Search results

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between corporate debt-like compensation and the value of excess cash holdings.

The environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosure score provided by Bloomberg is used as a proxy for the extent of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The empirical analysis is based on a sample of 379 firms that made up the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index over the period 2010-2015. In order to take into account the endogeneity problem between board gender diversity and ESG disclosure, a fixed effect model with lagged board variables is used.

Two main results arise from this study. First, no significant relationship is found between board gender diversity and ESG disclosure. Second, the evidence also partially confirms critical mass theory, as below three female directors the relationship between board gender diversity and ESG disclosure is not statistically significant. However, beyond that, no significant relationship was found.

Reasonable theoretical arguments drawn from stakeholder theory suggest that board gender diversity may have a positive effect on ESG disclosure. The empirical evidence presented neither supports, nor denies stakeholder theory. However, the results may be improved by enlarging the frontiers of this research in time and space, increasing the perimeter of qualitative data integrated in this investigation.

This paper offers theoretical and empirical arguments for the feminization of corporate boards, not only in the name of equality between women and men and organizational justice, but also in the light of organizational performance (examined through the prism of governance). Transparency, analyzed using the proxy of ESG disclosure, is strongly and positively correlated with a feminization of boards, if the proportion of women is significant and sufficient to be able to prevent and surpass the “invisibilization” phenomenon, which is based on the marginalization of passive ultra-minorities, reduction to silence, marginalization (disqualification of women voice or exit strategy), assimilation or the endorsement of stigma.

First, this makes a theoretical contribution to the diversity and governance literature by examining the effect of WOCB on ESG disclosure through the stakeholder theory (Freeman, 2010). Second, the authors contribute to the CSR literature (cf. Byron and Post, 2016) by documenting specifically the effect of board gender diversity on CSR disclosures through ESG. Indeed, ESG research mainly concentrates on firm financial performance (Galbreath, 2013). No study has examined the relationship between WOCB and ESG disclosure. Finally, from an empirical standpoint, an FE model with lagged board variables (Liu et al., 2014) is used to fully address the endogeneity problems in the relationship between WOCB and ESG disclosure that may occur because of differences in unobservable characteristics across firms or reverse causality (Boulouta, 2013).

The career is a space where family and work lives amalgamate. The role of work for the individual, and the meaning of work within the culture, will determine the relevance of family. This study investigates CEOs' perception about conjugal family influence on career decisions, and it examines family factors.

Through a qualitative study, 22 Latin American CEOs who work for multinational firms were interviewed in a semi-structured way.

Not all career decisions were influenced by conjugal family. CEOs varied in the extent to which they considered their families when reflecting on their career decisions. Expatriation, joining or quitting an organization and change of area of work were found as those decisions perceived to be influenced by conjugal family. Family support, family structure and family demands and responsibilities were identified as the family factors involved. In spite of the role salience, family factors influenced some of CEOs' career decisions, in part, due to the cultural characteristics of the Latin American environment. The instrumental support of the extended family, as part of collectivist societies, was also evidenced.

A better understanding of the family influenced decisions and family factors involved may enhance individual career decision-making as well as organizational career management processes and public initiatives.

This study contributes to family and career literature, being the first one to explore the conjugal family influence upon CEOs' career decisions.

Foreign markets possess different characteristics to domestic ones; this means that dynamic marketing capabilities (DMCs) should be adjusted. This paper aims to understand how these DMCs enable firms to achieve greater legitimacy in international markets.

This research uses a qualitative approach based on in-depth interviews in collaboration with an association of exporting firms.

Findings suggest five areas of DMCs to improve organizational legitimacy overseas: flexibility, relationship management, local market sensitivity, anticipation and exemplariness. Those capabilities should be combined and will play a different role depending on the implementation phase of the external company. Resource allocation and capability development should follow an integrative approach emphasizing proximity, adaptability, alliances, engagement and credibility to reach differentiation in foreign markets.

The originality is mainly focused on the cohabitation and strong synergies between DMCs and legitimacy. This aspect is particularly relevant because legitimized companies have higher levels of survival, which is fundamental in the international venture.

Catering services play important role in the Spanish economy, accounting for 6.2% of GDP in 2021. To overcome the adverse economic impacts of COVID-19, catering services are considered one of the drivers to stimulate economic growth. Hence, the main aim of this paper is to analyse the sociodemographic profile of the family's main breadwinner who allocates most of his expenditure budget on different catering services before and during the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 in Spain.

The official Family Budget Survey in Spain was used. This offers information on expenditure by families in 2019 and 2020. CHAID multivariate analysis was employed. This has proved a valuable tool in predicting expenditure, as well as determining the cause–effect relationship of this expenditure.

Findings establish the main breadwinner's expenditure on catering services based on predictors such as “year” affected by the pandemic; “type of employment contract”; “gender”; and “age”. A gender “pub-gap” in consumption in bars and cafes has been revealed, and families with a male breadwinner, on a permanent contract, between the age of 40 and 60 spent the most on catering services.

This research presents a new interdisciplinary approach to family breadwinners as a company whose spend on catering is shaping the economic recovery and leading to new answers for hospitality management. Identified factors can lead to improved decision-making and contextualisation of economic models for food service providers in a post-pandemic future.

This study aims to examine whether export competitiveness (EC) in the two groups of the Indian textile industry i.e. “textiles” and “textile products” group differ.

The study examines how exchange rate (ER), real effective exchange rate (REER) and EC of both the groups are related in the long run over the period 1991-1992 to 2018-2019 using Granger causality test and Johansen and Juselius co-integration test.

The study confirms that EC is a challenge that needs to be addressed to sustain in the international market, as the volatile trend can be found for EC in both groups. The econometric framework shedding light on both groups of the textile industry suggest that select determinants have different relationships with the EC for two groups. The findings of the Granger causality test reveal that the presence of unidirectional causality running from ER to EC in the case of both the groups. Also, the select variables are found to be co-integrated in the long run. However, in the case of REER, no causality is found running from REER to EC.

ER is a vital determinant of EC and exporters can sustain competitiveness in global markets by reducing their profit mark-up in the face of an appreciating currency.

The introduction of quality management Internet of things (QM IoT) can help food supply chain members to enhance real-time visibility, quality, safety and efficiency of products and processes. Current literature indicates three main research gaps, including a lack of studies in QM IoT in the food supply chain, the vagueness of integrative adoption of new technology framework and deficient research covering both adoption attitude and intention in the same model. This study aims to propose an analysis model based on the technological–organizational–environmental (TOE) framework and reinforced by the collaborative structure to capture the importance of the supply chain network.

The partial least square-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was applied to test the impacts of the adoption factors on QM IoT adoption attitude and intention among 197 respondents in food manufacturing in Thailand.

The results indicated that compatibility, trialability, adaptive capacity, innovative capability, executive support, value chain partner pressure, presence of service provider and information sharing significantly impacted the attitude toward QM IoT adoption, while adaptive capability, innovative capability and information sharing directly influenced the QM IoT adoption intention. Furthermore, the attitude toward QM IoT adoption positively impacted the QM IoT adoption intention.

This study contributed to academicians by proposing a more solid adoption framework for QM IoT area. In addition, the business practitioners could actively prepare themselves for the QM IoT adoption, whereas the service providers could provide better and suitable service.

This research contributes to the building of a more solid framework and indicates significant factors that impact the attitude toward QM IoT adoption and adoption intention.

Question answering (QA) answers the questions asked by people in the form of natural language. In the QA, due to the subjectivity of users, the questions they query have different expressions, which increases the difficulty of text retrieval. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore new query rewriting method for QA that integrates multiple related questions (RQs) to form an optimal question. Moreover, it is important to generate a new dataset of the original query (OQ) with multiple RQs.

This study collects a new dataset SQuAD_extend by crawling the QA community and uses word-graph to model the collected OQs. Next, Beam search finds the best path to get the best question. To deeply represent the features of the question, pretrained model BERT is used to model sentences.

The experimental results show three outstanding findings. (1) The quality of the answers is better after adding the RQs of the OQs. (2) The word-graph that is used to model the problem and choose the optimal path is conducive to finding the best question. (3) Finally, BERT can deeply characterize the semantics of the exact problem.

The proposed method can use word-graph to construct multiple questions and select the optimal path for rewriting the question, and the quality of answers is better than the baseline. In practice, the research results can help guide users to clarify their query intentions and finally achieve the best answer.

The purpose of this paper is specifically to provide a more intelligent locomotion planning method for a hexapod robot based on trajectory optimization, which could reduce the complexity of locomotion design, shorten time of design and generate efficient and accurate motion.

The authors generated locomotion for the hexapod robot based on trajectory optimization method and it just need to specify the high-level motion requirements. Here the authors first transcribed the trajectory optimization problem to a nonlinear programming problem, in which the specified motion requirements and the dynamics with complementarity constraints were defined as the constraints, then a nonlinear solver was used to solve. The leg compliance was taken into consideration and the generated motions were deployed on the hexapod robot prototype to prove the utility of the method and, meanwhile, the influence of different environments was considered.

The generated motions were deployed on the hexapod robot and the movements were demonstrated very much in line with the planning. The new planning method does not require lots of parameter-tuning work and therefore significantly reduces the cycle for designing a new locomotion.

A locomotion generation method based on trajectory optimization was constructed for a 12-degree of freedom hexapod robot. The variable stiffness compliance of legs was considered to improve the accuracy of locomotion generation. And also, different from some simulation work before, the authors have designed the locomotion in three cases and constructed field tests to demonstrate its utility.

The study investigated the relationship between future time perspective and financial well-being among Chinese working millennials and its serial mediators, such as financial goal clarity, subjective financial knowledge and responsible financial behaviour, to foster consumer resilience in the financial realm.

A total of 526 Chinese working millennials (Mage = 31.78) participated in the online survey in response to questions on demographic characteristics and items to measure the variables adopted in the research model. Covariance-based structural equation modelling (CB-SEM) and AMOS version 27 were used to test the research hypotheses.

The results revealed a positive correlation between future time perspective and financial well-being. Moreover, the results showed that financial goal clarity, subjective financial knowledge and responsible financial behaviour serially mediated the correlation between future time perspective and financial well-being.

The findings provide implications for companies and policymakers to refine their intervention programmes to boost young millennials' future time perspectives in reinforcing their financial knowledge and financial goal clarity which in turn fosters their responsible financial behaviour in contributing to financial well-being in boosting their overall consumer resilience. Future studies should deepen the way in which the studied factors are leveraged as a tool to improve individuals' resilience in the economic realm.

The findings of this study shed light on the underlying mechanisms that drive and promote the financial well-being of Chinese working millennials.

The purpose of the study is to identify drivers of mobile massive open online course (MOOC) continuous intention (CI) through the lenses of customer perceived value (CPV) theory. Consumer choice is successfully explained by CPV, but lesser attention is given to linking the theory to the mobile MOOC context whereby the majority of theories have adopted approaches like technology acceptance model (TAM), unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT), etc.

A mix-method approach was employed. Study A (qualitative), explores context-specific perceived value (PV) dimensions using nethnographic analysis of 627 learner reviews on Corsera app. Study B (quantitative), collects primary data by administering a questionnaire based on dimensions, and 231 responses were then analysed using structural equation modelling.

The results revealed that three context-specific PVs (i.e. pedagogy, interface and content) have a positive and significant impact on CI. Pedagogy value is a chief driving force of mobile MOOC CI followed by content value. Ubiquity value demonstrated insignificant impact.

The findings provide insights for MOOC apps and their developers for formulating better value propositions for ensuring sustainable business which may result in gaining a higher share in the growing mobile learning market.

This study bridges an important gap in mobile MOOC literature by providing a novel approach to investigating what drives mobile MOOC CI through the lenses of CPV theory. It is the first study investigating mobile MOOC CI through the specific CPV dimensions identified by employing a mixed-method approach. The study formulates a conceptual framework that may serve as a foundation for future research on mobile MOOCs for which literature is relatively scant.