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The purpose of this paper is to test the existence of stylized facts, such as the volatility clustering, heavy tails seen on financial series, long-term dependence and multifractality on the returns of four real estate indexes using different types of indexes: conventional and Islamic by comparing pre and during COVID-19 pandemic.

Firstly, the authors examined the characteristics of the indexes. Secondly, the authors estimated the parameters of the stable distribution. Then, the long memory is detected via the estimation of the Hurst exponents. Afterwards, the authors determine the graphs of the multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MF-DFA). Finally, the authors apply the WTMM method.

The results suggest that the real estate indexes are far from being efficient and that the lowest level of multifractality was observed for Islamic indexes.

The inefficiency behavior of real estate indexes gives us an idea about the prediction of the behavior of future returns in these markets on the basis of past informations. Similarly, market participants would do well to reassess their investment and risk management framework to mitigate new and somewhat higher levels of risk of their exposures during the turbulent period.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first real estate market study employing STL decomposition before applying the MF-DFA in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. Likewise, the study is the first investigation that focuses on these four indexes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the dynamic interdependence structure and risk spillover effect between the Chinese stock market and the US stock market.

This paper mainly uses the multivariate R-vine copula-complex network analysis and the multivariate R-vine copula-CoVaR model and selects stock price indices and their subsector indices as samples.

The empirical results indicate that the Energy, Materials and Financials sectors have leading roles in the interdependent structure of the Chinese and US stock markets, while the Utilities and Real Estate sectors have the least important positions. The comprehensive influence of the Chinese stock market is similar to that of the US stock market but with smaller differences in the influence of different sectors of the US stock market on the overall interdependent structure system. Over time, the interdependent structure of both stock markets changed; the sector status gradually equalized; the contribution of the same sector in different countries to the interdependent structure converged; and the degree of interaction between the two stock markets was positively correlated with the degree of market volatility.

This paper employs the methods of nonlinear cointegration and the R-vine copula function to explore the interactive relationship and risk spillover effect between the Chinese stock market and the US stock market. This paper proposes the R-vine copula-complex network analysis method to creatively construct the interdependent network structure of the two stock markets. This paper combines the generalized CoVaR method with the R-vine copula function, introduces the stock market decline and rise risk and further discusses the risk spillover effect between the two stock markets.

Given the coincidental and sustained rise in house prices and foreign capital flows in Kenya, this study aims to understand whether a long-run relationship exists between real diaspora remittances and real house prices.

This study uses data from 2004-Q1 to 2020-Q4 and applies an autoregressive distributed lag model for estimation.

The results indicate that a positive and significant relationship exists between real remittances and real house prices in Kenya in the long run.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no study exploring the relationship between real remittance inflows and house prices in Kenya, after controlling for other key macroeconomic determinants of house prices. This study addresses this research gap.

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether Mayors in Portugal engage in earnings management close to zero with the motivation of re-election.

The data used in this study were annual financial information from Portuguese municipalities from 2005 to 2016, as well as data on elections and Mayor re-elections involving three political cycles. The methodologies employed were quantitative, including graphical and panel data regressions.

The results indicate that municipalities used discretionary accruals to engage in earnings management to report net earnings close to zero, and re-election seems to be a motivation for earnings management behaviour. Furthermore, the results suggest that municipalities in which the Mayor is re-elected are less likely to report positive net earnings close to zero.

This paper makes a valuable contribution to the literature on earnings management in municipalities. At the theoretical level, it makes it possible to identify whether re-election is a motivation for earnings management and, in this sense, to identify patterns of behaviour by managers. On a practical level, the knowledge of a manager's behaviour patterns will help to anticipate his or her future behaviour and, consequently, may prevent inefficiencies.

In the era of multiple global disruptions, firms are finding it to continue their business. MSMEs are impacted more as they have constrained resources. Organizational flexibility has emerged as an organizational and management principle that would help firms stay competitive even in volatile markets. This study aims to present a set of guidelines and insights for MSME managers to implement organizational flexibility in their organizations.

This study uses total interpretive structural modelling to study how the various factors contributing to organizational flexibility behave together. Behavioural theory is used to explain why organizations need to incorporate flexibility, and systems theory of organization is used to explain why an organization needs to have open boundaries.

Organizational flexibility is a principle that may be supported by the systems theory of organization. The study has shown that it is important for MSMEs to have supply chain collaborations to be more flexible. The study also shows pressure from competitors as the key driver that would make a firm more flexible, and that adequate support from management and technological skills are required to drive flexibility in an organization.

Single respondent bias may have occurred in this study. This can be eliminated by interviewing multiple people from the same organization. Further research around the reasoning for linkages can be explored with theory-driven grounded studies.

This study attempts to use a multi-criteria decision-making technique to present insights to managers to help them make their organizations flexible.

This article presents two Brazilian Portuguese corpora collected from different media concerning public security issues in a specific location. The primary motivation is supporting analyses, so security authorities can make appropriate decisions about their actions.

The corpora were obtained through web scraping from a newspaper's website and tweets from a Brazilian metropolitan region. Natural language processing was applied considering: text cleaning, lemmatization, summarization, part-of-speech and dependencies parsing, named entities recognition, and topic modeling.

Several results were obtained based on the methodology used, highlighting some: an example of a summarization using an automated process; dependency parsing; the most common topics in each corpus; the forty named entities and the most common slogans were extracted, highlighting those linked to public security.

Some critical tasks were identified for the research perspective, related to the applied methodology: the treatment of noise from obtaining news on their source websites, passing through textual elements quite present in social network posts such as abbreviations, emojis/emoticons, and even writing errors; the treatment of subjectivity, to eliminate noise from irony and sarcasm; the search for authentic news of issues within the target domain. All these tasks aim to improve the process to enable interested authorities to perform accurate analyses.

The corpora dedicated to the public security domain enable several analyses, such as mining public opinion on security actions in a given location; understanding criminals' behaviors reported in the news or even on social networks and drawing their attitudes timeline; detecting movements that may cause damage to public property and people welfare through texts from social networks; extracting the history and repercussions of police actions, crossing news with records on social networks; among many other possibilities.

The work on behalf of the corpora reported in this text represents one of the first initiatives to create textual bases in Portuguese, dedicated to Brazil's specific public security domain.

This study aims to explore and validate the antecedents of employer branding (EB) and assess their impact on EB measures taken by Indian information technology firms while promoting themselves as an employer of choice.

Through the method of content analysis of the EB literature published between 2010 and 2020, a total of 77 research articles that were published in various eminent sources, including papers 11 papers from Elsevier, 28 from Emerald, 12 from Taylor and Francis, 8 each from Wiley and Sage and finally 10 from Springer, were chosen for the final analysis. The results were confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis using structural equation modelling.

The analysis revealed the significant themes of the content: the primary antecedents of the EB, i.e. compensation and benefits, career opportunities, work–life balance, work environment and corporate social responsibility. The findings proposed that the employees working in the IT firms are more concerned about the compensation package, work–life balance and work environment. The study also suggested that employees love to work for organizations that benefit society and the environment.

The study emphasized the identification of the antecedents which are vital in impacting the organization’s EB strategy. The study suggested that corporate social responsibility, compensation and benefits and work–life balance are a few of the important antecedents that play a crucial role in engaging and retaining the existing talented employees in IT firms. Through the EB strategy, the firms can differentiate themselves from their competitors.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the long-run and short-run drivers of real house prices in Nigeria from 1991Q1 to 2020Q4.

Vector autoregression and cointegration tests were used to assess the key drivers of Nigeria’s real house prices in the long run and short run.

The empirical findings revealed that household disposable income is the most important determinant of house prices in Nigeria. House prices increased by 1.6% and 60.8% in response to a 1% increase in disposable income in the long run and short run, respectively, while real mortgage credits pushed up house prices by 5% and have no long-run effects, suggesting that most Nigerians depend on their money income rather than credits in securing a home. In addition, prices of oil sector products and real interest rates had negative and significant relationship with house prices, while positive correlations were found for real effective exchange rate and real housing investments regardless of the time horizon. The impact of construction costs and cement prices was also documented.

This is likely a pioneering study of its kind to focus on the determinants of real house prices in Nigeria. It is probably the first study, the best of the author’s knowledge, to empirically examine the impact of the oil sector on house prices in the country.

Mauritius’s residential real estate sector has undergone an increase in foreign investment over the past decades. This study aims to establish if the increasing level of foreign real estate investments (FREI) has increased land demand and land prices. The study also aims to depict whether the relation between FREI and land prices prevails at an aggregate and/ or a regional level.

Data from 26 regions, classified as urban, rural and coastal is collected on an annual basis over the period 2000 to 2019, and a dynamic panel regression framework, namely, an autoregressive distributed lag model, is used to take into account the dynamic nature of land price modeling.

The findings show that, at the aggregate level, in the long-term, FREI does not have a significant influence on land prices, while in the short term, a positive significant relationship is noted between the two variables. A regional breakdown of the data into urban, rural and coastal was done. In the long term, only in coastal regions, a positive significant link was observed, whereas in urban and rural regions FREI did not influence land prices. In the short term, the positive link subsists in the coastal regions, and in rural regions also land prices are positively affected by FREI.

Unlike other studies which have used quite general measures of FREI, the present research has focused on FREI mainly undertaken in the residential real estate market and how these have affected residential land prices. This study also contributes to research on the determinants of land prices which is relatively scarce compared to research on housing prices.

This paper aims to propose and evaluate an innovative approach to education for sustainable consumption (ESC) which empowers teenagers and young adults to improve sustainable consumption competences. This approach combines pedagogical learning approaches such as real-world learning (e.g. experiential learning and research-based learning) with transformative and transdisciplinary research approaches (i.e. real-world laboratory research).

Through a transdisciplinary research design, the authors explore if real-world experiments (RWEs) offer a suitable approach for sustainable consumption education at schools. RWEs are a research approach for knowledge production, aiming to go beyond temporary interventions, to establish semi-permanent spaces for sustainability transformation and reflexive learning. To evaluate this proposal, the authors study already existing active teaching and learning approaches developed within and for ESC and put these in perspective, to define and understand the RWEs.

Insights from a transdisciplinary research project which applied RWEs as a teaching and learning approach in German schools complement conceptual considerations. As a result, advantages, such as the development of core competencies among learners, but also challenges experienced, are illustrated. Though, the challenges found are not unique to the RWE, rather they point out important potentials for ESC through suggesting systematic changes in educational institutions and teaching approaches.

This paper explores RWEs as an active and participatory teaching and learning approach for sustainable consumption education at schools and delivers practical insights and a definition of RWEs as an innovative teaching and learning approach.