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In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.

This paper describes the first of a two part study of copper ball/wedge thermosonic wire bonding and concentrates on the second wedge bond to copper thick film. Results of varying the bonding machine parameters of force, amplitude of vibration, weld time, substrate temperature and bonding direction on bond strength are discussed and optimum conditions to give maximum yield suggested. Methods of providing adequate gas shielding of the wire and substrate and the effect of wire ductility are also presented. Particular attention has been given to improving the accuracy and speed of testing of the loop pull test by correcting for variations in wire loop geometry. A method will be described for measuring loop height automatically during each test and the incorporation of a computer to obtain corrected values of force.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of interest free micro credit loans on the lives and business of the female borrowers.

Both primary and secondary data have been used. Case studies of four different female entrepreneurs have been included as part of the research. The observation was conducted over an extended period of time. Subsequently, interviews were conducted with four beneficiaries to know the role played by interest free micro credit loans in improving (or not!) their lives and businesses.

Interest free micro credit loans played a significant role in bringing a positive change in the lives of the borrowers. Clients mentioned that “zero interest rate” and “flexible repayment schedules” were the main reason for obtaining loans from this source. Further, they suggested that there is a need for training/workshops, feedback/monitoring, networking and online repayment system to make interest free micro credit loans more successful.

The focus of the study is limited to only four female borrowers in Karachi. Future studies can include other cities and cross-gender comparisons for better understating.

This study will help microfinance organizations to assess the problems faced by the borrowers; it will also shed light on the motivations of borrowers.

Interest free micro credit loans were provided to women entrepreneurs in a social experiment and implications were observed.

Omnichannel sales have provided new impetus for the development of catering merchants. The authors thus focus on how catering merchants should manage capacities at the ordering, production and delivery stages to meet customers’ needs in different channels under third-party platform delivery and merchant self-delivery. This is of great significance for the development of the omnichannel catering industry.

This paper formulates the capacity decisions of omnichannel catering merchants under the third-party platform delivery and merchant self-delivery mode. The authors mainly use queuing theory to analyze the queuing behavior of online and offline customers, and the impact of waiting time on customer shopping behavior. In addition, the authors also characterize the merchant’s capacity by the rate in queuing model.

The authors find that capacities at ordering stage and food production stage are composed of base capacities and safety capacities, but the delivery capacities only have the latter. And in the self-delivery mode, merchants can develop higher safety capacities by charging delivery fees. The authors prove that regardless of the delivery mode, omnichannel sales can bring higher profits to merchants by integrating demand.

The authors focus on analyzing the capacity management of omnichannel catering merchants at the ordering, production and delivery stages. And the authors also add the delivery process into the omnichannel for analysis, so as to solve the problem of capacity decision-making under different delivery modes. The management of delivery capacity and its impact on other stages’ capacities are not covered in other literature studies, which is one of the main innovations of this paper.

It is seldom realised that with the nationalisation of British Railways, the world's largest catering undertaking has fallen under state control. Though representating but an auxiliary activity of the British Transport Commission, the Hotels and Catering Services employ a staff of more than fifteen thousand persons and attain a yearly turnover of eighteen million pounds. In their forty hotels (with a capacity of six thousand seven hundred beds), four hundred refreshment rooms, seven hundred fully equipped dining cars, all the minor catering installations such as trolleys, kiosks, mobile refreshment room units and automatic slot machines is invested a value of eleven million pounds. It must be pointed out that these figures do not include any of the catering facilities of the Pullman Car Company Limited whose undertaking forms a special part of the Transport Commission and of which the fixed assets alone amount to a sum of over four hundred and ten thousand pounds.

The ways in which management strategy has developed in employee relations with particular reference to the UK catering industry are examined. A comparison is made between practices in the public and private sectors.

The purpose of this paper is to test a catering theory by examining impacts of minority shareholders’ pressures on earnings management (EM), and attempt to answer: what is the role of minority shareholders participation (MSP) in corporate governance? and does MSP serve as an external monitor to managers, or does it put excessive pressure on them?

Using a novel online voting data set in China’s stock market, the author constructs the measure of MSP, and regress the EM on MSP. To address the endogeneity, the author introduces propensity score matching and difference-in-difference methods, instrumental variables, and Heckman estimation to show that the results are robust to different specifications and alternative measures.

The author documents that: MSP plays limited role in external monitoring; and firms facing high MSP levels tend to manage earnings more actively. In addition, information asymmetry, proposals’ importance, managerial incentives, and CEO financial expertise significantly affect firms’ catering behaviors.

This paper contributes to different strands of the literature. First, the finding significantly supports the catering hypothesis from a new perspective of EM. Second, the author contributes to a hotly debated issue in corporate governance: whether minority shareholders should be granted increased participation in corporate decisions? The results also provide timely empirical evidence for government regulators who are concerned about the costs and benefits of granting minority shareholders direct control over corporate decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether investor sentiments exert significant influence on corporate dividend policy. Additionally it provides further evidence on the moderating role of certain firm’s characteristics on the relation between dividends and investor sentiment.

A sample of 635 firms from 12 Eurozone countries for the period of 1986-2003 has been used. A dividend model has been suggested which incorporates a variable at the firm level that proxies for the catering effect, as a measure of investor sentiments. The estimation model of dividends is based on the Generalized Method of Moments (Arellano and Bond, 1991).

It can be concluded that psychological factors influence the decision to pay. Furthermore, other relevant findings show an interaction effect between catering and firm’s characteristics, particularly high liquid assets, valuable investment opportunities, and higher levels of free cash flow.

Given the subjectivity inherent in creating a variable that captures the sentiment of investors, the author admits that there are other variables to consider. Also, corporate governance factors could have been introduced as well as other countries with different institutional environments.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is a novel approach that incorporates a variable capturing investor’s sentiment at the firm level. With the approach suggested it has been shown that investors’ sentiments impact dividends payout, highlighting its usefulness for managers who are expected to pay dividends according to investors’ expectations. Moreover, this work also demonstrated that firm’s characteristics could affect the investor sentiments for dividends also conveying a valuable contribution for investors.

The purpose of this study is to compare two theories that relate the proportion of diversified firms in the economy and the implied discount for diversified firms: the first is a real-options model predicting a positive relationship between the discount and management’s choice to operate a diversified firm; the second is based on catering theory, in which a negative relationship is predicted, as management is attentive to investor preference concerning diversified firms.

This study proposes a new aggregate measure of the diversification discount. The authors’ measure allows for decomposition of the discount into firm-level mispricing, industry-level mispricing and long-run fundamental value components.

Results support a catering theory of diversification. The discount appears to be the result of firm-level mispricing. Thus, providing an explanation for why, in light of the observed discount, a large number of diversified firms persist.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to provide evidence that firm-level mispricing may drive the observed diversification discount.

The Secretary of State, having given notice under section 29(1) of the Prices and Incomes Act 1966(a) that he was considering the making of this Order, and having considered representations duly made, in exercise of the powers conferred on him by the said section 29, and by section 25(7) and (8) of the said Act, hereby makes the following Order:‐