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This study is a pioneer in the academic literature to investigate the relationship between Valentine’s Day and stock market returns of major economies around the world.

Specific control variables for Valentine's Day are introduced to eliminate the potential influence of other effects.

The findings indicate that stock returns are higher on the days when Valentine's Day is approaching than on other days for most cases, showing “the Valentine Effect” in the stock market.

Unlike other holiday effects in the previous literature, the Valentine's Day effect cannot be explained by many conventional theories, such as tax-loss selling and the inventory adjustment hypothesis.

The purpose of this paper is to test hypotheses about the effects of economic and weather factors on the inventories of cattle, sheep and goats in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR).

An equilibrium displacement model of livestock products is combined with an inventory relation proposed by Rucker et al. (1984) to deduce hypothesis about the effects of expected price and feed costs, weather, and supply and demand shifters on herd size. Dynamics are incorporated using the partial adjustment and adaptive expectations models originally proposed by Nerlove (1956). The hypotheses are tested using both the structural equations implied by the model, and the reduced form.

Results suggest livestock inventories in IMAR in general are more responsive to weather conditions than to economic conditions. This is especially true for cattle and sheep, where isolated 1 percent changes in weather variables, namely precipitation and radiation, were found to have a much larger effect on inventory than isolated 1 percent changes in expected price and forage costs. The effects of the weather variables, moreover, were found to be different for goats than for cattle and sheep, with goat numbers decreasing with improvements in weather, and cattle and sheep numbers increasing. This suggests herders respond to poor weather in part by substituting goats for cattle and/or sheep. Price was found to have a negative effect on cattle inventory, and no effect on sheep and goat inventory. Forage costs were found to have a positive effect on cattle and sheep inventories, and no effect on goat inventory. These results suggest policies to protect grassland by controlling inventory levels must be designed carefully if they are to be effective.

The paper makes a methodological contribution in that the livestock inventory relation proposed by Rucker et al. (1984) is extended to include supply and demand shifters for livestock products in a partial-equilibrium setting where the industry in question is a net exporter of livestock products. The paper makes an empirical contribution in that additional evidence is provided on the role that price plays in inventory behavior.

The level of inventories, particularly the finished‐goods inventories, is a good gauge of adjustment in inputs and outputs of the firms in a market economy and plays an important role in business fluctuations (see, e.g., Abramovitz, 1950, and Stanback, 1962).

In recent years, Egypt has been developing rapidly from a socialist to a fully developed market‐based economy. One may expect that this economic transition towards a more capitalist orientation will influence the country’s cultural and socio‐economic environment, and consequently the behaviour of its corporate managers. The increasing separation of ownership and control of capital could be expected to increase agency problems associated with managerial decisions. In these circumstances, it should be interesting to identify whether ‘positive accounting’ hypotheses would apply in such an environment. Therefore, this paper examines the relevance to financial reporting in Egypt of some established positive accounting theory hypotheses in addition to a new hypothesis related to taxation. The evidence of the study is consistent with the validity of the conventional ‘bonus’ and ‘debt’ hypotheses and the new ‘taxation’ hypothesis. These conclusions are also consistent with recent empirical studies of cultural and socio‐economic change in Egypt.

This conceptual paper aims to shed light on the nature and determinants of managerial behaviour when affected by supply chain disruptions. It aims to argue that the managerial decision‐making process is an important component in determining the eventual long‐term impact of a supply chain disruption.

The paper introduces a continuous simulation model that is based on a Bayesian robot decision‐maker. Using the system dynamics approach, it illustrates the process of evaluating competing hypotheses of functional vs dysfunctional supply chain design in a disruption scenario. Model validity is assessed by means of a case study based on secondary data.

The model provides insight into the drivers of decision‐maker confidence dynamics that are used when evaluating the competing hypotheses. Furthermore, it identifies the psychological distortions that make actual managerial inference processes different from the Bayesian robot and incorporate these adjustments into the system dynamics model. Several propositions about the nature and determinants of decision‐maker confidence are stated.

For policy makers, the paper clarifies the important moderating role of confidence in the realisation of wider implications of supply chain disruptions, especially from the perspective of industrial development, and trade and transport facilitation.

The research enhances understanding of the wider implications of supply chain disruptions, contributing to behavioural research in logistics and supply chain management.

Drawing on experiential learning theory, this study seeks to understand how the perceived cultural difference in a foreign country and learning flexibility, which enables more integrated experiential learning from international experience, influence expatriates’ cultural intelligence (CQ) and consequently their adjustment and job performance.

Survey data were collected from 169 expatriates in China. Polynomial regression analyses were employed to test curvilinear relationships between cultural difference and CQ and between learning flexibility and CQ. Mediation hypotheses were tested either by the MEDCURVE procedure if a curvilinear relationship was confirmed or by the Haye’s Process procedure if a curvilinear relationship was not confirmed and instead a linear relationship was confirmed.

The results demonstrated a positive relationship between cultural difference and CQ and an inverted U-shape relationship between learning flexibility and CQ. CQ mediated the relationship between cultural difference and expatriate adjustment and partially mediated the relationship between learning flexibility and expatriate adjustment. CQ positively influenced expatriates’ job performance via expatriate adjustment.

Our findings suggest that companies should not hesitate to send expatriates on assignments to culturally very different countries and focus more attention on the selection of expatriates. The findings of this study suggest firms should choose candidates who are moderate or high in learning flexibility and could engage in integrated learning and specialized learning in a more balanced manner.

This research is the first study that examines the influence of learning flexibility on CQ and expatriate effectiveness. It examines cultural difference through the lens of experiential learning theory and argues that cultural difference constitutes “stimuli” in the experiential learning environment for individual learning in an international context. The results advance our knowledge of the role of experiential learning in developing capable global managers.

This study examines the relationship between oil price uncertainty (OPU) and corporate inventory investments using a sample of 6,072 USA manufacturing firms from 1992 to 2019.

The author's study employs a panel dataset to examine the relationship between OPU and corporate inventory investments. The author uses several alternative specifications such as fixed effects models, an instrumental variable analysis, an impact threshold for confounding variable (ITCV) analysis, alternative measures, additional control variables and the percent bias analysis to account for endogeneity issues.

Corporate inventory investments decrease in response to high OPU. This decrease in inventory investments happens regardless of firms' expected stockout costs, information environment and reliance on external financing. As a potential mechanism, an uncertainty-induced increase in cash holdings contributes to this reduction in inventory investments. Also, the effect of OPU is non-linear and asymmetric. In response to the volatility of positive (negative) oil price changes, inventory investments decrease (increase) up to a certain point and increase (decrease) after that. Further, uncertainty-induced adjustments in inventory investments positively influence the operating performance of firms.

The author's study adds to the growing literature that examines the impact of OPU on corporate outcomes. Inventory investments directly affect business operations and could better reflect firms' responses to an uncertain environment.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the line of research on the ex ante valuation of the economic payoff from strategic alliances. The paper links a firm's related pre‐alliance situation to an alliance announcement, to predict how investors value the alliance.

The researchers collected data on marketing alliances in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. Using an empirical model, three hypotheses predicting how investors value alliances in the light of their knowledge of how the firm is doing before the alliance announcement were tested.

The findings indicate that investors assign higher value to marketing alliances for firms with lower inventory liquidity and product demand. Investors, in fact, rewarded firms with weak pre‐alliance positions, indicating that the alliance was perceived as a useful strategy to turnaround the weak situation.

As is common with other event study research, the study is unable to predict the long‐term relationship between alliance announcements and performance of the alliance. A positive evaluation at the time of the announcement may not necessarily translate into long‐term success.

This research provides an important lesson for firms hoping to reap financial rewards from their alliance announcements. Firms may do well to time such alliance announcements to correspond with their internal situations.

This paper is believed to be one of the first to consider an additional piece of firm information in addition to an alliance announcement to gauge investor valuation of alliances. The research therefore extends existing research and offers a more complete understanding of how investors value alliances at their formation. The findings should be of interest to firms contemplating alliances, and enhance understanding of investor decision making.