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The rapid spread of COVID-19 has dramatic effects on financial market across the globe. This study analyzes the relationship between the COVID-19 cases, age and stock market indexes in Central America, North America, and South America.

The panel regression analysis on three regions from March 10, 2020 to April 9, 2020 was conducted to test the hypothesized model. The authors used Levin et al.’s (2002) panel data unit root test to check the stationarity, and Hausman (1978) test was applied to determine the random and fixed effects.

The authors’ panel regression results indicate that the COVID-19 cases have a negative impact on stock indexes, whereas the age has a positive impact on the stock indexes. The region-wise analysis supports the panel finding except for South America, which shows an insignificant association between stock indexes and COVID-19 cases.

The study supplements the literature by examining the impact of pandemics on stock indexes and focus on three multicultural regions, comprising developed, developing and emerging countries, which are hitherto unaddressed.

This study analyses the organizational consequences of work–family conflict (WFC) among female nurses in health care sector. Moreover, this study focuses on the moderating effect of intrinsic motivation on the association between WFC dimensions with different organizational outcomes.

Data are collected from 347 female nurses working in health care sector at Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Multan and Bahawalpur regions of Pakistan, using random sampling technique. Regression analysis is used to test the hypotheses of this study.

The findings demonstrate that WFC conflict lowers job satisfaction, affective commitment and organizational citizenship behaviour. Contrary, WFC reduces job satisfaction, affective commitment and organizational citizenship behaviour and increases turnover intentions among female nurses. Moreover, intrinsic motivation moderates the association between WFC and certain organizational outcomes.

The study offers valuable insights for female nurses at health care sector about WFC and finally leads to theoretical contributions and practical implications for the healthcare sector of Pakistan.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the differentiated effects of entrepreneurial self-efficacy and social norms on individuals’ entrepreneurial intentions (EIs), through the mediation of attitude toward entrepreneurship, by integrating the framework of gender schema theory with the theory of planned behavior. The authors posit that different factors stimulate the EIs of males and females, through attitude toward entrepreneurship, in developing countries.

Data are collected from graduating students of South Asia’s largest university. Structural equation modeling is used for model testing.

The results show that perceived entrepreneurial self-efficacy has a greater effect on the attitude of males toward entrepreneurship than on the attitude of females, but perceived social norms have a greater effect on female attitude toward entrepreneurship. Attitude toward entrepreneurship has a positive impact on EIs.

This is the first study of its nature which demonstrates that the EIs of males and females are induced by different factors. Where the social norms are the major factors in determining the EIs of the females, self-efficacy plays a vital role in predicting the EIs of their male counterparts. This study also attempts to clarify the relationship between self-efficacy, social norms, and EIs by positing entrepreneurial attitude as mediator. Moreover, it brings a fresh perspective through its setting in South Asia. By testing a model in the cultural setting of a developing country, this study differentiates the research from that conducted in the developed world.

Participatory wireless sensor networks (PWSN) is an emerging paradigm that leverages existing sensing and communication infrastructures for the sensing task. Various environmental phenomenon – P monitoring applications dealing with noise pollution, road traffic, requiring spatio-temporal data samples of P (to capture its variations and its profile construction) in the region of interest – can be enabled using PWSN. Because of irregular distribution and uncontrollable mobility of people (with mobile phones), and their willingness to participate, complete spatio-temporal (CST) coverage of P may not be ensured. Therefore, unobserved data values must be estimated for CST profile construction of P and presented in this paper.

In this paper, the estimation of these missing data samples both in spatial and temporal dimension is being discussed, and the paper shows that non-parametric technique – Kernel Regression – provides better estimation compared to parametric regression techniques in PWSN context for spatial estimation. Furthermore, the preliminary results for estimation in temporal dimension have been provided. The deterministic and stochastic approaches toward estimation in the context of PWSN have also been discussed.

For the task of spatial profile reconstruction, it is shown that non-parametric estimation technique (kernel regression) gives a better estimation of the unobserved data points. In case of temporal estimation, few preliminary techniques have been studied and have shown that further investigations are required to find out best estimation technique(s) which may approximate the missing observations (temporally) with considerably less error.

This study addresses the environmental informatics issues related to deterministic and stochastic approaches using PWSN.

It has been witnessed that many incidents of crowd evacuation have resulted in catastrophic results, claiming lives of hundreds of people. Most of these incidents were a result of localized herding that eventually turned into global panic. Many crowd evacuation models have been proposed with different aspects of interests. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to bring together many of these aspects to study evacuation dynamics.

The proposed agent-based model, in a hypothetical physical environment, uses perception maps for routing decisions which are constructed from agents’ personal observations of the surroundings as well as information gathered through distant communication. Communication is governed by a trust model which measures the authenticity of the information being shared. Agents are of two types; emotional and rational. The trust model is combined with a game-theoretic model to resolve conflict of agents’ own type with that of types of agents in the neighborhood.

Evacuation dynamics in different environmental and exit strategies are evaluated on the basis of reduced herding and evacuation time. Using this integrated information sharing model, agents gain an overall view of the environment, sufficient to select the optimal path towards exits with respect to reduced herding and evacuation time.

The proposed model has been formulated and established using an agent-based simulation integrating important modeling aspects. The paper helps in understanding the interplay between technological and humanistic aspects in smart and pervasive environments.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) by focusing on institutional and economic factors among South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) as well as Central Asian countries over the period 2002-2014.

The generalized method of moments technique is employed for analyzing the impact of institutional quality on FDI inflow by controlling for the effect of market size, domestic investment and labor force.

The authors found large variations in terms of the impact of institutional and economic variables in regards to FDI in the SAARC, Central Asian and ASEAN regions. The results reveal that real GDP, domestic investment and economic freedom index have a positive and significant effect on FDI inflows in the SAARC region, while governance index and labor force have a negative impact on FDI inflows. In Central Asia, the real GDP, domestic investment and governance index are positively associated with FDI inflows, whereas the effect of economic freedom index on FDI is negative as well as insignificant. Apart from the GDP, other variables such as labor force, domestic investment, governance and economic freedom indices influence FDI positively in the ASEAN region. It is worth mentioning here that domestic investment produces positive effect on FDI inflows in all the regions. On the whole, the authors may conclude that institutional factors play an important role in attracting FDI inflows in the ASEAN region as compared to Central Asian and SAARC regions.

A limited research work is available that could help in identifying the role of institutional and economic factors simultaneously in attracting FDI in the SAARC, Central Asian and ASEAN regions.

This study aims to study the impact of corporate governance (CG) versus ethical investment on the firm performance. It takes into account the firms of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan for the purpose of the study. A composite variable of CG index and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) index is used to test the impact on the firm performance. Separate country wise and overall analysis is obtained. Regression analysis is used to obtain the results. Two measures of performance are used, one is return on assets (ROA) and other is Tobin Q. The findings of the study reveal that there is an impact of corporate governance index (CGI) on firm performance (overall and country wise) whereas ethical investment (EI) has an impact on firm performance when tested overall and no impact when checked for country wise results. The results further show that on country level, increase in CG measures may lead to positive results, but at the macro level, it may lower the performance. On the other hand, at the micro level, ethical finance may not show its impact; however, at the macro level, it has an impact. The study has implications for the investors and policymakers.

Hoping to uncover the physical principles of the vibration of the functionally graded material (FGM) microplate, by which the authors can make contributions to the design and manufacturing process in factories like micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) and other industries.

The authors design a method by establishing a reasonable mathematical model of the physical microplate composed of a porous FGM.

The authors discover that the porosity, the distributions of porosity, the power law of the FGM and the length-to-thickness ratio all affect the natural frequency of the vibration of the microplate, but in different ways.

Originally proposed a model of the micro FGM plate considering the different distributions of the porosity and scale effect and analyzed the vibration frequency of it.

The purpose of this study is two phase modeling of Water/Cu nanofluid forced convection in different arrangements of elliptical tube banks in a two-dimensional space.

The arrangements of tube banks have been regarded as equal spacing triangle (ES), equilateral triangle (ET) and the rotated square (RS). The obtained results indicate that, among the investigated arrangements, the RS arrangement has the maximum value of heat transfer with cooling fluid. Also, the changes of Nusselt number and the local friction factor are under the influence of three main factors including volume fraction of slid nanoparticles, the changes of fluid velocity parameters on the curved surface of tube and flow separation after crossing from a specified angle of fluid rotation.

In Reynolds number of 250 and in all arrangements of the tube banks, the behavior of Nusselt number is almost the same and the separation of flow happens in almost 155-165 degrees from fluid rotation on surface. In RS arrangement, due to the strength of vortexes after fluid separation, better mixture is created and because of this reason, after the separation zone, the level of local Nusselt number graph enhances significantly.

In this research, the laminar and two-phase flow of Water/Cu nanofluid in tube banks with elliptical cross section has been numerically investigated in a two-dimensional space with different longitudinal arrangements. In this study, the effects of using nanofluid, different arrangements of tube banks and the elliptical cross section on heat transfer and cooling fluid flow among the tube banks of heat exchanger have been numerically simulated by using finite volume method.