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This study conducts a comparative analysis of the impact of educational mismatch on Spanish wages. This paper aims to focus on the industrial, construction and service sectors at three levels of disaggregation: sector, occupation and gender.

The over-education, required education and under-education (ORU model), was applied to data from the 2018 Spanish Wages Structure Survey conducted by the Spanish National Statistics Institute.

The industrial sector is the one that best manages over-education by offering the highest returns to each year of over-education. It is also the sector that most values the education of women, particularly those in highly qualified positions.

This study compares the wage effects of educational mismatch in the service, industry and construction sectors. Previous literature has ignored the latter sectors in this field of study, but the results of the present study show that the industrial sectors significantly value and remunerates worker education. Therefore, it may be worthy to focus certain economic and social policies on this sector, to contribute to reducing gender wage gaps and gender employment discrimination in the economy.

This study investigates the performance distribution of passive funds in the Korean market and compares it with the performance distribution of active funds. The key findings are as follows, first, the performance distribution of passive funds has a thicker tail compared to that of active funds. There are passive funds that achieve outstanding performance, and both the false discovery rate (FDR) analysis and simulation analysis suggest that their outperformance is driven by managerial skill rather than luck. Second, passive fund performance is more persistent compared to active fund performance. Third, investors are less responsive to passive fund performance compared to active fund performance. The fund flow-performance relationship is significantly positive for active funds but not for passive funds. This implies that investors may not recognize the managerial skills of passive funds.

COVID-19 has forced Big 4 firms to challenge existing management control arrangements and adapt their ways of working. Yet, we know little about how management control might be enacted in the future of the sustainable workplace. The objective of the study is to examine the patterns of management control change in the Big 4 accounting firms during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Adopting an exploratory qualitative research design, the authors draw on 42 interviews with directors and associates in the Big 4 professional services firms.

The findings reveal two pathways of management control change including alignment and displacement. The authors found that relatively minor adaptions to action and result controls were relied upon to respond to substantial cultural and personnel control changes.

The contributions are threefold: the authors take a temporal perspective to (1) unpack the changes to management control arrangements; (2) theorise the findings by developing a three-dimensional taxonomy of change pathways encompassing pace, scope and longevity of management control change and (3) contextualise management control arrangements in a hybrid work setting.

1. COVID-19 has forced Big 4 firms to challenge existing management control arrangements.

2. Literature has focused on traditional, onsite work settings and largely ignored change pathways.

3. The authors take a temporal perspective to unpack changes to management control arrangements.

4. Big 4 firms adapted to hybrid work with substantial changes to personnel and cultural controls.

5. The authors theorise the findings by developing a three-dimensional taxonomy of change pathways.

COVID-19 has forced Big 4 firms to challenge existing management control arrangements.

Literature has focused on traditional, onsite work settings and largely ignored change pathways.

The authors take a temporal perspective to unpack changes to management control arrangements.

Big 4 firms adapted to hybrid work with substantial changes to personnel and cultural controls.

The authors theorise the findings by developing a three-dimensional taxonomy of change pathways.

We explore the impact of equity liquidity on a firm’s dynamic leverage adjustments and the moderating impacts of leverage deviation and target instability on the link between equity liquidity and dynamic leverage in the UK market.

In applying the two-step system GMM, we estimate our model by exploring suitable instruments for the dynamic variable(s), i.e. lagged values of the dynamic term(s).

Our analyses document that a firm’s equity liquidity has a positive impact on the speed of adjustment (SOA) of its leverage ratio back to the target ratio in the UK market. We also demonstrate that the positive relationship between liquidity and SOA is more pronounced for firms whose current position is relatively close to their target leverage ratio and whose target ratio is relatively stable.

This study provides important implications for both firms’ managers and investors. Particularly, firms’ managers who wish to increase the leverage SOA to enhance firms’ value need to give great attention to their equity liquidity. Investors who want to evaluate firms’ performance could also consider their equity liquidity and leverage SOA.

We are the first to enrich the literature on leverage adjustments by identifying equity liquidity as a new determinant of SOA in a single developed country with many differences in the structure and development of capital markets, ownership concentration and institutional characteristics. We also provide new empirical evidence of the joint effect of equity liquidity, leverage deviation and target instability on leverage SOA.

The overall objective of this study is envisaged to provide decision makers with actionable insights and access to multi-risk maps for the most in-danger stave churches (SCs) among the existing 28 churches at high spatial resolution to better understand, reduce and mitigate single- and multi-risk. In addition, the present contribution aims to provide decision makers with some information to face the exacerbation of the risk caused by the expected climate change.

Material and data collection started with the consultation of the available literature related to: (1) SCs' conservation status, (2) available methodologies suitable in multi-hazard approach and (3) vulnerability leading indicators to consider when dealing with the impact of natural hazards specifically on immovable cultural heritage.

The paper contributes to a better understanding of place-based vulnerability with local mapping dimension also considering future threats posed by climate change. The results highlight the danger at which the SCs of Røldal, in case of floods, and of Ringebu, Torpo and Øye, in case of landslide, may face and stress the urgency of increasing awareness and preparedness on these potential hazards.

The contribution for the first time aims to homogeneously collect and report all together existing spread information on architectural features, conservation status and geographical attributes for the whole group of SCs by accompanying this information with as much as possible complete 2D sections collection from existing drawings and novel 3D drawn sketches created for this contribution. Then the paper contributes to a better understanding of place-based vulnerability with local mapping dimension also considering future threats posed by climate change. Then it highlights the danger of floods and landslides at which the 28 SCs are subjected. Finally it reports how these risks will change under the ongoing impact of climate change.

The purpose of this paper is to determine if there is a link between corporate shareholder value creation and economic growth. The first objective of this paper is to determine which specific shareholder value measurement best explains shareholder value creation for a particular industry. The next objective of the study is to establish, for each of nine different categories of firms examined, a set of value drivers that are unique and significant in expressing shareholder value for that particular category of firms. Lastly, the relationship between shareholder value creation and economic growth is tested.

To quantify and measure value creation, the paper investigates the various value creation measurements that are being applied. The next step is to ascertain whether various industries have different value creation measures that best explain value creation for the respective industries. Then, the value drivers of these specific value creation measures can be determined and their relationship with economic growth tested.

The results of this study indicate that each industry does have a specific shareholder value creation measurement that best explains shareholder value creation for that industry; for example, for five of the nine categories (industries) that were analyzed, market value added was found to be the best shareholder value creation measurement, but for capital-intensive firms and manufacturing firms, the Qratio is the best measure, while for the food and beverage industry, the market to book ratio was found to be a better measure of shareholder value creation than other measures tested. It was further found that an increase in corporate shareholder value creation is to the detriment of economic growth.

The contribution of the present study is its determination of a unique shareholder value creation measurement for particular industries. In addition, a specific set of variables per industry that create shareholder value is identified. Lastly, the important link between shareholder value creation and economic growth is exposed.

This paper investigates whether and how the financial services offered by an e-commerce platform can help budget-constrained small- and medium-sized suppliers improve their corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance.

The authors examine a supply chain in which a budget-constrained supplier engages in CSR, produces a finished product and sells it on the marketplace of an e-commerce platform. This platform offers financial services to the supplier, choosing among three types of financing models: target rate of return, credit limit and CSR-linked financing. Using a Stackelberg game approach, the authors can drive the equilibrium decisions under each financing model.

The results reveal that all three financing models help improve the supplier's CSR investment as long as consumer sensitivity toward CSR exists. Moreover, the last one leads to the highest profitability of the overall supply chain and each member.

The findings shed light on the role of platform financing and how to design the most appropriate financing model to improve CSR for supply chain managers.

Railways are a well-known example of complex critical infrastructure, incorporating socio-technical systems with humans such as drivers, signallers, maintainers and passengers at the core. The technological evolution including interconnectedness and new ways of interaction lead to new security and safety risks that can be realised, both in terms of human error, and malicious and non-malicious behaviour. This study aims to identify the human factors (HF) and cyber-security risks relating to the role of signallers on the railways and explores strategies for the improvement of “Digital Resilience” – for the concept of a resilient railway.

Overall, 26 interviews were conducted with 21 participants from industry and academia.

The results showed that due to increased automation, both cyber-related threats and human error can impact signallers’ day-to-day operations – directly or indirectly (e.g. workload and safety-critical communications) – which could disrupt the railway services and potentially lead to safety-related catastrophic consequences. This study identifies cyber-related problems, including external threats; engineers not considering the human element in designs when specifying security controls; lack of security awareness among the rail industry; training gaps; organisational issues; and many unknown “unknowns”.

The authors discuss socio-technical principles through a hexagonal socio-technical framework and training needs analysis to mitigate against cyber-security issues and identify the predictive training needs of the signallers. This is supported by a systematic approach which considers both, safety and security factors, rather than waiting to learn from a cyber-attack retrospectively.

Acknowledging that housing forms a large part of households’ and country’s long-term wealth, the South African Government has implemented various housing-related policies towards that end. Among these, the government has extended transfer duty exemption to house buyers – both individuals or natural persons and companies or other parties – to enable them buy houses of their choices since January 1950 to date. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between historical transfer duty exemption and housing demand in the City of Johannesburg (CoJ) over a longer period, where a comprehensive data set on house sales and other predictors was available.

This paper uses multi-year data on repeat house sales from 2010 to 2020 and other macro- and socio-economic variables to test the relationship between transfer duty exemption and housing demand in the CoJ, a core part of Gauteng province, South Africa. After cleaning the original data, final analysis was based on 139,121 repeat sales transactions. Data was analyzed in R.

Findings suggest that, when macro-, socio-economic and yearly effects are controlled, transfer duty has a damping effect on housing demand in the CoJ. The results were consistent across all the estimated models. While the motivation behind the implementation of transfer duty exemption in South Africa continues to encourage home ownership, these findings are unexpected because they do not offer support to that policy intention. These unexpected results are partly explained by the prevailing complexities of the housing market and related policies and the progressive tax regime. However, there are welfare effects that all buyers achieve across the housing market ecosystem.

This paper extends work on housing markets research in South Africa through the investigation of mortgage-based housing market in the CoJ that presents one of the densest, developed, bustling and growing housing market in the country. It also presents a fertile ground where all the effects of all the housing policies coalesce – in the statistical sense, one can control the effect of some aspects of housing policies, while appropriately testing the link between a specific policy (in this case, transfer duty exemption) and housing dynamics.

This study aims to identify the interfaces between Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies and circular supply chains (CSC) in Brazilian foodtechs, focusing on key stakeholders’ perspectives to understand the efficiency and sustainability impacts of these integrations.

Using a qualitative exploratory research design, the study analyzes eight Brazilian foodtechs through interviews and content analysis. It identifies CSC practices and examines the adherence of I4.0 technologies within these enterprises, assessing stakeholder engagement and the implications for CSC optimization.

Fifteen CSC practices were identified across the foodtechs, with notable integration of three distinct I4.0 technologies. The findings suggest that while I4.0 technologies enhance efficiency in CSC, their adoption is in early stages. Stakeholder engagement emerges as a crucial element for optimizing CSC in the context of Brazilian foodtechs.

This study contributes to the academic discussion on the synergy between I4.0 and circular economy (CE) models, providing empirical evidence of their application in the foodtech sector and highlighting the role of stakeholders in facilitating these integrations.

The findings suggest that stakeholder engagement in circular practices is vital for both supply chain and organizational levels, with potential benefits including improved efficiency and sustainability outcomes. The research also underscores the need for public sector support, including regulatory frameworks and incentives for adopting I4.0 technologies.

By demonstrating how I4.0 technologies can support CE practices in foodtechs, the study highlights the potential for these integrations to contribute to more sustainable and efficient food systems, addressing environmental concerns and promoting social well-being.

This study addresses a gap in the literature by exploring the interface between I4.0 technologies and CSC in the emerging context of Brazilian foodtechs, offering insights into the practical and societal benefits of these integrations.