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The purpose of this paper is to advance knowledge of the transformative potential of big data on city-based transport models. The central question guiding this paper is: how could big data transform smart city transport operations? In answering this question the authors present initial results from a Markov study. However the authors also suggest caution in the transformation potential of big data and highlight the risks of city and organizational adoption. A theoretical framework is presented together with an associated scenario which guides the development of a Markov model.

A model with several scenarios is developed to explore a theoretical framework focussed on matching the transport demands (of people and freight mobility) with city transport service provision using big data. This model was designed to illustrate how sharing transport load (and capacity) in a smart city can improve efficiencies in meeting demand for city services.

This modelling study is an initial preliminary stage of the investigation in how big data could be used to redefine and enable new operational models. The study provides new understanding about load sharing and optimization in a smart city context. Basically the authors demonstrate how big data could be used to improve transport efficiency and lower externalities in a smart city. Further how improvement could take place by having a car free city environment, autonomous vehicles and shared resource capacity among providers.

The research relied on a Markov model and the numerical solution of its steady state probabilities vector to illustrate the transformation of transport operations management (OM) in the future city context. More in depth analysis and more discrete modelling are clearly needed to assist in the implementation of big data initiatives and facilitate new innovations in OM. The work complements and extends that of Setia and Patel (2013), who theoretically link together information system design to operation absorptive capacity capabilities.

The study implies that transport operations would actually need to be re-organized so as to deal with lowering CO₂ footprint. The logistic aspects could be seen as a move from individual firms optimizing their own transportation supply to a shared collaborative load and resourced system. Such ideas are radical changes driven by, or leading to more decentralized rather than having centralized transport solutions (Caplice, 2013).

The growth of cities and urban areas in the twenty-first century has put more pressure on resources and conditions of urban life. This paper is an initial first step in building theory, knowledge and critical understanding of the social implications being posed by the growth in cities and the role that big data and smart cities could play in developing a resilient and sustainable transport city system.

Despite the importance of OM to big data implementation, for both practitioners and researchers, we have yet to see a systematic analysis of its implementation and its absorptive capacity contribution to building capabilities, at either city system or organizational levels. As such the Markov model makes a preliminary contribution to the literature integrating big data capabilities with OM capabilities and the resulting improvements in system absorptive capacity.

The purpose of this study is to look at how Shariah-compliant status and Shariah regulation affect the demand for initial public offerings (IPOs) in Pakistan. The Shariah-compliant status, which is seen as a method that offers a credible signal to investors, may explain the anomaly in IPO demand.

This research used multivariate and quantile regression models to assess data from 85 IPOs issued on the Pakistan Stock Exchange between 2000 and 2019.

Shariah-compliant status has a considerable negative association with IPO demand. Nevertheless, there is a considerable positive association among Shariah regulation and IPO demand. Furthermore, the interaction among regulatory quality and Shariah-compliant status has a considerable strong influence on IPO demand. As a consequence, the findings show that Shariah-compliant firms might possibly attract the attention of investors. Investors were found to concur on the amicability of rigorous rules and permissible Shariah-compliance aspects.

Future studies could analyse the financial ratio benchmark (cash and debt) to determine the Shariah-compliant status and Shariah regulation to better understand the problem of IPO demand in the context of Pakistan.

The outcomes of this research are useful for issuers and underwriters in comprehending the characteristics that influence high and early IPO success. Such knowledge may assist issuers and underwriters in responsibly planning and managing the IPO process.

The results may be useful to investors looking for critical information in prospectuses to make the best choice when subscribing to IPOs in Pakistan.

This is one of the first studies to provide empirical data on the links among Shariah-compliant status, Shariah regulation and IPO demand in Pakistan. Furthermore, this research demonstrates the interaction impact of regulatory quality and Shariah-compliant status on IPO demand.

Ownership structure deals with internal corporate governance mechanism, which plays important role in minimizing conflict of interests between shareholders and management Ownership structure is an important mechanism that influences the value of firm, financing and dividend decisions. This paper aims to examine the impact of the ownership structures, i.e. managerial ownership, institutional ownership on financing and dividend policy.

The authors use panel data of manufacturing firms from both developed and developing countries, and the generalized method of moments (GMM) is applied to analyze the results. The authors collect the data from DataStream for the period of 2010 to 2019.

The authors find that managerial ownership and ownership concentration have significant and positive effects on debt financing, but they have significant and negative effects on dividend policy. Institutional ownership shows a positive impact on financing decisions and dividend policy for sample firms.

This study fills the gap by proving the policy implications for both firms and investors, as managers prefer debt financing, but at the same time try to ignore dividend payment. Therefore, investors may not invest in firms with a higher proportion of managerial ownership and may choose to invest more in institutional ownership, which lowers the agency cost.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impacts on production of five fruit crops from 1961 to 2018 of energy use, CO₂ emissions, farming areas and the labor force in China.

This analysis applied the autoregressive distributed lag-bound testing (ARDL) approach, Granger causality method and Johansen co-integration test to predict long-term co-integration and relation between variables. Four machine learning methods are used for prediction of the accuracy of climate effect on fruit production.

The Johansen test findings have shown that the fruit crop growth, energy use, CO₂ emissions, harvested land and labor force have a long-term co-integration relation. The outcome of the long-term use of CO₂ emission and rural population has a negative influence on fruit crops. The energy consumption, harvested area, total fruit yield and agriculture labor force have a positive influence on six fruit crops. The long-run relationships reveal that a 1% increase in rural population and CO₂ will decrease fruit crop production by −0.59 and −1.97. The energy consumption, fruit harvested area, total fruit yield and agriculture labor force will increase fruit crop production by 0.17%, 1.52%, 1.80% and 4.33%, respectively. Furthermore, uni-directional causality is correlated with the growth of fruit crops and energy consumption. Also, the results indicate that the bi-directional causality impact varies from CO₂ emissions to agricultural areas to fruit crops.

This study also fills the literature gap in implementing ARDL for agricultural fruits of China, used machine learning methods to examine the impact of climate change and to explore this important issue.

The objectives of this study are twofold. First, it intends to investigate the symmetric link between initial public offering (IPO) variability and the determinants of the stock market index, treasury bill rate, inflation, GDP growth rate and foreign direct investment. Second, this study intends to examine the asymmetric link between IPO variability and the aforementioned determinants, namely the stock market index, treasury bill rate, inflation, GDP growth rate and foreign direct investment.

Data from 1992 to 2018 were gathered from the country of Pakistan in order to achieve the above objectives. Augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF) and Phillips Perron (PP) unit root tests were employed to determine the data's stationarity properties. The Auto Regressive Distributive Lags (ARDL) model was utilized to examine the symmetric links, and the Non-Linear Auto Regressive Distributive Lag Model (NARDL) was employed to determine the asymmetric links. While the long-run co-integration was examined using the ARDL bound test, the short-run dynamics were tested using the error correction method (ECM).

The macroeconomic variables of the stock market index, treasury bill rate, inflation, GDP growth rate and foreign direct investment are found to pose significant short-run and long-run symmetric and asymmetric effects on IPO variability. These results indicate the significance of the aforementioned variables in enhancing IPO variability. The findings also demonstrate the typical reactions of inflation, GDP and FDI towards negative and positive shocks in IPO variability and inflation. This evidence implies that Pakistan's poor capital market development is reflected in the country's weak macroeconomic factors. At the same time, the reduced IPO variability in the country also reflects the lack of confidence among prospective issuers and investors due to Pakistan's weak macroeconomic indicators.

This is the first study of its kind to properly investigate the symmetric and asymmetric effects of the macroeconomic variables on Pakistan's IPO variability.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of diversification, corporate governance and capital regulations on bank risk-taking in Asian emerging economies.

The authors applied the generalized method of moments to analyze a sample of 116 listed banks of ten Asian emerging economies for the years 2010–2018.

The authors found that diversification, board size, CEO duality and board independence, block holders and capital regulations significantly affect bank risk-taking. In particular, nontraditional income sources such as noninterest income and adoption of diversification strategies minimize bank risk-taking.

It is expected that the outcomes of this study can be used by banks in Asian emerging economies that seek to reduce risk-taking by managing the diversification of their income streams and managing the impacts of capital regulation and implementing sound corporate governance features in monitoring their operations. This study suggests practical risk minimizing strategies for banks. First is the sourcing of nontraditional income and adoption of diversification strategies. Second, maintaining nonexecutive directors on the board would enhance monitoring of business activities. Third, maintaining deposit insurance would reduce bank’s risk. Government provides insurance to depositors to motivate them to deposit their funds into the banks. This, in return, facilitates banks to overcome risk. However, banks need to be cautious of any increase in capital ratio, as channeling funds into risky investments would increase risk.

This study is the first to investigate the impacts of corporate governance, diversification and regulation on bank’s risk-taking in a cross-country setting of ten Asian emerging economies.

Economic risk plays a vital role in firm's cash holdings. We aim to determine the impact of economic risk on the firm's cash holdings.

The data is collected from the DataStream from 2002 to 2018, which covers 552 listed firms in the manufacturing sector of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India and Bangladesh. We apply a two-step dynamic panel estimation to analyze the results.

We use the variance of inflation and variance of interest rate as proxies of economic risk. Our results show that variance of inflation has a significant and negative effect while the variance of interest rate has a significant and positive effect on firms' cash holdings in selected countries. Furthermore, we find economic risk negatively affects the firm's cash holdings in the country-wise analysis. Firms should maintain a reasonable amount of cash reserves to handle uncertain situations.

This study may provide insights to financial decision-makers of a firm for better cash management according the economic conditions of the country.

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.

This paper examines the relationship between the extent and quality of the four dimensions of corporate social responsibility disclosure (CSRD) namely community, environment, workplace and marketplace with the long-run share price performance of Malaysian initial public offering (IPO) companies.

This study utilised secondary data by the content analysis of the annual reports and Datastream of 115 IPOs listed from 2007 to 2015 in Malaysia. The IPO’s performance was determined by calculating the return measures under the equally weighted and value-weighted schemes of the mean abnormal returns and buy-and-hold abnormal returns covering the three years post-listing using the event-time approach.

The findings demonstrate that Malaysian IPOs experience substantial overperformance and underperformance when both the IPO performance measures are benchmarked against the matched companies and market. The results indicated that the extent and quality of the community and environment CSRD dimensions are positively and significantly correlated to the IPO’s performance. On the other hand, the extent and quality of the workplace and marketplace CSRD dimensions are negatively and significantly correlated to the IPO performance.

Malaysian regulators could benefit from these findings in their endeavour to carry out a reform process on CSRD to improve its quality. The results of this study are important to investors, regulators, non-government organisations, communities and policymakers. They also enhance the understanding of companies about the importance of disclosing greater CSR information to improve their performance and profitability.

To the researchers' best knowledge, this study provides new insights into the association between CSRD and the performance of Malaysian IPO companies, which is considered important.

The purpose of this paper was to examine whether or not the sponsor lock-up ratio, lock-up period, regulation changes and interaction variable (oversubscription [OSR]) affected initial public offering (IPO) initial return.

A complete sample of 111 listed IPOs in Pakistan stock exchange from 1996 to 2018 was incorporated. Based on the cross-section data, this paper estimated using ordinary least square and quantile least square for robustness. In addition to that, this paper estimated the data using stepwise least square to inspect the signalling aspect of the lock-up ratio, lock-up period and regulation changes on IPO initial return.

This study showed that the lock-up ratio, lock-up period and regulatory changes had a positive impact on the IPO’s initial return. Furthermore, the assertion of interaction variable (regulation changes × OSR) and (lock-up period × OSR) was a negatively significant factor in influencing the IPO’s initial return. The results of this paper were robust to endogeneity bias.

The finding of this study proposed that sponsors of IPOs can be a strong signal of risk or quality, which was consistent with the signalling theory prediction. Concurrently, investors must be aware of the total proportions of lock-up ratio so that they can estimate the chances of getting the highest initial return on IPOs. From the regulators’ point of view, it is suggested that the lock-up ratio and the lock-up period should be determined with a deeper understanding and incorporated into the equity guidelines as it is evident that these factors are priced by the market.

Studies on the effect of sponsors have always been centred on well-recognized firms. Therefore, using the IPO samples listed in Pakistan, this paper contributes to the IPO literature by investigating the lock-up ratio of the sponsor, the lock-up period and the regulatory changes to the initial IPO return. Additionally, OSR has been introduced as an interaction variable among the sponsors’ lock-up period and regulations changes to explain the ongoing IPO initial return phenomenon.