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Using a unique sample of about 563,000 competitively bid municipal revenue bonds with financial advisors issued during the period 1998–2012, the purpose of this paper is to examine the role and influence of financial advisor quality in the municipal bond market.

The authors use a sample of about 563,000 competitively bid municipal revenue bonds with financial advisors issued during the period 1998–2012. The authors estimate a selection model where the authors identify the factors leading to the selection of a high-quality financial advisor. The authors then, using the inverse mills ratio from the first regression, estimate the association of high-quality advisor (and other factors) with the cost of borrowing.

The results suggest that high-quality financial advisors provide a credible signal to market participants about issue and issuer quality. This signal translates to a greater number of bids for issues that use high-quality financial advisors, resulting in improved liquidity and lower borrowing costs for these issues. The results also show that the beneficial effects obtained by using higher quality financial advisors are prevalent across all categories of issues such as for refunding and non-refunding issues, and for both insured and non-insured issues. The benefits are also generally observed for issues of most size categories. The results also suggest that the passage of the Dodd–Frank Act requiring mandatory registration of financial advisors and enhanced scrutiny has only increased the benefits to issuers from using higher quality financial advisors.

This paper differs from previous research in several important ways. First, the study is, to the authors’ knowledge, the first study that explores the relationship between financial advisor quality and liquidity in the municipal sector. The authors show using higher quality financial advisors enhances liquidity for the issues by attracting a significantly large number of bids. Second, the sample is exclusively comprised of competitively bid revenue issues all of which rely on financial advisors. This enables us to examine more unambiguously the influence of financial advisor quality, without the confounding effects of issues without financial advisors. Third, time coverage (1998–2012) and size of the sample (roughly 563,000 bond issues) enables us to conduct varied sub-sample analyses with greater power since the resulting sub-sample partitions themselves are of very large size. This provides better and additional insights into the role of financial advisor quality. The more current data when compared to prior research enables us to examine the impact of financial advisor quality inter-temporally with special attention devoted to the period after passage of the Dodd–Frank Act.

In this study, an optimal green product is selected from three newly developed ecological products and a non-environmentally friendly product. An analytic network process (ANP), used widely for multi-criteria decision making (MCDM), is applied to account for the tradeoff issues among the criteria (quality, cost and green issue) in the new green product selection processes. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper focuses on current social and consumer requirements. New product selection processes consider three major perspectives, i.e., quality, cost and environment, as criteria. The following two main methods are applied to respond to this multi-disciplinary issue: the eight quality dimensions proposed by Garvin are used to manage the quality issue, and a life cycle costing (LCC) method is applied for consideration of the cost and green issue. Therefore, the dependency issue among the criteria is considered, using a suitably selected method, the ANP method, and all the methods are applied to a real business, which produces roof tiles, for the delivery of a new optimal green product.

An optimal environmentally friendly product does not overcome the existing toxic product of the focused company. The environmental performance is necessarily balanced by the quality and cost capabilities.

This paper focuses on the new product selection of roof tile products. The criteria or measuring indicators may be dissimilar, and cannot be applied to other products.

The proposed approach can be applied to other manufacturing companies or services to allow decision makers to make better determinations for a comprehensive dependency problem. The managers can apply the proposed model to benchmark the considered products as well as to find the weaknesses of products.

This method considers the relationship among quality, cost and environment for newly developed green products. The method produces better results than former MCDM studies which did not account for the dependency issue among the criteria.

Quality in the construction industry is an important issue yet ignored during the initial stages of the life cycle of a project, that is, the design and construction stage. The contribution of stakeholders, especially the architects is generally suspended though it has huge significance in terms of cost and time related to quality. This research endeavors to examine the issues related to the design and construction stages of the project from architects' purview, to understand the relative importance of these issues in the Indian construction industry.

The study of qualitative data conducted formed a basis for online quantitative data collection that was further analyzed with the help of cross-tabulation and multiple correspondence analysis methods.

The study concludes that the budget of a project is a corresponding factor related to quality concern for architects. The study also established that the quality issues corresponding to high budgets are closely related to the construction stage and are identified as preparation of checklist, and bidding process of hiring the contractor on the lowest bid.

The study is limited to analyzing the perspective of architects; however, other stakeholders of the construction industry may represent a different opinion.

This research emphasizes the importance of the client's role, and need for integration and coordination among stakeholders in the construction industry for effective quality control and management.

The research presents an exhaustive literature review on quality issues and its importance with respect to cost implications, standard practices, sustainability and the life cycle of the project.

This paper sets out to report on a research project investigating the academic voice in higher education quality in the UK and the Czech Republic. It aims to describe the origins and reasons for introducing quality monitoring and assurance into higher education, showing the differences and impacts on higher education quality in England and the Czech Republic, including the current practices and presenting the concerns and issues voiced by the academics and higher education leaders in both higher education systems.

The research utilised a critical event narrative inquiry method, which focuses on issues of complexity and human‐centredness in studied phenomena. In this way the method addresses issues that are frequently overlooked by quantitative research methods. It is argued that, by extracting “critical events,” the method is more efficient in dealing with large amounts of data, which often result from the use of qualitative research methods. In the presented research, “critical events” voicing important issues and concerns in higher education quality are extracted from stories of UK and Czech academics and higher education leaders.

Through extracting “critical events” in the professional practice of academics and higher education leaders, the research uncovered some similar and some culture‐specific issues voiced by Czech and UK academics and higher education leaders. The culture‐specific issues were revealed mainly in the Czech higher education context.

The research uncovered a number of issues and concerns which were overlooked in the current higher education quality practices in both the higher education systems. The paper does not present all the recommendations for educational practice and further research. These may be consulted in Mertova's Quality in Higher Education: Stories of English and Czech Academics and Higher Education Leader.

The research applied a critical event narrative inquiry methodology, which is a novel qualitative research method focusing on extracting “critical events” in the professional practice of individuals, in this case academics and higher education leaders. Even though the methodology was developed by Webster and Mertova, the study has further refined it and applied it in the field of higher education quality.

This paper discusses the results of Australian case studies illustrating the key issues that need to be addressed for accounting information quality management. In previous studies from the existing literature, the factors that may impact on information quality have been summarized. In this paper, a model for key issues that impact on accounting quality was proposed based on the literature. The case study results were then used to discuss the key components of the research model.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a literature review of the perishable food supply chain quality (PFSCQ). It includes all the products/process from the farm to folk of perishable food (milk, meat, vegetable, grains and butter).

The methodology of a structured literature review involves selection of a representative sample of articles followed by classification of articles on the basis of research methodology and content of PFSCQ in the paper.

Research toward PFSCQ has risen in last five years. Fewer articles are addressing issues of developing countries then developed countries. Majority of the articles involved multiple as entity of analysis (combination of supplier, distributor, manufacturer, retailer and consumer), information as element of exchange and chain as the level of analysis. A large number of articles involved “agri-food,” “dairy” and “pork” as perishable products. Majority of articles used “case study” methodology. Statistical analysis as a tool for problem solving was used in majority of articles. Performance measurement aspect is also on growth in PFSCQ literature. Information sharing, logistic management, strategic management, demand forecasting and integration among the various stakeholders of PFSCQ are some of the critical issues.

Many literature reviews that aim at critical examination of supply chain literature are reported but none of them focussed exclusively on content of PFSCQ. Another unique feature of this paper is that the sample size of articles with respect to number of papers (481 papers) as well as number of journals (141 journals) is quite large. The paper spans a longer time span of 20 years (1994-2013) as well.

This chapter will examine the interplay among actors who took part in the process of consensus building towards a post-2015 education agenda via different channels of global governance, including both formal and informal channels.

Most of the forums and entities established as part of the global governance structure are composed of representatives from UN or UNESCO member states, civil society organizations (CSOs) and UN agencies. However, each of these categories has diverse constituent groups; representing these groups is not as straightforward a task as the governance structure seems to assume. Therefore, based on interviews and qualitative text analysis, this chapter will introduce major groups of actors and their major issues of concern, decision-making structure, mode of communication and relationship with other actors. Then, based on an understanding of the characteristics of the various channels and actors, it will present the structural issues that arose during the analysis of post-2015 discourse and the educational issues that emerged as the shared concerns of the ‘education community’. While most of the analysis to untangle the nature of discourse relies on qualitative analysis of texts and interviews, the end of this chapter will also demonstrate the trends of discourse in quantitative terms.

What was the post-2015 discourse for the so-called education community, which in itself has an ambiguous and virtual existence? The keywords post-2015 and post-EFA provide us with an opportunity to untangle how shared norms and codes of conduct were shaped at the global scale.

Describes the process and outputs of the findings to date in a research project to determine quality in academic business journal publishing, sponsored by a major academic publishing house. Describes the refereeing/review process for journal articles, a study of quality indicators in established “academic” journals, and the same in “practitioner” journals. Draws conclusions for quality improvement in the journals surveyed based on the findings. Draws conclusions for other researchers and publishers.

The purpose of this paper is to deliver a structured literature review of existing literature on agri-fresh food supply chain quality (AFSCQ) over a period of 23 years (1994 to mid-2016) and provide a platform for practitioners and researchers trying to identify the existing state of work, gaps in current research, and future directions in the field of AFSCQ.

The existing literature is classified on the basis of several classes like number of publications per year, journal-wise publications, studies across various countries, growth of empirical research, data analysis methods or tool used, issues related to supply chain quality as well as performance measurement (with respect to entity of analysis, level of analysis and element of exchange).

Most of the research publications discuss issues in developed countries, while relatively lesser publications are available on issues in developing countries. Hence, larger opportunities in the field of AFSCQ are available in developing countries. Empirical research is also growing in the field of AFSCQ. Largely research publications make use of “case study” research approach and “statistical analysis” as a quantitative tool of research. The literature is also categorized under the various issues of supply chain quality such as sustainability management, information management, logistic management, collaboration and coordination management, strategic management, demand management, inventory management, food safety, performance management, supply chain integration, supplier management, quality management, etc. It was found that in the majority of articles, information management, sustainability management, and logistics management are very critical issues as far as AFSCQ is concerned. Performance measurement of agri-fresh food supply chain is also on a growing stage. It is also an integral part of AFSCQ.

Most of the prior reviews are concentrated on a particular issue as production and distribution planning for agri-foods, temperature monitoring, corporate and consumer social responsibility, traceability system and ignore the wider perception. There exists a necessity of having a detailed review to cover up all the issues in AFSCQ. This review fills this gap in the extant AFSCQ literature.