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The increased availability and adoption of precision agriculture technologies has left researchers to grapple with how to best utilize the associated high-frequency large-volume of data. Since the wealth of information from precision equipment can easily be aggregated in real-time, this poses an interesting question of how aggregates of high-frequency data may complement, or substitute for, publicly released periodic reports from government agencies.

This study utilized advances in event study and yield projection methodologies to test whether simulated weekly harvest-time yields potentially drive futures price that are significantly different from the status quo. The study employs a two-step methodology to ascertain how corn futures price reactions and price levels would have evolved if market participants had access to weekly forecasted yields. The marginal effects of new information on futures price returns are first established by exploiting the variation between news in publicly available information and price returns. Given this relationship, the study then estimates the counterfactual evolution of corn futures price attributable to new information associated with simulated weekly forecasted yields.

The results show that the market for corn exhibits only semi-strong form efficiency, as the “news” provided by the monthly Crop Production and World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates reports is incorporated into prices in at most two days after the release. As expected, an increase in corn yields relative to what was publicly known elicits a futures price decrease. The counterfactual analysis suggests that if weekly harvest-time yields were available to market participants, the daily corn futures price will potentially be relatively volatile during the harvest period, but the final price at the end of the harvest season will be lower.

The study uses simulation to show the potential evolution of corn futures price if market participants had access to weekly harvest-time yields. In doing so, the study provides insights centered around the ongoing debate regarding the economic value of USDA reports in the presence of growing information availability within the private sector.

COVID-19 has influenced the way we utilise the radio spectrum in terms of increasing data rates, the localisation of usage, and the transfer of traffic from urban to rural areas. Most regulators have shown sympathy towards operator requirements, stipulating a range of mitigation actions including allowing technology neutrality and temporary assignments. Internationally, the ITU-R suspended all physical meetings and launched a new global network resiliency platform named ‘REG4COVID’ to share experiences including those related to spectrum management.

It is argued in this chapter that the pandemic has supported the calls for additional unlicensed spectrum for Wi-Fi in the 6 GHz and accelerated the rollout of 5G. Moreover, despite of increasing use of streaming, it is quite difficult to assume that traditional linear TV will be replaced, at least in the near future for a variety of reasons. The pandemic has also raised the question as to whether an innovative assignment model could be used to assign the spectrum instead of auctions, and whether, in some countries where temporary assignments were made, frequencies are kept unutilised or reserved. Concerning international spectrum management, it is expected that WRC-23 will be held on time though there will be some implications for issues such as the regulatory time-limits for bringing into use satellite networks frequency assignments. Finally, it is argued that the pandemic has also demonstrated the importance of flexibility and agility in national spectrum management, and placed spectrum managers in a new position where they were forced to be proactive instead of their traditional reactive role.

The overall goal of science is to build a valid and reliable body of knowledge about the functioning of the world and how applying that knowledge can change it. As personnel and human resources management researchers, we aim to contribute to the respective bodies of knowledge to provide both employers and employees with a workable foundation to help with those problems they are confronted with. However, what research on research has consistently demonstrated is that the scientific endeavor possesses existential issues including a substantial lack of (a) solid theory, (b) replicability, (c) reproducibility, (d) proper and generalizable samples, (e) sufficient quality control (i.e., peer review), (f) robust and trustworthy statistical results, (g) availability of research, and (h) sufficient practical implications. In this chapter, we first sing a song of sorrow regarding the current state of the social sciences in general and personnel and human resources management specifically. Then, we investigate potential grievances that might have led to it (i.e., questionable research practices, misplaced incentives), only to end with a verse of hope by outlining an avenue for betterment (i.e., open science and policy changes at multiple levels).

The purpose of the current study is to explain best practices for attempting humor in the workplace. Research on humor in the workplace has emphasized the use of leader humor but has neglected to provide guidance on how to successfully use humor. This is an important gap because unsuccessful humor attempts are associated with lowered status and disruptive behavior.

This paper summarizes three types of humor theories (i.e. cognitive, social and contextual) and derives principles from these theories that can be applied to improve humor success. Then, the authors apply the understanding of humor to workplace applications, providing suggestions for future empirical research inferred from the humor theories.

Humor attempts are most likely to land (i.e. invoke mirth) when they include a benign violation of mental schemas, societal norms or other expectations or when humor evokes shared feelings of benign superiority in the audience. Humor is less effective in goal-directed situations. Mirth is expected to increase group cohesion, leader trust and organizational identification and mitigate the effects of job stressors. Finally, employee learning and development activities (e.g. onboarding, training) seem like a good place to use humor to facilitate cognitive flexibility.

These suggestions from across psychological disciplines are synthesized to inform best practices for leader humor.

The authors examine the impact of CEO generalist experience on firm performance. Using 522 listed firms in Indonesia for the period 2010–2018, the authors find that the generalist CEO is negatively associated with firm performance. Generalist CEOs tend to experience ambiguity in adjustments in the new environment. In order to decrease the impact of a generalist CEO, our empirical evidence finds that CEO tenure does not significantly moderate the association between the two. This is because generalist CEOs with longer tenure tend to avoid changing strategies, and therefore the negative impact of CEO generalist is not altered. The results of this study provide suggestions for the firm in the developing country to appoint a CEO with generalist experience.

It has been two decades since the first academic paper shone a spotlight on non-GAAP earnings. The past 20 years of research investigates concerns over the misuse of these disclosures and resulted in some significant changes to accounting and reporting standards across the globe. This paper aims to document the history of non-GAAP reporting and outline the emerging themes of the now matured practice of non-GAAP reporting.

This systematic literature review searches two popular databases to identify the academic publications relating to non-GAAP reporting between 2002 and 2022. The paper uses bibliographic mapping to present the key statistics of the non-GAAP reporting field of research.

The non-GAAP reporting environment started out as the “wild West’ but, through regulation and public awareness, emerged as an important supplement to the traditional outputs of financial reporting. Current consensus is recent non-GAAP earnings are informative to users but there is lack of research into qualitative non-GAAP disclosures and the vast body of archival research needs triangulating with more experimental studies.

This paper contributes to the literature by documenting the past 20 years of non-GAAP reporting and identifying the important existing and emerging research areas concerning non-GAAP earnings disclosures.

With the recent increasing relevance of sustainability, multinational enterprises are faced with divergent stakeholder demands and persistently shifting priorities. This study aims to examine stakeholders’ perceptions of the sustainability performance of a gold mining subsidiary in Ghana.

Using a purposive sampling technique, the authors interviewed managers and employees of the case enterprise, officials of regulatory institutions and host community members on their perceptions of the case enterprise’s sustainability performance. The authors triangulated the opinions expressed by these stakeholders with data from annual reports. The data were analysed through the lens of stakeholder theory.

The authors found that while members of the host community and the regulatory institutions were keenly interested in the case enterprise’s social and environmental activities, they perceived their performance as unimpressive, considering the economic benefits derived from the mining operations. On the contrary, the managers and employees of the case enterprise were satisfied with their environmental compliance and social intervention programmes, even though the company’s economic position had declined. The authors submit that the variations in the sustainability performance perceptions among the stakeholders are due to the lack of a deeper understanding of the other stakeholders’ expectations.

To equitably satisfy diverse stakeholder expectations, the study highlights the role of stakeholder collaborations in understanding the expectations of more salient stakeholder groups such as community members and employees, as well as the lesser salient groups such as academics. It also demonstrates the fluidity of sustainability and its benefits in designing a consensual sustainable management strategy. This implies that managers of the case mining enterprise make the necessary efforts to meet the diverse stakeholder needs while attaining their primary objective of creating wealth for shareholders.

Compared to advanced economies, studies on sustainability performance in emerging economies are limited. Nonetheless, these limited studies leave out stakeholder perceptions, focusing more on quantitative performance indicators. Using thematic and content analyses, the authors investigate stakeholder perceptions on the sustainability performance of a case mining subsidiary operating in Ghana. The study focused on Ghana because it is ranked with South Africa as the top two producers of gold in Africa. Nonetheless, unlike South Africa, Ghana faces more sustainability challenges from the mining sector due to weak institutions in enforcing sustainability standards.