Search results

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationships between leverage and firm’s performance in Malaysia by framing the relationship under the tradeoff theory and agency cost theory.

Based on insights drawn from the existing literature, we opted for fixed effects and system two-steps GMM models to establish the hypothesized relationship between leverage and performance. We analyzed 528 nonfinancial firms listed on the Bursa Malaysia Stock exchange for the period of 12 years (2005–2016).

The outcomes show that the leverage ratio improves the firm performance, consistent with leverage serving as an effective strategy in constraining managers from building their personal empire, revealing a proportionately greater benefit for Malaysian firms than the cost to debt financing. The authors also find that a positive relationship between leverage and firm performance switch to the negative when the level of leverage reaches beyond the optimal level. Consequently, switching from positive to negative indicates that debt has a twofold (nonlinear) impact on firm performance.

Our research provides several implications to potential stakeholders. For investors, firms having lower leverage ratios could achieve superior performance, thus investing in corporations pursuing higher performance. Managers should therefore strive for achieving higher performance to meet the needs of investors and shareholders. From the researcher’s perspective, our research suggests the need to go away from the searching linear association between leverage and firm performance and the relevance of nonlinear correlation. Moreover, our research can help managers to understand how their lender relates to their debt to assets ratios. Thus, they can design an optimal level of leverage that not only improves the firm’s performance but also reduce the associated costs.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the initial attempt in the context of Malaysia that documents evidence indicating that the lower leverage is likely to create value for shareholders while a higher debt ratio reduces firm profitability.

The purpose of this study is to present the optimization of the design and measurement principle of a six-component force/thrust measurement stand. This study highlights some key problems found in previous studies and proposes improvements in design and measurement principles.

The numerical simulation approach is used to verify the proposed improvements. An improved design and measurement principle are proposed and to verify the proposed improvements, simulation experiments are conducted. The data obtained from simulations are analyzed through the proposed improved measurement principle. The proposed stand is capable of measuring the main thrust and other components as pitch, yaw and roll. The stand is capable of measuring the main thrust more than 50,000 N and orthogonal thrust components more than 1,000 N. Improved design of measurement stand is also capable of measuring moments in three-axis more than 150 Nm. Thrust stand consists of two main sections: front and rare. Stand consists of seven piezoelectric force sensors to measure all components of force.

The simulations experiments and basic theoretical laws of kinematics prove that the proposed design indeed improves the precision of measurement and also enhance the efficiency of design. Evaluation results show that the measurement stand designed is highly functional. Non-linearity, coupling and repeatability errors are found to be within acceptable range during numerical simulations.

This study is unique in this kind. This study identifies the key problems found in previous studies and proposes an improved design and measurement principle. This study provides evidence for the improvements to be really functional and necessary.

Earned Value Management (EVM) is widely used as a project performance measurement and forecasting technique. Nonetheless, it has not been fully explored in Pakistani construction industry; where conventional progress reporting methodology (CPRM) is being followed having certain confines. It reports only the financial progress of a project, expresses feeble association between the duration and cost of activities, and forecasts flawed schedule and completion cost. This research implements EVM on under-construction building projects in Pakistan, and compares its upshots with the projects' actual records and with the outcomes of CPRM.

To assess the implementation of EVM on building projects, a set of specific criteria was established. Work Breakdown Structure, Organization Breakdown Structure and Control Points were established. The study has compared the EVM metrics with CPRM outcomes on three under-study building projects, and has deliberated on their mutual differences as well as their relationship with actual cost and schedule performance. Monthly figures of actual spending and completed activities were periodically recorded and compared with planned values for status indication. The graphs were generated to observe the correlation between the results of EVM and CPRM. The data was then extrapolated to forecast the schedule and cost values at completion.

The study discovered that trends of EVM in quantifying the project's cost and schedule performance were strongly correlated and were closer to the actual progress. It has also verified the EVM's soundness in forecasting the cost and schedule, required for project's completion. Contrarily, CPRM metrics could not precisely visualize the current and future, cost and schedule performance.

The case study concludes that EVM's incorporation in progress reporting regime can revolutionize the assessment procedures in Pakistan by rightly indicating the project's current status as well as visualizing the future performance. The study's methodology can also be extrapolated in other countries having similar work environment and economic conditions.

In view of the paradox of soaring malnutrition prevalence in an agrarian economy like Pakistan, political and economic pundits are of the opinion that Pakistan may face acute shortage of food in future if its political managers do not take holistic approach to address the issue. The form of government system is one such dimension of this approach. Pakistan has witnessed different forms of government system. The purpose of this paper is to assess the food availability situation under different regimes in Pakistan since 1972.

The paper uses log‐lin growth model to make out if form of the government may affect the level of food availability in Pakistan.

The data indicate lot of variations between different regimes. Over the years consistent and positive public policies for demographic management brought down the population growth rate. It was expected that positive demographic development coupled with supplementary policies will provide space to ensure sufficient food and standard nutrition to the people but this variable also could not contribute according to expectations. Prevailing inequity in society along with inconsistent policies and mismanagement of resources are generally quoted as the main reasons for this misfortune. However, the paper demonstrates that vertical power structure and absence of inclusive political system is an additional reason of continuing food deprivation in Pakistan.

For the purpose of this analysis the authors use the food balance sheet data of Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations, and hence assume all limitations of this database.

This paper points out another reason to have inclusive form of the government in Pakistan: to reduce food deprivation.

This paper is the first of its kind to assess the availability of food to the citizens of Pakistan under different regimes.

Tags are used to annotate resources on social media platforms. Most tag recommendation methods use popular tags, but in the case of new resources that are as yet untagged (the cold start problem), popularity-based tag recommendation methods fail to work. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel model for tag recommendation called multi-feature space latent Dirichlet allocation (MFS-LDA) for cold start problem.

MFS-LDA is a novel latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)-based model which exploits multiple feature spaces (title, contents, and tags) for recommending tags. Exploiting multiple feature spaces allows MFS-LDA to recommend tags even if data from a feature space is missing (the cold start problem).

Evaluation of a publicly available data set consisting of around 20,000 Wikipedia articles that are tagged on a social bookmarking website shows a significant improvement over existing LDA-based tag recommendation methods.

The originality of MFS-LDA lies in segregation of features for removing bias toward dominant features and in synchronization of multiple feature space for tag recommendation.

Citation analysis is an important measure for the assessment of quality and impact of academic entities (authors, papers and publication venues) used for ranking of research articles, authors and publication venues. It is a common observation that high-level publication venues, with few exceptions (Nature, Science and PLOS ONE), are usually topic specific. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the claim correlation analysis between topic specificity and citation count of different types of publication venues (journals, conferences and workshops).

The topic specificity was calculated using the information theoretic measure of entropy (which tells us about the disorder of the system). The authors computed the entropy of the titles of the papers published in each venue type to investigate their topic specificity.

It was observed that venues usually with higher citations (high-level publication venues) have low entropy and venues with lesser citations (not-high-level publication venues) have high entropy. Low entropy means less disorder and more specific to topic and vice versa. The input data considered here were DBLP-V7 data set for the last 10 years. Experimental analysis shows that topic specificity and citation count of publication venues are negatively correlated to each other.

This paper is the first attempt to discover correlation between topic sensitivity and citation counts of publication venues. It also used topic specificity as a feature to rank academic entities.

One of the central themes of education for all (EFA) for the last two decades has been empowerment through access to education. The history of EFA, however, can at best be termed as checkered. EFA has been relatively successful in drawing world attention and improving access to education. However, the question whether world attention and improved access has resulted in empowerment of people in the developing world still remains unanswered.

In this paper we argue that the limited success of EFA can best be examined and analyzed by paying close attention to tension between demands of the global capital and labor market place and nationalist agendas of the developing (post-colonial) state. These tensions affect the EFA agenda in the developing countries in complex ways.

Taking empirical-educational data from Pakistan we demonstrate that demands of the global capital and the labor market had resulted in an increased attention on institutions and programs of study that cater to the needs of the global capital and labor pool. Access to these institutions is limited to certain strata of the society. On the other hand the mass education program in Pakistan is largely defined by the nationalistic agenda of the post-colonial undemocratic state. A net impact of the interplay of these global and national dynamics is that not only the EFA's aim of mass education is hampered but also more importantly education in its present state is not empowering the recipients.

This paper aims to examine the determinants that drive digital library use by university students in Indonesia and Malaysia during COVID-19. A proposed model based on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model-2 was implemented.

A pilot study was conducted prior to the main data collection to examine the reliability of the instrument. For the structural model assessment, 1,168 responses were analysed through partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) and importance and performance analysis (IPMA). A t-test was also conducted to support the main findings.

Most hypotheses are confirmed by the significant results reported through the PLS-SEM. The strongest determinant of behavioural intention is habits. Digital library use is most significantly predicted by behavioural intention. Through IPMA, habits are reported to be the most important determinant for behavioural intention. Performance expectancy obtains the highest performance in the IPMA procedure. Behavioural intention and digital library use are significantly different based on the respondents’ location.

This study addresses the research gap (comparative studies between two countries) by evaluating digital library use among students in two universities in Indonesia and Malaysia during COVID-19. Findings could facilitate policymakers with insights into digital library use determinants and initiate effective and efficient policies to improve digital library use, especially during school closures due to certain situations or conditions.

This study aims to develop a novel theoretical model for predicting the users’ intention to use virtual tools designed for construction risk evaluation. Risk evaluation is a vital objective for construction managers. This paper intends to examine critical factors such as potential benefits, motivation, performance expectancy and rich sources of information that may affect users’ intention to use virtual technology.

A pile training module (PTM) was developed in a virtual environment to analyze the proposed virtual reality-technology acceptance model (VR-TAM) factors. Further, a questionnaire survey was conducted with the participation of 102 construction professionals in China to validate the proposed VR-TAM model and PTM tool. The retrieved data was computed to test the proposed model by using partial least squares structural equation modeling and the significance of the PTM tool in a virtual environment.

The results of this study reveal that high-significance paths represent five relationships between crucial factors affecting users’ intention to use a selected virtual reality (VR) module. Five of seven hypothesis paths were significant with acceptable t-values. By quantitative measurement of high-significance paths, this research has found that each factor under VR-TAM has received significant loadings, with many above the 0.7 threshold mark and others around 0.6. The top factors include “motivation” and “benefits” and have multiplier effects on “intention to use” as the source factors.

The finding of this study presents crucial factors for VR adoption, and the proposed VR-TAM model contributes to the body of knowledge toward managing construction risk using pre-optimization and understanding in a virtual environment. This study supports Chinese construction company managers in effectively using VR technology in their construction projects for risk assessment and management.

This study offered the development of a novel VR-TAM integrated with risk assessment techniques for piling processes. Further, the developed model was analyzed by using a survey of Chinese construction professionals to collect perceptions about the modified theoretical model of VR-TAM.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the balanced role of internal and external compliance in risk evaluation process of specialized agriculture financing. The authors examine the adaptive behavior of risk managers to determine the role of proposed transformation for risk monitoring (RM) and control process in risk mitigation and avoidance of agriculture credit failure.

A self-administered survey was conducted to collect data from 353 risk-related officers and managers in Zarai Taraqiati Bank Limited (ZTBL) Pakistan. The authors used a previously tested scale for the main constructs. The descriptive analyses were used to gauge the model capacity for determining the strength of proposed risk patterns in agriculture risk management.

The results reveal that risk evaluation process in ZTBL is reasonably efficient in mitigating risks. Given the sensitive nature of farm credit, there is a need of fundamental reforms in risk policy manuals in line with central bank’s agriculture prudential regulations and Basel-III standards. The results fully support H1 and H2, while H3 is partially validated. The result patterns indicate serious issues in risk evaluation process in agriculture finance that is causing higher delinquency in farm credit.

Based on highlighted issues, the authors recommend valuable guidelines in the RM review system for agriculture financing products at ZTBL.

The authors propose remodeling of agriculture risk management and offer valuable insights to the agriculture financial regulators and government in taking policy initiatives in the pre-and-post agriculture risk evaluation process. The proposed model enables RM process to improve farm credit delinquency, particularly in ZTBL and other agriculture banking networks in commercial banks.

This is the first study to empirically investigate RM evaluation process in agriculture risk management of ZTBL in Pakistan, thus, offers new horizon of farm credit regulatory compliance in agricultural sector of Pakistan.