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As part of the banking reform, major commercial banks in China went through initial public offerings (IPOs) in the past two decades. Has this change in the ownership structure led to improvement in their performance? With a comprehensive data set of Chinese banks over 1999-2010, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of IPOs on bank performance in China.

The authors employ a stochastic frontier approach (SFA) to measure bank efficiency and assess the selection and dynamic effects of public listing.

The authors find strong selection effects. That is, banks that choose to go public are significantly more efficient than those that do not. However, the analysis of the dynamic effects shows no evidence that bank efficiency improves after going public, either in the short run or in the long run. The authors further look into bank performance around IPO events with non-parametric analysis and find that banks significantly outperform their counterparts prior to IPOs, but this superior performance disappears immediately after IPOs. This evidence is consistent with the “window dressing” hypothesis that firms time new issues to take advantage of windows of opportunity.

This is the first study that addresses the performance of IPO banks measured with SFA in China after 2005 when the major Chinese banks were listed.

With social media usage growing rapidly in business sustainability in manufacturing sectors, the means through which manufacturing firms can incorporate it into the pursuit of environmental sustainability are largely under-researched by academics. Drawing upon the dynamic capability view, this study examines the indirect relationship between social media usage and sustainable innovation in manufacturing sectors.

The study was based on analyzing data collected through a questionnaire survey on Chinese manufacturing firms. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was applied to test the hypotheses.

The results show that social media usage has a positive effect on sustainable innovation in the manufacturing sectors. Firms' sustainable dynamic capability mediates the relationship between social media usage and sustainable innovation. In addition, the effects of social media usage on firms' sustainable dynamic capability are stronger when stakeholder pressure is stronger and top management team commitment is higher.

This study highlights social media application as an important, yet underexplored, factor in sustainable innovation of manufacturing firms. The findings also untangle the mechanism of sustainable dynamic capability by which social media usage improves sustainable innovation for manufacturing firms.

Recent years have witnessed the popularity of social free sampling (SFS). That is, firms on social commerce platforms (e.g. Amazon Vine and Pconline Try) offer free sample products for consumers' applications, and the selected applicants are required to write a product trial report on the sites as a return. The main advantage of SFS is to leverage users' product trial reports to increase product exposure and attract prospective consumers. Thus, product trial reports play a central role in SFS. Despite that scholars have examined the rating bias of product trial reports in recent years' knowledge concerning how product trial reports influence user (i.e. readers of product trial reports) engagement remains sparse. To address the research gap, this paper aims to examine the drivers of user engagement with product trial reports.

This study utilized the Poisson regression model to analyze 3,419 trial reports collected from a well-known Chinese SFS site.

Based on the ELM model, the empirical results indicate that product rating, vividness, opinion balance, and reputation of the trial user are positively associated with user engagement. However, longer reports and reports with higher emotional intensity lead to weaker user engagement. Furthermore, product prices strengthen the positive impact of opinion balance but weaken the positive impact of trial users' reputations.

This study is among one of the first studies to investigate the impact of trial reports on user engagement in SFS. It yields actionable guidelines for SFS campaigns.

The popularity of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has attracted worldwide research interest. This study aims to identify and summarize the research foci (e.g. themes, methods, contexts, etc.) and discuss the new directions and trends of MOOC research in the context of Mainland China.

A systematic review of the published MOOC research papers in Mainland China was conducted with the following inclusion criteria: (1) papers written in English; (2) context focused on Mainland China; and (3) empirical studies. Three main issues were explored with the selected 70 papers: (1) research methods (data collection and analysis); (2) the research foci; and (3) research objects.

The results found that the major MOOC research in China was quantitative, mostly using one method to collect data. Most studies collected data through the databases of MOOC platforms and survey techniques, which was consistent with the widely used descriptive statistics for data analysis. Learner-focused themes were investigated the most, aligning with the result that learners were the most popular research objects.

The findings suggest that using new technology tools, such as the Big Data approach for learning analytics, may transform traditional MOOC research into new practices. Transdisciplinary research concepts may also provide an alternative evolving model for constructing collaboratively dynamic research frameworks under the changing technologies and paradigms. Meanwhile, educational research traditions, such as qualitative methods, contribute to scaffolding MOOC research for more pragmatic applications.

Most systematic reviews on MOOCs focus on general or regional contexts other than Mainland China, and scant MOOC review is based on published English papers about Mainland China.

This study extends the literature on top management team (TMT) diversity and innovation by introducing entrepreneurial passion diversity as an important TMT affective component in determining firm innovation performance. This paper draws on the knowledge-based view and proposes that TMT passion diversity, in terms of intensity separation and focus variety, may hinder the process of knowledge creation, and, in turn, reduce firm innovation performance.

The authors conduct a questionnaire survey using a simple random sampling technique and collect data from 195 small- and medium-sized enterprises in China. Ordinary least squares regression and a structural equation model are applied to test the hypotheses.

This study finds that TMT passion intensity separation has a negative effect on firm innovation performance via knowledge exchange and knowledge combination. TMT passion focus variety has a negative effect on firm innovation performance via knowledge combination.

This study highlights the affective diversity of entrepreneurial passion in TMTs and clarifies the detrimental role of TMT entrepreneurial passion diversity in innovation and knowledge creation. It contributes new insights to the literature on TMT diversity, knowledge management and entrepreneurial passion.

Endwall film cooling protects vane endwall by coolant coverage, especially at the leading edge (LE) region and vane-pressure side (PS) junction region. Strong flow impingement and complex vortexaa structures on the vane endwall cause difficulties for coolant flows to cover properly. This work aims at a full-scale arrangement of film cooling holes on the endwall which improves coolant efficiency in the LE region and vane-PS junction region.

The endwall film holes are grouped in four-holes constructal patterns. Three ways of arranging the groups are studied: based on the pressure field, the streamlines or the heat transfer field. The computational analysis is done with the k-ω SST model after validating the turbulence model properly.

By clustering the film cooling holes in four-holes patterns, the ejection of the coolant flow is stronger. The four-holes constructal patterns also improve the local coolant coverage in the “tough” regions, such as the junction region of the PS and the endwall. The arrangement based on streamlines distribution can effectively improve the coolant coverage and the arrangement based on the heat transfer distribution (HTD) has benefits by reducing high-temperature regions on the endwall.

A full-scale endwall film cooling design is presented considering interactions of different film cooling holes. A comprehensive model validation and mesh independence study are provided. The cooling holes pattern on the endwall is designed as four-holes constructal patterns combined with several arrangement choices, i.e. by pressure, by heat transfer and by streamline distributions.