Search results

The purpose of this paper is to comprehensively examine the influence of formal and informal institutional differences on enterprise investment margin, mode and result.

This paper is based on 2,440 micro samples of large-scale outbound investment from 609 Chinese enterprises from the years 2005 to 2016.

The study has found that formal institutional differences have little impact on investment scale, but significantly affect investment diversification. In order to avoid the management risks brought by formal institutional differences, enterprises tend to a full ownership structure. However, the choice between greenfield investment and cross-border mergers and acquisitions is not affected by formal institutional differences. In contrast, the impact of informal institutional differences is more extensive. Both formal and informal institutional differences significantly increase the probability of investment failure. Further research found that the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) bridges the formal institutional differences.

The study concludes that developing the BRI, especially cultural exchanges with countries alongside the Belt and Road, will help enterprises to “go global” faster and better.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the metaverse platform in a social context to better understand the future of this tool in tourism cities and how this can help to improve the well-being of residents in both digital and physical scenarios.

In this paper, the current and probable developments in the metaverse, and its use in tourism cities and companies have been investigated. Moreover, this study develops, collects and examines the main metaverse definitions by expert authors and organizations as a methodology to ensure the transparency and credibility of the metaverse analysis.

Findings suggest that the fusion of the metaverse and tourism cities must create residents’ services and experiences in the new MetaTourPolis to help interact and connect citizens with the city’s institutions and companies, as well as make tourism cities more attractive, innovative, environmentally friendly and healthier places to live. Metaverse will bring new changes for residents and tourists, in fact, this virtual platform is already changing and improving the residents’ quality of life and people with disabilities in tourism cities. For instance, the metaverse platform has been implemented in Seoul, Santa Monica and Dubai MetaTourPolis to interact with their residents, including people with disabilities, to resolve bureaucratic and administrative problems, avoiding this group and the rest of the residents travelling by bus or car to the city’s institutions. In addition, several metaverse applications based on softbot tutors or metaverse virtual social centres have been developed to improve blind and impaired people, and elderly people’ quality of life, respectively.

A new concept called “MetaTourPolis” has been included to stage the relationship between tourism cities and the metaverse platform, where the fusion of metaverse and the new tourism polis of the 21st century will be at the service of citizens, tourists and companies, to create more sustainable, efficient, quantitative and environmental tourism cities.

As the world faces a new health crisis threatening people with the spread of Covid-19, this study aims to summarize the key information of Covid-19 related to disease characteristics, diagnosis, treatment and prevention along with the lessons learned from Thailand.

The narrative review was synthesized from various sources such as the World Health Organization; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Ministry of Public Health and other related news; articles in ScienceDirect, PubMed, Google Scholar; and the author's perspective regarding the lessons learned from Thailand with keywords of “Covid-19” and “Coronavirus” from January to August 2020. Google Trends was used to set common questions.

Covid-19 is the seventh family of coronaviruses that cause various symptoms related to respiratory systems. The disease can be treated through general and symptomatic treatment, by using antiviral drugs. As of July 2020, there are four potential vaccine candidates ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, mRNA-1273, Ad5-nCOV and BNT162b1. The recommendations for Covid-19 prevention are physical distancing, face masks, eye protection and hand washing. Thailand is now considered as low-risk for Covid-19 possibly because of (1) soft policy by government actions, (2) village health volunteers, (3) integration of technology and (4) fact-based communications.

This study summarized the key points about Covid-19, clarified some misunderstandings and shared strategic actions from Thailand, which can be adapted according to the different capacities and situations in other countries.

This study explores the characteristics of high-speed rail (HSR) and air transportation networks in China based on the weighted complex network approach. Previous related studies have largely implemented unweighted (binary) network analysis, or have constructed a weighted network, limited by unweighted centrality measures. This study applies weighted centrality measures (mean association [MA], triangle betweenness centrality [TBC], and weighted harmonic centrality [WHC]) to represent traffic dynamics in HSR and air transportation weighted networks, where nodes represent cities and links represent passenger traffic. The spatial distribution of centrality results is visualized by using ArcGIS 10.2. Moreover, we analyze the network robustness of HSR, air transportation, and multimodal networks by measuring weighted efficiency (WE) subjected to the highest weighted centrality node attacks. In the HSR network, centrality results show that cities with a higher MA are concentrated in the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta; cities with a higher TBC are mostly provincial capitals or regional centers; and cities with a higher WHC are grouped in eastern and central regions. Furthermore, spatial differentiation of centrality results is found between HSR and air transportation networks. There is a little bit of difference in eastern cities; cities in the central region have complementary roles in HSR and air transportation networks, but air transport is still dominant in western cities. The robustness analysis results show that the multimodal network, which includes both airports and high-speed rail stations, has the best connectivity and shows robustness.

This review aims to give a critical view of the wheel/rail high frequency vibration-induced vibration fatigue in railway bogie.

Vibration fatigue of railway bogie arising from the wheel/rail high frequency vibration has become the main concern of railway operators. Previous reviews usually focused on the formation mechanism of wheel/rail high frequency vibration. This paper thus gives a critical review of the vibration fatigue of railway bogie owing to the short-pitch irregularities-induced high frequency vibration, including a brief introduction of short-pitch irregularities, associated high frequency vibration in railway bogie, typical vibration fatigue failure cases of railway bogie and methodologies used for the assessment of vibration fatigue and research gaps.

The results showed that the resulting excitation frequencies of short-pitch irregularity vary substantially due to different track types and formation mechanisms. The axle box-mounted components are much more vulnerable to vibration fatigue compared with other components. The wheel polygonal wear and rail corrugation-induced high frequency vibration is the main driving force of fatigue failure, and the fatigue crack usually initiates from the defect of the weld seam. Vibration spectrum for attachments of railway bogie defined in the standard underestimates the vibration level arising from the short-pitch irregularities. The current investigations on vibration fatigue mainly focus on the methods to improve the accuracy of fatigue damage assessment, and a systematical design method for vibration fatigue remains a huge gap to improve the survival probability when the rail vehicle is subjected to vibration fatigue.

The research can facilitate the development of a new methodology to improve the fatigue life of railway vehicles when subjected to wheel/rail high frequency vibration.

This study aims to investigate whether firms purchase directors' and officers' liability (D&O) insurance when the country-level economic policy uncertainty (EPU) is high.

This study uses D&O insurance data from Chinese listed firms between 2003 and 2019 to conduct regression analyses to examine the association between D&O insurance and EPU.

The results show that government EPU, despite being an exogenous factor, increases the likelihood of firms' purchasing D&O insurance, and this effect is more pronounced when firms are exposed to great share price crash risk and high litigation risk, suggesting that firms intend to purchase D&O insurance possibly due to the accentuated stock price crash risk and litigation risk associated with EPU. In addition, the results indicate that the effect of EPU on the D&O insurance purchase decision is moderated by the provincial capital market development and internal control quality.

The study highlights the role of uncertain economic policies in shareholder approval of D&O insurance purchases.

The study enriches the literature on the determinants of D&O insurance purchases by documenting novel evidence that country-level EPU is a key institutional factor shaping firms' decisions to purchase D&O insurance.

This paper investigates the consequences of job insecurity among hotel employees during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Data were obtained from the employees of two five-star chain hotels in Turkey. The study hypotheses were tested via structural equation modeling.

The research findings demonstrate that job insecurity exacerbates job tension. Job tension erodes employees’ trust in organization and aggravates their propensity to leave work early and be late for work. As hypothesized, job tension mediates the effect of job insecurity on organizational trust and the abovementioned outcomes.

This study adds to the hospitality literature by assessing the interrelationships of job insecurity, job tension, organizational trust and nonattendance intentions.