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The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect on the cost of capital of increased disclosure that reduces information asymmetry among market participants.

This study uses the decision to regularly hold open (closed) conference calls pre‐Reg FD as a proxy for a commitment to the policy of public (selective) disclosure and a cross‐sectional research design to examine the associations between open/closed conference calls and three proxies for firms' cost of capital (i.e. bid‐ask spreads, share turnover, and implied costs of capital).

The results show that firms that commit to open calls exhibit lower relative bid‐ask spreads, lower implied costs of capital, and higher share turnover than firms that commit to closed calls.

The findings suggest that increased disclosure that “levels the playing field” for small investors benefits investors as a whole by improving firms' market liquidity and reducing the cost of capital.

This study contributes to existing literature on the association between corporate disclosure and firms' cost of capital.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between attachment style, sub-clinical symptoms of psychosis and aggression in a general population sample.

Using both convenience and snowball sampling, participants in the community (n=213) completed an online questionnaire including previously validated measures of adult attachment, aggression and psychotic experiences.

Results suggested that there were statistically significant correlations between all study variables. Multiple linear regression demonstrated that total psychotic-like experiences and attachment scores significantly predicted variance in total aggression. Moderation approaches revealed that the relationship between psychotic-like events and aggression was stronger in individuals with more insecure attachment styles.

This generalisability of the results is compromised by the sampling methodology and the use of self-report tools. However, the significant results would support larger scale replications investigating similar variables.

This study suggests there is a relationship between psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) and facets of aggression in the general population. These results suggest that attachment is a contributing factor to aggression associated with PLEs, and highlight the need for similar investigations within clinical samples. The results imply that attachment may be a useful construct for explanatory models of the relationship between adverse childhood experiences, psychotic experiences and aggression.

We investigate whether council audit committees relate to municipal fiscal policies. We find that municipalities with audit committees are associated with greater levels of own-source revenue, in that they finance municipal operations with locally raised revenues driven by charges and fees compared to municipalities without audit committees. Furthermore, municipalities with audit committees are associated with less new debt than those without audit committees, indicating more conservative use of external financing. Overall, our results are consistent with municipal audit committees, in addition to monitoring the financial reporting function, playing an advisory role in fiscal decisions, especially when the cost of local government to citizens is high.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the extent to which immigrant nurses have integrated within the Maltese healthcare system.

This research consisted of a qualitative case study approach which was conducted within Malta’s four public entities in the secondary care sector. In this case study, data were collected through 34 semi-structured interviews with ten nursing managers, 12 Maltese nurses and 12 immigrant nurses. The data were analysed using content analysis. Data were collected between June 2015 and July 2015.

Four themes emerged from the data. These were: human resources management, language barrier, cultural differences and discrimination. The recruitment of nurses to Malta from other countries translated into several positive and favourable outcomes, such as the sharing of knowledge. However, a number of negative and unfavourable outcomes are also indicated in the data including language barrier and discrimination.

This paper presents a discussion of the issues experienced within a healthcare system in relation to the mobility of nurses. Increasingly, the nursing workforce across the globe comprises of professionals from various nationality, origin, training, culture and professional ethos. The findings are presented in an effort to inform policy makers, management and administrative structures regarding the issues pertaining to the prevalent growing reality of mobility in nurse populations.

This research study provides a unique contribution to the literature regarding the phenomenon of nurse mobility because it embraces the integration of nurses as a two-way process. Since data was collected from immigrant nurses as well as from local nurses and nursing managers, this study hopes to offer a different point of view from previous studies which largely focused on the views of immigrant nurses only.

This study aims to explore how business-to-business service failures manifest in a manufacturing context.

The empirical research involved two case studies: case study one included 20 interviews in the metal finishing industry; case study two included 20 interviews in the paint and coatings industry. In both case studies, suppliers and customers’ perceptions were obtained to facilitate a dyadic understanding of the phenomena.

Business-to-business service failure is a complex, dynamic and interactive process. It varies according to type of service, services supporting the products and services supporting the customers, service quality dimensions and the source of the failure. It can have a more profound impact than service failure in a consumer context because it may cause disruption to customers’ production and have a negative influence of failure on their clients in the network.

Business customers may play a role in value co-destruction rather than value co-creation by causing service failures due to errors on their part. The consequences of the domino effects revealed in this study need to be given careful consideration by managers. The research is exploratory, and the findings may be influenced by the manufacturing sector in which the case study firms are based.

Business-to-business service failure has its own distinct characteristics, as it may impact widely in the business-to-business network. Domino effects implicitly dominate business-to-business service failure episodes where negative outcomes cascade downstream and affect service recipients’ customers.

Examines the management of quality from the perspective of organizational culture change. Discusses the nature of quality and the evolution of the management of quality in relation to key issues arising from the literature on organizational culture. It is found that total quality management (TQM) makes a number of assumptions about organizational culture. Adopts an integrationist perspective, with culture defined in terms of something an organization has, as opposed to something an organization is. Presents a tentative model of the relationship implied between TQM and organizational culture. A number of questions emerge, not least of which concern the strength and direction of this relationship. The culture perspective is likely to challenge some of the basic assumptions found in the TQM literature. In so doing, it may inform organizational attempts to raise levels of quality.

Service conveniences (SCs) play a deterministic role in motivating consumers’ participation in self-collection (via attended pickup points or unattended automated locker systems). Accordingly, the SERVCON model provides a multi-dimensional conceptualisation of SCs, whereas the Kano model explains consumers’ satisfaction formation in response to multi-dimensional service attributes. Anchored on synthesised insights of both models, the purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to qualitatively apply the SC concept to develop specific service attributes of self-collection; and second, to quantitatively examine these attributes in relation to consumers’ satisfaction formation.

A quantitative Kano model is adopted for survey questionnaire design and data analysis, and 500 valid responses are obtained from an online panel of respondents in Singapore.

SCs are decomposed into 11 service attributes reflecting access, benefit, transaction and post-benefit conveniences of self-collection services. Distinctive patterns of satisfaction formation are revealed in response to specific service attributes; for example, consumers are most responsive to improvement in transaction convenience. Furthermore, as service performance level increases, benefits of spatial accessibility diminish, whereas those of temporal accessibility increase.

This study reveals key service attributes influencing the self-collection services’ convenience and impact on consumers’ satisfaction. Guidelines are presented for designing an optimal resource allocation strategy for logistics service providers to promote self-collection services.

This study synthesises diverse logistics literature on self-collection services under the central theme of SCs, thus enriching the conceptual development of SCs with a decomposed framework of logistics service attributes.

Effects of voice, compensation, and responsibility attribution on justice perception and post‐complaint behavior in a consumer setting were studied in a cross‐cultural study. Hotel school students in China and Canada (N = 168) read and responded to a scenario which described how a service provider handled the complaint from a customer whose coat was stained with tea. The results showed that collectivists were more likely than individualists to blame the service provider. Also, voice offered by the service provider failed to reduce its blame, and compensation actually led to more blame attributed to the service provider. Responsibility attribution was found to be able to mediate the effect of culture on post complaint behavior. A culture by voice interaction indicated that when voice was offered by the service provider, Canadians were less likely to attribute the responsibility to themselves than were Chinese. The implications of these results on justice, culture, and responsibility attribution are discussed.

Emerging-market multinational companies (EMNCs) utilize cross-border merger and acquisitions (M&As) to acquire strategic assets that compensate for their resource deficiencies. Therefore, developed markets have become important destinations for EMNCs. Institutional distance constitutes a major source of competitive disadvantage for foreign firms competing with indigenous firms. The purpose of this paper is to examine the ownership pattern of cross-border M&As in the USA, and determine if EMNCs respond to institutional distance differently than advanced-market multinational companies (AMNCs).

Based on the extant literature in institutional theory as well as internationalization strategy, a quantitative study was carried out. Hypotheses were proposed and tested using fixed effects panel regressions.

This paper finds that both AMNCs and EMNCs take smaller ownership positions when there is greater cognitive and normative distance. The negative association is stronger for AMNCs than for EMNCs. Further, the larger the regulative distance in the positive direction, meaning a higher level of development in the host market than in the home market, the more AMNCs and EMNCs are led to opt for a higher ownership position, with EMNCs being less influenced by regulative distance.

Though findings are robust and stable, this study is limited to observations that only have US target firms.

By integrating the literature from institutional theory and strategy, this paper offers a clearer understanding and distinction of the acquisition decisions made by EMNCs and AMNCs.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.