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Knowledge-intensive public organizations (KIPOs henceforth) rely heavily on knowledge as the primary resource to provide public services. This study deals with a specific kind of KIPO in the judiciary system: the courts. The paper aims to explore the court’s managerial and organisational change resulting from the national recovery and resilience plan (NRRP) reform in response to Covid-19, focussing on how this neglected KIPO responds to change, either by showing acts of resistance or undergoing a hybridisation process.

The paper adopts a qualitative research design, developing an explorative case study to investigate the process of a court’s managerial and organisational change caused by NRRP reform and to shed light on how this neglected KIPO reacts to change, showing resistance acts and developing the hybridisation process. Thirty-one interviews in six months have been conducted with the three main actors in Courts: judges, clerks and trial clerks.

The paper shows that in this understudied KIPO, judges fiercely resist the managerial logic that decades of reforms have been trying to impose. The recent introduction of an office for speeding up trials (Ufficio Per il Processo (UPP)) was initially opposed. Then, the resistance strategy changed, and judges started to benefit from UPP delegating repetitive and low-value tasks while retaining their core activities. Clerks approached the reform with a more positive attitude, seeing in UPP the mechanism to bridge the distance between them and the judges.

Considering their relevance to society, courts must be more addressed in KIPOs' studies. This paper allows the reader to enter such KIPO and understand its peculiar features. Secondly, the article helps to understand micropractices of resistance that may hinder the effectiveness of managerial reforms.

The article analyzes the challenges Slovak businesses and organizations are facing in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting human resource management solutions they apply.

The authors present a part of their research conducted in six Central Eastern European (CEE) countries. Based on timely data, the article presents socioeconomic characteristics of Slovakia and the results of the research “HRM Challenges in Times of the Covid-19 Crisis” conducted among employers in Slovakia. The survey method encompassed 247 Slovakian organizations.

The year 2020 was an extraordinary one for businesses, governments, and individuals alike. According to the results of this research, Slovak organizations were not prepared for the Covid-19 crisis. Respondents who had a pandemic action plan at the time of the breakout were hardly found. Measures taken to preserve human health directly impacted the way how work is done and organized. This poses significant challenges for both employers and employees. In general, small organizations used cost and staff reduction tools. On the other hand, some of the respondents, mainly large organizations have been using future-oriented solutions, e.g. organizational development.

In this research the authors analyzed the experiences of a Central European country, namely Slovakia. However, the experiences gained and collected here can be useful in the international arena as well.

While the Olympic Games are always under the spotlight, the Paralympic Games are somehow ignored. This paper aims to invite the general public to think about the para-athletes and the differential treatments they received.

Among the participating countries, many of them were unable to win a single Olympic or Paralympic medal. When the dependent variable is left-censored, ordinary least squares regression is asymptotically biased downwards. In the literature, researchers typically employ the maximum likelihood Tobit model to take care of the censoring problem. However, some researchers argue that the Hurdle model has an advantage over the Tobit model in identifying the determinants of winning Olympic medals. Following their wisdom, this paper employs both the Tobit and Hurdle models in analysis.

The empirical evidence gathered in this paper suggests that population size, host status and average years of schooling are the big three socio-economic determinants when it comes to winning medals at the Paralympic Games and Olympic Games. The findings support the hypothesis that sports talent is randomly distributed and a large country has a higher chance to have talented athletes or para-athletes winning the Olympic medals. The strong host advantage also showed up in the following Paralympics but was not so strong at the next Olympics.

This paper not only examines the relationship between various social, economic and political factors in determining the success of a nation in the Paralympic Games but also attempts to identify possible non-traditional determinants.

Our paper studies a central issue with a long history in economics: the relationship between population and economic growth. We analyze the joint dynamics of economic and demographic growth in 111 countries during the period 1960–2019.

Using the concept of economic regime, the paper introduces the notion of distance between the dynamical paths of different countries. Then, a minimal spanning tree (MST) and a hierarchical tree (HT) are constructed to detect groups of countries sharing similar dynamic performance.

The methodology confirms the existence of three country clubs, each of which exhibits a different dynamic behavior pattern. The analysis also shows that the clusters clearly differ with respect to the evolution of other fundamental variables not previously considered [gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, human capital and life expectancy, among others].

Our results indirectly suggest the existence of dynamic interdependence in the trajectories of economic growth and population change between countries. It also provides evidence against single-model approaches to explain the interdependence between demographic change and economic growth.

We introduce a methodology that allows for a model-free topological and hierarchical description of the interplay between economic growth and population.

This paper aims to examine whether the cooperation between female chief financial officers (CFO) and the proportion of female directors would impact investment efficiency. The investigation is grounded in the increasing number of female top managers globally and the notion that female tends to cooperate more with other female than with male.

This study uses publicly listed firms in Bursa Malaysia from 2016 to 2020, which yielded a sample of 2,022 firm-year observations. The authors used multivariate ordinary least square regression to test the relationship, and to correct for the selection bias, the Heckman selection and PSM test were used.

The authors find a positive relationship between female CFOs and investment efficiency. A higher proportion of female directors accentuates this result. The findings support the homophily argument that similar characteristics (gender) promote cooperation. This shows that cooperation between female CFOs and directors improves investment efficiency. The results suggest that the improvement in investment efficiency could relate to higher managerial discretion for female CFOs and their ability to collaborate with female directors. These results are robust to a series of additional endogeneity tests. The findings have important implications for policymakers and firms to encourage more appointments of females in top management positions.

By highlighting the cooperation between female CFOs and female directors, this study contributes to the understanding that cooperation among females improves investment efficiency.

This study aims to examine living preference and tenure among millennials, with a particular focus on the impact of ethnic and cultural diversity on housing outcomes including observed homeownership inequalities.

Using the individual panel data from three waves in American Housing Survey, 2015–2019, this study compares the likelihood of co-residing among Asian and Hispanic millennials with non-Hispanic white millennial peers. Furthermore, this study estimates the effect of co-residence on homeownership across generational and ethnic backgrounds.

This study finds a preference for coresident adult familial households among foreign-born Asian and Hispanic millennials, and US-born Hispanic millennials when compared to their non-Hispanic white millennial peers. The results are robust after considering neighborhood selection bias, affordability and education. The effect of co-residence on ownership is significant and positive, suggesting this living arrangement contributes to homeownership across all generational and ethnic groups.

Housebuilders should be aware of Asian and Hispanic millennials’ increased appetite for extended family living arrangements and consider increasing the physical size of affordable or workforce-oriented rental housing and new single family construction to accommodate more adult co-living arrangements.

This study provides a more comprehensive understanding of the role ethnic and cultural diversity has on millennial adult living preferences and its generational differences, which is not just “boomeranging” as identified by previous literature, contributing to the growing interest in the housing research on the effect of ethnic diversity and culture on millennials’ homeownership rates.

This paper examines the drivers of brain gain by investigating the motivations of migrants who plan to return and contribute to their home country. It focuses on highly skilled Sudanese migrants in Japan, including a group of “plan-to-return” migrants (P-group), who intend to gain knowledge abroad that they will use to contribute to their homeland upon their return.

The participants are 24 highly skilled Sudanese migrants in Japan, 10 of whom are part of the P-group. To understand their motivation to contribute to their home country, the study applies the qualitative life course approach, using Elder's four life course themes: lives in time and space, the timing of lives, linked lives and human agency.

The P-group is characterised by a high level of motivation for self-development, which motivates them to study abroad. The analysis finds that the P-group's drive to contribute had been nurtured by a spirit of mutual aid in Sudanese society, which emphasises Islamic values and social ties. Religious norms, personal interactions and emotional ties to Sudan are especially influential on the P-group's motivation to contribute to their home society.

This study identifies drivers that lead to brain gain. Whereas previous studies have noted the relationship between return intentions and willingness to contribute to the home countries; they have not investigated influences on motivations to contribute. The results suggest that Sudan might already possess a system for local human resource development to encourage brain gain.

The design and implementation of a broadband quasi-monolithic microwave integrated circuit (q-MMIC) power amplifier (PA) is presented for 0.2 to 2.2 GHz applications.

To obtain an efficient, high-gain and high-power performance with in a compact and low-cost size, the prototype is based on Gallium nitride (GaN) on SiC 0.25-µm transistors, whereas the passive matching networks are realized on an AlN substrate as thin film circuit.

Measured results of the q-MMIC PA across the 0.2 to 2.2 GHz band show at least 32 ± 3 dB small-signal gains, an output power of 7 to 12 W and an average power add efficiency greater than 54%. The q-MMIC occupies an area of 12.8 × 14.5 mm².

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work reports the first full integrated PA which covers the frequency range of 0.2 to 2.2 GHz and achieves the combination of highest gain, about 10 W output power, together with the smallest component size among all published GaN PAs to date.

The construction collapse is one of the most serious accidents since it has several attributes (e.g. accident type and consequence) and its occurrence involves various kinds of causal factors (e.g. human factors). The impact of causal factors on construction collapse accidents and the interrelationships among causal factors remain poorly explored. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to use association rule mining (ARM) for cause analysis of construction collapse accidents.

An accident analytic framework is developed to determine the accident attributes and causal factors, and then ARM is introduced as the method for data mining. The data are from 620 historical accident records on government websites of China from 2010 to 2020. Through the generated association rules, the impact of causal factors and the interrelationships among causal factors are explored.

Collapse accident is easily caused by human factors, material and machine condition and management factors. Furthermore, the results show a close interrelationship between many causal factors and construction scheme and organization. The earthwork collapse is greatly related to environmental condition and the scaffolding collapse is greatly related to material and machine condition.

This study found relevant knowledge about the key causes for different types of construction collapses. Besides, several suggestions are further provided for construction units to prevent construction collapse accidents.

This study uses data mining methods to extract knowledge about the causes of collapse accidents. The impact of causal factors on various types of construction collapse accidents and the interrelationships among causal factors are explained from historical accident data.

Although the academic literature provides extensive insight into the motivations for the unethical use of information technology in online classes, little is known about how perceived justice, the opportunity to cheat and spiritual legitimacy mitigate unethical behavior among young academics. The purposes of this study are two folds: first, to determine how perceived lecturers’ justice and opportunity to cheat may mitigate academic misconduct in online classes, and second, to evaluate the moderating effect of spiritual power on the relationship between perceived lecturers’ justice and opportunity to cheat and academic misconduct.

This research was conducted at universities in three Southeast Asia countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, with a total of 339 respondents. The research questionnaire was distributed using Google Forms. The analytical method used to test the research hypothesis is moderated regression analysis (MRA).

The findings of this study reveal that spirituality moderates the relationship between lecturer justice and the opportunity to cheat online. Even though the justice level of the lecturer is low, individuals with relatively high spirituality will show much less cheating behavior than when there is a low level of lecturer justice and a low level of student spirituality, and vice versa.

Cheating occurs when students develop an intention to cheat, which leads to actual involvement in cheating, meaning that theoretically, the findings extend the fraud triangle theory. In addition, the practical implications of this research are that lecturers need to conduct fair teaching, such as transparency of exam conditions, assessment, the right to an opinion and supervision during exams, consequently, the students cannot cheat. Spirituality is also an essential factor that can reduce online cheating, so instilling spirituality in specific courses is a fruitful solution.

The contributions of this study are twofold. First, this study gives testable theories on how spiritual help works. Second, this study offers tailored and more humanistic assistance, such as a mechanism that adjusts to the academic world’s usage of more positive technologies. This study contributes to the literature on online cheating in higher education across three Southeast Asian nations (Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand).