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This paper aims to analyze the effectiveness of aid in stimulating investment using different measures of aid and up-to-date panel time-series techniques. This study controls for endogeneity by using dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) and minimizes the risk of running a spurious long-run relationship by using series that are cointegrated. This paper finds evidence that aid promotes investment in countries with good institutional quality and gain interesting insights on the influence of country characteristics and the amount of aid received. Aid is ineffective in countries with unfavorable country characteristics such as a colonial past, being landlocked and with large distances to markets. Aid can boost investment in regions that receive high (above-median) amounts of aid such as Africa and the Middle East but not in regions that receive low amounts of aid. Investment-targeted aid is effective but non-investment-related aid can also enhance investment.

Regressions on the aid-investment nexus are based on either a rather simple (115 countries) or an extended/augmented investment model (91 countries). The data covers the period of 1973–2011 and 1985–2011 if the institutional quality is included. This study estimates the relationship between aid and investment by applying the DOLS/dynamic feasible generalized least squares technique which is based on a long-run relationship of the regression variables (cointegration). In this framework, this paper incorporates country-fixed effects, control for endogeneity, autocorrelation and take heteroscedasticity and cross-country correlation of the residuals into account.

This study finds empirical evidence that aid promotes investment in countries with good institutional quality and gain interesting insights on the role played by country characteristics and the amount of aid received. Aid is ineffective in countries with unfavorable country characteristics such as the colonial past, being landlocked, distant from markets. Aid can boost investment in regions that receive high (above-median) amounts of aid such as Africa and the Middle East. Investment-targeted aid is effective but non-investment-related aid also able to enhance investment.

The study looks at the investment to gross domestic product (GDP) ratio (including domestic investment and foreign direct investment (FDI)) and, hence does not disentangle these factors. It looks at the net effect (positive and negative impact together) and, therefore does not allow to identify the direct crowding out the impact of aid. Of course, if this paper finds that aid has a negative impact on investment, it is clear that aid must have crowded out either domestic investment or FDI or both.

The authors think that it is relevant to have identified the circumstances and settings in which foreign aid can be particularly effective and in which foreign aid needs accompanying measures that improve the effectiveness of aid. Also, it is relevant that the relative amount of aid received (aid-to-GDP ratio) must be quite high so that aid can increase investment.

This study sees that the least developed, low-income countries and (in terms of regions) the sub-Saharan Africa countries benefit from aid. This is very desirable. This paper further sees that higher relative amounts of aid do help more and that it is helpful to care about a better institutional quality in developing countries. Hence, this study provides some support for the desirability of aid.

The paper was done very diligently, and this study is very confident that the results are robust. This paper is also confident that this study has studied the long-run (which is of special importance) nexus between aid and investment. The estimation technique used is original, as it combines regular DOLS with corrections for autocorrelation and cross-section dependence.

The study aims to investigate the influence of corporate governance practices on enhancing firm value in manufacturing industries in Bangladesh.

The study sample consists of 131 companies from 10 manufacturing industries listed in Dhaka stock exchange (DSE). Using the multiple regression method, the study analyzed 1,193 firm-year observations from 2012 to 2021.

The outcome reveals that managerial ownership, foreign ownership, ownership concentration, board size, board independence, board diligence and auditor quality have a significant positive influence on firm value. In contrast, audit committee size has no significant influence on firm value.

The practical implications of the current study demonstrated that good corporate governance creates value and must be invigorated for the interest of all stakeholders. Policymakers should formulate specific guidelines regarding firms' ownership structure and audit quality issues.

The study, by focusing on a context dominated by firms with a concentrated ownership, in which type-II agency problems (principal-principal conflicts) may occur, aims to depict which board configurations may be effective in protecting minority shareholders by mitigating the risk of controlling shareholders' expropriation via cash holdings.

The research adopts a configurational approach and empirically conducts a fuzzy set/qualitative comparative analysis on a sample of 268 Italian listed companies.

The analysis depicts three combinations of board configurations and ownership structures that can be considered effective, namely Active Independent Control, Female Active Control and Double Internal Control.

The study revisits the topic of the risk of expropriation via cash holdings in a type-II agency problem framework and delineates the meaning of board effectiveness in a mature context ruled by family firms, like Italy. Furthermore, by drawing on a configurational approach, it overcomes the causality relationship between each board characteristic and cash holdings policies and reasons from a “bundle” perspective.

This article provides a brief overview of the literature on board of director performance, highlighting the difficulties in attempting to directly measure the performance of boards of directors and how various studies have tackled this challenge. As an illustration, I show that two current measures of board of director performance, board meeting activity and director attendance, suggest that the boards of Asian firms do not compare favorably to the boards of firms from developed markets. Suggestions for future research on the performance of corporate boards are provided, as well as implications for board of director practices in Asia.

This paper aims to clarify the spatial connection characteristics and organization mode of logistics economy of 21 cities in Guangdong Province under the background of the integrated development of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao Bay area, and explore the spatial development characteristics and influencing factors of logistics economy in Guangdong Province.

This paper constructs the development level model of urban logistics economy in Guangdong Province from three aspects: demand level, supply level and support level, and uses the entropy weight method to measure the development level index of urban logistics economy in Guangdong Province. Then, the traffic accessibility index model is used to measure the traffic accessibility index between cities in Guangdong Province. Finally, using the social network analysis method, combined with the development level index of urban logistics economy in Guangdong Province and the urban traffic access index in Guangdong Province, this paper analyzes the spatial connection characteristics and influencing factors of logistics economy network in Guangdong Province.

There are regional differences in the development level of logistics economy in Guangdong Province; The overall network density of its logistics economic connection is large, but there is an imbalance in the network structure, and the core edge phenomenon is obvious; Logistics economic space presents the characteristics of double core development.

Because the research object is the spatial connection characteristics of logistics economy in Guangdong Province, the research results may lack universality. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to put forward further tests.

By studying the spatial connection mode of logistics economy in 21 cities in Guangdong Province, China, this paper promotes the original methods and empirical contributions, and constructs the research framework of spatial relationship of logistics economy. This research framework is universal to a certain extent.

This paper is conducive to promoting the integrated development of logistics economy in Guangdong Province and improving the balance of regional development of logistics economy.

Firstly, this study provides a new perspective to understand the spatial relationship and spatial spillover of logistics economy from relational data rather than attribute data. Secondly, This study enriched and broadened the research topic of spatial correlation of logistics economy. Thirdly, this research aims to promote the original methods and empirical contributions. Specifically, this study establishes a comprehensive research framework on the spatial network structure of logistics economy.

Economic integration of refugees remains a challenge for developed countries. Although refugees differ greatly from labor migrants in available resources and motivation toward self-employment, prevailing studies on minority and ethnic entrepreneurship tend to lump these different categories of migrants together. Based on theories of migrants’ economic embeddedness, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent to which family- and kinship-based resources affect self-employment duration among refugees and labor migrants.

Based on Cox regression models, this longitudinal study estimates the self-employment duration of 10,519 refugees and 2,503 labor migrants starting businesses in Sweden in the period 2006–2012.

Results reveal that while refugees are at a disadvantage to labor migrants in terms of self-employment duration, their higher level of family embeddedness in part helps them overcome these disadvantages. For refugees but not for labor migrants, co-location in an ethnic enclave also lowers the risk of them becoming unemployed after a spell in entrepreneurship.

This original paper provides empirical and theoretical contributions to research on migrants’ self-employment success. It also discusses contributions for research on entrepreneurs’ social embeddedness and refugees’ entrepreneurship.

A range of studies have shown that performance is typically higher in organisations with employee share ownership (ESO) schemes in place. Many possible causal mechanisms explaining this relationship have been suggested. These include a reduction in labour turnover, synergies with other forms of productivity-enhancing communication and participation schemes, and synergies with employer-provided training. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper empirically assesses these potential linkages using data from the 2004 and 2011 British Workplace Employment Relations Surveys, and provides comparisons with earlier analyses conducted on the 1990 and 1998 versions of the survey.

Substantial differences are found between the 2004 and 2011 results: a positive relationship between ESO and workplace productivity and financial performance, observed in 2004, is no longer present in 2011. In both years, ESO is found to have no clear relationship with labour turnover, and there is no significant association between turnover and performance. There is, however, a positive moderating relationship with downward communication schemes in 2004 and in 2011 in the case of labour productivity. There is no corresponding relationship for upward involvement schemes.

The results are only partially supportive of extant theory and its various predictions, and the relationship between ESO and performance seems to have weakened over time.

The study further questions the rhetoric offered in support of wider ESO.

The purpose of this paper is to present a review of the literature on two lines of research, corporate governance and innovation, explaining how different internal corporate governance mechanisms may be determinants of business innovation.

It explores the theoretical background and the empirical evidence regarding the influence of both ownership structure and the board of directors on company innovation. Then, conclusions are drawn and possible future research lines are presented.

No consensus was observed regarding the relation between corporate governance and innovation, with both positive and negative arguments being found, and with empirical evidence not always pointing in the same direction. Thus, new studies trying to clarify this relationship are needed.

Over recent years, interest has grown in the influence of governance mechanisms on innovation decisions taken by the management. Innovation efforts and results depend on factors that are influenced by corporate governance, such as ownership structure or the functioning of the board of directors. Thus, the paper shows an updated state of the art in this field proposing future lines for empirical research.

Over the past 20 years, China's infrastructure has developed at an extraordinary speed. The current literature mainly focuses on the effects of political incentives on the infrastructure. However, this paper indicates that the structural change of China's land regime is an important clue and that the supernormal development of China's infrastructure is an explicable result for that.

This paper theoretically proves that in a politically centralized and economically decentralized economic entity with a public land-ownership regime, the self-financing mechanism formed by local officials through regulation of the land-grant price is the primary factor that influences the optimal supply volume of infrastructure in a region, in addition to political and economic incentives, and whether the self-financing mechanism can be formed or not depends on the structure of a country's land regime, which can help to explain the difference between the development of infrastructure in China and that in other developing countries from a theoretical angle.

The paper suggests that the mode is facing an important transformation toward land reform and new-type urbanization construction, and the replication and promotion of China's experience in infrastructure construction are of further significance under the Belt and Road Initiative as it provides a method for helping developing countries to eliminate infrastructure bottlenecks.

Through the test of multinational panel data, the paper indicates that the structural change of China's land regime around 1990 had an overall effect on the supernormal development of infrastructure in China. The paper indicates that the “land-based development mode” of China's infrastructure indeed contributed to the supernormal development of infrastructure in China, but there are still some shortcomings in this mode.

The paper analyzes the response of agricultural value added to credit and real interest rate shocks in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) and make a short-term comparative effect analysis of credit granted to the agricultural sector on agricultural value added among member countries.

First, in order to estimate impulse response functions (IRFs) and study shocks, a panel VAR model is used. Second the paper uses an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model with the associated error correction model to make a comparative analysis of the effect of agricultural credit on agricultural value added in the WAEMU.

Results shows that: (1) credit stimulates agricultural value added only in the medium and long term; (2) in the case of WAEMU, credit only becomes a means of lifting the constraint of capital underutilization after three years; (3) short-term credit granted to agriculture in WAEMU has a weak and differentiated effect on agricultural value added from one country to another.

It is imperative to implement a policy of lowering real short-term interest rates. Moreover, a monetary policy that favors direct financing of agriculture to the detriment of that oriented toward market financing is to be prioritized.

The originality of this paper is that it makes the link between macroeconomics and agriculture. It shows how the monetary instrument can be manipulated to improve the performance of agriculture. Actually, in WAEMU, the financing of agriculture is provided by the market. This paper proposes a new approach which is direct financing. The paper offers possibilities for the coordination of agricultural policies in the WAEMU.