Search results

This paper aims to investigate the relation between gender diversity in employees and earnings quality. Specifically, how gender diversity among full-time and part-time employees is associated with discretionary accruals in Korea is examined.

The author analyzes the association between women ratio among full-time (part-time) employees and discretionary accruals by using 3,687 firm-years of Korean listed companies from 2010 to 2012. The regression model used in Barua et al. (2010) is adopted. The dependent variables, the absolute value of discretionary accruals, are proxied by the Modified Jones Model of Dechow et al. (1995) and the Performance Matched Model of Kothari et al. (2005).

First, a higher ratio of women among full-time workers is related to lower discretionary accruals, whereas that of part-time female employees is not related to discretionary accruals. Second, the effect of gender diversity in employees varies depending on the possibility of earnings management. Third, the results are robust with sample firm-years without female executives, thereby suggesting that the results are not driven by the existence of female executives, and robust to accounting standards and firm-year clustering.

This paper expands the understanding about the determination of discretionary accruals by demonstrating the impact of full-time female employees on earnings quality. Previous studies demonstrated that female workers are more ethical in the workplace, and the quality of accounting information disclosed by firms with female CFOs or directors, i.e. high ranking officers, is higher. It is observed that accounting information quality is higher when firms simply have more female workers, regardless of their relative position in the firm. This complements the results of previous studies and indicates gender diversity among employees is a sign of accounting information quality.

In Korea, a regulatory body can assign auditors to firms if they possess certain characteristics that cast doubt on auditor independence or the reliability of accounting disclosures. This paper investigates whether such mandatory assignment of auditors improves investors’ perceptions of the quality of accounting information. Using over 4,000 firm‐year observations from 1994 to 2002, we find that investors respond more favorably to positive earnings audited by assigned auditors than to those audited by non‐assigned auditors. Negative earnings, however, do not lead to significantly different reactions. Capital market participants respond more favorably to the book value of equity audited by assigned auditors than to that audited by non‐assigned auditors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the diversification effect of the Korean Ship Investment Fund (KSF) under Markowitz portfolio theory by analyzing short-term and long-term relationships with stocks and bonds.

For this purpose, unit root, correlation and cointegration tests are performed. Monthly data from 2004 to 2015 for stocks, bonds and KSFs are obtained for this study.

The correlation coefficients indicate that KSFs are uncorrelated with stocks and negatively correlated with bonds, and no long-term equilibrium relationships exist with all three variables by the Johansen and Engle-Granger cointegration tests.

This paper makes contribution to the literature as follows: first, whereas the previous literature investigated diversification effect of ship investment using freight indices or freight rates which are not able to represent returns from ship investment, this study is the first study to use actual stock prices of the KSFs to the authors’ best knowledge; and second, diversification effect of ship investment represented by KSFs is empirically verified in the both short term and long term.

Policy-makers and managers of shipping companies can have sound ground that the KSFs are alternative and attractive assets to investors. It is also shown that the KSFs have potential to improve risk and return structure of investors on their own regardless of existence of incentives. Therefore, decisions of policy-makers can be made free from expectations for stronger incentives provided by the government. In addition, those countries that do not have such a ship investment platform may consider introducing a similar ship investment fund in order to revitalize the capital markets of the country.

This study holds its significance in investigating diversification properties of the KSFs for the first time in Korea since the KSFs were introduced.

This study aims to explore the structural relationship among food quality, usefulness, ease of use, convenience, brand trust and willingness to pay. The technology acceptance model was used as the theoretical foundation of this work.

Amazon Mechanical Turk was used to recruit survey participants, and 436 valid observations were ultimately used for the analysis. In the data analysis, the structural relationships between variables were explored through structural equation modeling.

The results of hypothesis testing show that ease of use positively affects the usefulness of the Starbucks mobile application. Usefulness also exerts positive impacts on both brand trust and convenience. Moreover, brand trust is positively associated with food quality. Finally, willingness to pay is positively influenced by both convenience and brand trust.

This study contributes to the literature by not only validating the technology acceptance model using the Starbucks mobile application but also proposing food quality-related attributes in the domain of the café business.

The objective of the study is to identify the themes of “family friendly practices” and to perform a literature review. The research aims to identify the emerging trends in the area of “family friendly practices” by carrying out an exhaustive literature review.

The study synthesizes the literature between the years 2010 and 2019. First of all, 150 research articles were identified by keyword search, bibliography and citation search, out of which 57 research articles were selected on the basis of the most sound theoretical background and maximum literature contribution. The citation analysis method was performed on these studies in order to study the journals, authors by using Google Scholar, ResearchGate, the international database Science Citation Index and SCImago Journal Ranking.

The author citation count shows that the research topic is still getting recognition and the research in this area is increasing. The finding of the research is that the current research in family-friendly practices has focused mainly on seven topics: availability and usability of family-friendly policy, job satisfaction, organizational performance, supervisor or manager support, work–life conflict, employee turnover employee retention and women’s employment.

The study may provide valuable inputs to the HRD practitioners, managers, research scholars, to understand the recent trends in the field of family-friendly policy. As per the best knowledge of the author, this is the first study on family-friendly practices using citation analysis.

Given the climatic context and economic challenge of Ghana in its developmental strides, energy use of office buildings continues to be a task on the economy. Therefore, the study was about finding measures that could reduce cooling loads in 10 office buildings. The paper presents the outcome of a long-term study of the thermal conditions in a selected number of office buildings in Accra and Kumasi, Ghana.

Through long-term monitoring of environmental data, the buildings were consequently modelled in a simulation application. Thereafter, a validation of the simulation models (using regression coefficients, r² of 0.53–0.90) was undertaken towards finding measures to reduce cooling loads.

The results showed various potentials of efficient lighting, thermal mass, night ventilation, insulation to attic floors, efficient glazing, blind deployments, etc. in reducing cooling loads in the range of 2–17.5%. By combining the potential measures to study their synergistic effects on the loads, 35, 39 and 38% improvements were achieved for the low-rise, multi-storey and fully glazed office buildings.

These potential measures ought to be incorporated in the design, specification, construction and operation of Ghanaian office buildings to reduce the burden on the economy and the environment. Now more than ever, there is the need for climatic regions to come up with empirical data that could help relieve the world's economies from the post-pandemic stress.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the hydraulic efficiency without changing the overall dimension. The blade profile optimization design of the aero-centrifugal pump based on the biharmonic equation surrogate model has been studied.

First of all, Bezier curves and linear function are used to control the annular angle distribution and the stacking angle of blade profile under the MATLAB platform. Grid independence analysis has been studied to find the finest mesh scheme. After the precision comparison of test data and computation fluid dynamics 15 sets of design parameters are carried out as the boundary condition of the biharmonic equation. The efficiency surrogate model of the biharmonic equation is constructed via iteratively solving of a discrete difference equation. The other two surrogate models of response surface model (RSM) and radial basis function neural network surrogate model (RBFNNSM) are compared with the biharmonic equation surrogate model by the standard of modified complex correlation coefficient R² and root mean square deviation (RSME). Finally, the artificial fish swarm algorithm has been used to find the global optimal design parameters with the objective function of highest efficiency.

The results show that the design parameters code conversion method can reduce the number of optimization parameters from five to three, makes the design space become a cube, and compared with RSM and RBFNNSM, the biharmonic equation surrogate model has higher precision with R² is 0.8958, RSME is 0.1382. The final optimum result of AFSA is at the point of [1 −1 −1]. The internal flow field analysis shows that after optimization the outlet relative velocity becomes more uniform and the wake effect has been significantly decreased. The hydraulic efficiency of the optimized pump is about 59.45 per cent increasing 5.4 per cent compared with a prototype pump.

This study developed a new method to optimize the design parameters of aero-centrifugal pump impeller based on biharmonic equation surrogate model, which had a good agreement with experimental values within just 15 sets of the original design. The optimization results shows that the method can improve the hydraulic efficiency significantly.

This paper investigates a retrospective on the Journal of Derivatives and Quantitative Studies (JDQS) on its 30th anniversary based on bibliometric. JDQSs yearly publications, citations, impact factors, and centrality indices grew up in early 2010s, and diminished in 2020. Keyword network analysis reveals the JDQS's main keywords including behavioral finance, implied volatility, information asymmetry, price discovery, KOSPI200 futures, volatility, and KOSPI200 options. Citations of JDQS articles are mainly driven by article age, demeaned age squared, conference, nonacademic authors and language. In comparison between number of views and downloads for JDQS articles, we find that recent changes in publisher and editorial and publishing policies have increased visibility of JDQS.