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In the wake of rapid banking consolidations in the USA, concerns have arisen about the accessibility of capital and financial services for new businesses. With fewer and more centralized banking options, the likelihood of these entities securing financing may be compromised. This study aims to explore the repercussions of this consolidation on entrepreneurial activities in the U.S. Midwest.

To measure entrepreneurship, this study examines various business application metrics: total applications, high-propensity business applications (i.e. those with a high likelihood of evolving into businesses with payrolls), business applications from corporations (applications stemming from corporations or personal service entities) and applications with planned wages (those indicating a forthcoming payroll date). To assess the banking sector’s consolidation, this study used the deposit-based Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI), a well-known measure of banking concentration.

This research underscores the detrimental impact of banking consolidation on various new business formations. To illustrate, a one standard deviation surge in the HHI, roughly 1253 points, correlates with a decline of approximately 16 total business applications, 7.3 high-propensity business applications, 3.72 applications originating from corporations and 3 applications indicating planned wages – all per 10,000 individuals. The findings indicate that reduced banking competition could slow down new business formations and negatively affect entrepreneurship.

This study examines various business formation statistics and use deposits at the institution level to determine banking concentration.

The use of verbal reinforcement has longstanding support in encouraging desired student responses. For students with learning and behavioral disabilities, the use of verbal reinforcement through behavior specific praise (BSP) and feedback are promising practices for improving academic and behavioral outcomes. While these strategies are relatively straightforward to implement, they are often applied inappropriately. Thus, specific guidelines should be followed to ensure that BSP and feedback are used effectively. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of BSP and feedback related specifically to students with learning and behavioral disabilities, provide theoretical and empirical support for these practices, offer research-based recommendations for implementation, and identify common errors to avoid.

Entrepreneurial activity is a phenomenon that increases the economic growth of countries and improves their social welfare. The economic development levels of countries have significant effects on these entrepreneurial activities. This research examines which institutional and macroeconomic variables explain early-stage entrepreneurship activities in developed and developing economies.

The authors conducted panel data analysis on the data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) surveys covering the years 2009–2018.

First, the authors' results reveal that cognitive, normative and regulatory institutions and macroeconomic factors affect early-stage entrepreneurial activity in developed and developing countries differently. Second, the authors' findings indicate that cognitive, normative and regulatory institutions affect early-stage entrepreneurship more positively in developed than developing countries. Finally, the authors' results report that macroeconomic factors are more effective in early-stage entrepreneurial activity in developing countries than in developed countries.

This study provides a better understanding of the components that help explain the differences in entrepreneurship between developed and developing countries regarding institutions and macroeconomic factors. In this way, it contributes to developing entrepreneurship literature with the theoretical achievements of combining institutional theory and macroeconomic indicators with entrepreneurship literature.

This chapter discusses what special instruction is and alternative ways of providing special education. It considers the values and limitations of the typical self-contained classrooms and special schools, resource rooms staffed by special educators, collaboration with general educators, and co-teaching in addition to inclusion. The revolutionary idea that a science of instruction should guide the evolution of instruction and instructional environments is also discussed.

An extensive research base supports the positive effects of self-monitoring interventions on a number of student outcomes, both academic and behavioral. While the vast majority of this research base relied on traditional paper-and-pencil forms of self-monitoring, advances in technology have created significant opportunities to develop technology-based self-monitoring (TBSM) systems that may offer a number of benefits in terms of efficiency and data management, storing, and graphing. Technology-based self-management applications have evolved and been studied extensively in health-related fields, but research and development for such applications is only beginning in the field of education. In this chapter we (1) provide a brief overview of the literature on traditional forms of self-monitoring, (2) examine how educators and educational researchers may apply lessons learned about TBSM from the medical field, (3) summarize emerging literature on TBSM for students with or at risk for emotional/behavioral disorders in particular, and (4) offer suggestions for future research and development in TBSM.

Scientific research provides a reliable means for developing and accumulating knowledge bases to guide policy and practice. However, evidence from meta-research and large-scale replication projects suggests that the published research base likely reflects bias, which threatens the validity and credibility of research-based recommendations. Moreover, there is limited accessibility to research reports, which limits the impact and application of scientific research. In this chapter, we propose that open-science reforms, which aim to make the research process as open and transparent as possible, can be applied to help address these issues. We describe and discuss four open-science practices – preregistration and Registered Reports, open data and materials, open peer review, and open access and preprints – and propose that they may become one of the next big things in special education research.

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) or other developmental disabilities are often reported to have challenges in well generalizing the newly learned communicative skills such as requesting help. Not requesting help when it is needed can hinder engagement and learning, whereas requesting help could also be socially inappropriate. This paper aims to offer a demonstration of applying general case instruction to teach a young child diagnosed with ASD to request help only when needed while concurrently increasing the child’s independence in task completion.

The demonstration adopted within-participant AB designs for one 5-year-old boy with ASD, with data collected across three tasks targeted for intervention and the other three tasks targeted for generalization probes throughout both the baseline and intervention phases. Dependent measures consisted of independent help request and independent task completion. Visual analysis was used to describe the results.

Results showed that the child with ASD learned to ask for help on difficult educational activities, while concurrently increasing his independence on these tasks; generalized the skill of requesting help by asking for help when he encountered other challenging novel tasks; and independently completed easy educational activities without requesting help.

The findings from this study may add to the limited literature that explored the generalization performance across tasks/activities in young learners with ASD, while demonstrating the feasibility of designing and applying general case instruction framework to enhance generalization performance for one individual learner.

Food banks play an increasingly important role in society by mitigating hunger and helping needy people; however, research aimed at improving food bank operations is limited.

This systematic review used Web of Science and Scopus as search engines, which are extensive databases in Operations Research and Management Science. Ninety-five articles regarding food bank operations were deeply analyzed to contribute to this literature review.

Through a systematic literature review, this paper identifies the challenges faced by food banks from an operations management perspective and positions the scientific contributions proposed to address these challenges.

This study makes three main contributions to the current literature. First, this study provides new researchers with an overview of the key features of food bank operations. Second, this study identifies and classifies the proposed optimization models to support food bank managers with decision-making. Finally, this study discusses the challenges of food bank operations and proposes promising future research avenues.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had major impacts on the performance of construction projects that have adopted social distancing measures. This study examines the effect of social distancing measures on project schedule performance through job reorganization on construction project sites.

Responses were obtained through a survey of 154 construction projects and analysed using the partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique.

The findings established that social distancing has a negative effect on schedule performance, social distancing has a positive effect on job re-organization and job re-organization has a positive effect on schedule performance. Additionally, the results indicate that job re-organization partially mediates the relationship between social distancing and schedule performance, while social distancing moderates the relationship between job re-organization and schedule performance with low social distancing having the stronger positive effect.

This study contributes theoretically to a greater understanding of the impact of adopting COVID-19 safety measures such as social distancing on the schedule performance of construction projects. The study also shows how social distancing could lead to schedule performance through job reorganization.