This chapter presents a perspective on the institutional conditions that affect firms’ climate change strategies regarding ownership, location, and internalisation (OLI), and GVCs, with ‘investment’ and ‘emerging standards’ playing a significant role. The authors illustrate the discussion using several examples from the Global South (i.e. Bangladesh) and the Global North (i.e. Denmark, Sweden, and Germany) with a special emphasis on the garment industry. The aim is to encourage future research to examine how a ‘business systems’, or varieties of capitalism, institutional perspective can complement the analysis of sustainability and climate change strategies in IB and GVC studies.

The authors seek to advance the understanding of small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) internationalization at the regional level and examine the role of home market institutions in this process.

The authors analyze hypotheses with data from SMEs in five country markets and from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. A cluster analysis establishes the regional diversification patterns (based on regional diversification scope, speed and rhythm) and a multinomial regression tests the effect of home market institutions on their adoption.

The results offer a refined picture of SME regional diversification by revealing three patterns: intra-regionally focused firms, late inter-region diversifiers and early inter-region diversifiers. They also suggest that the adoption of these patterns is determined by SMEs' home market institutions.

The authors develop a nuanced understanding of SME internationalization by building upon and expanding the regionalization rationale in the internationalization patterns literature. Additionally, the authors address the acknowledged, yet rarely investigated, country-level determinants of internationalization patterns.