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Do socially responsible funds, as a whole, perform as well as the average of all mutual funds in their respective categories? This paper examines fund characteristics as well as risk and performance measures of all available socially responsible funds (SRFs) in the U.S. mutual fund industry over the last fifteen years. The contribution of this paper is two unique findings. First, although SRFs have had a relative advantage in terms of lower expense ratios, lower annual turnover rates, lower tax cost ratios, and lower risk, SRFs also exhibit lower returns, and two risk‐adjusted return measures indicate SRFs have inferior reward‐to‐risk performance. In particular, domestic stock SRFs have not generated competitive returns relative to conventional funds in the same categories over the past ten to fifteen years. These results contrast those found in the extant SRI literature which suggest socially responsible investing has little or no cost. Second, a finer partitioning by fund type reveals not all SRFs have similar relative performance. SRFs in balanced fund and fixed‐income fund categories, especially during the past three years, have performed better than the category averages with lower risk, higher returns, and higher risk‐adjusted returns. This suggests the costs of socially responsible investing are not homogenous.

Competition among seaports is rapidly increasing due to various factors such as the global recession, resurgence of COVID-19, tight environmental regulations of IMO, sharp rise in ocean freight charges, increasing global uncertainties and growth in ship sizes. It is essential to have precise knowledge of shipping companies' port selection factors to secure the competitive advantage of seaports. This study aims to empirically analyze recent changes in the importance of port selection factors.

By employing a longitudinal study, this study conducted the t-test analysis. The first survey was conducted from January 2005 to April 2005. Then, the second survey was conducted in May 2021.

First, the importance of port facilities (berth length and the number of berths, shed and terminal areas, possession of adequate equipment and maximum berth size) increased significantly. Second, while ship and cargo safety were the critical port service factors in previous studies, speed, flexibility and reliability for handling cargo and berthing schedule were found to be crucial in this study. Third, the importance of ship arrival/departure frequency, route diversity and ship arrival/departure information systems increased when shipping companies selected the port.

This study has academic significance in that it reveals the changing importance of port selection factors in the 2020s and has taken the form of a longitudinal study on the importance of port selection factors from 2005 to 2021, moving beyond the cross-sectional approach. This study can provide valuable insights into and implications for port policymakers and managers when developing and formulating port policies and strategies.

The purpose of this study is to provide a holistic view of the emergence of shareholder activism (SA) in India. However, specifically, this study aims at fulfilling the research gap by discussing the policy and legal advancement in the area of SA and investigating the chronological evolution of SA, manifestations of SA, motives of SA, outcome of SAs and impact of SA on the financial performance of the firm.

This study used a mixed methodology (both qualitative and quantitative) to draw inferences, including content analysis, descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test and paired sample t-test. The data has been collected from the annual reports of the sample companies and the Prowess database. Return on assets and return on equity have been used as measures of financial performance while investigating the difference in financial performance between firms subjected to SA and firms not subjected to SA.

The findings of this study suggest that there has been significant growth in the occurrence of SA incidents in India in the past decade, with shareholders prominently manifesting by opposing the proposals at annual general meetings/extraordinary general meetings, mostly involving governance-related demands. The findings from the independent sample t-tests revealed that there has been a significant difference in the financial performance of the sample subjected to SA and firms not subjected to SA. Furthermore, the results of the paired sample t-test provide strong evidence of significant improvement in the financial performance of firms’ post-SA.

The findings of this study have implications for various stakeholders. The findings of this study suggest that SA has been relatively more successful in the Indian context and may encourage minority shareholders to follow active participation through shareholder proposals and votes rather than a passive strategy to trade and exit. For firms, it can provide valuable inferences about the emergence of SA and how it has a positive impact on the financial performance of the firm, which can lead to a change in the perception of investors and promoters who perceive SA as a threat (Gillan and Starks 2000; Hartzell and Starks, 2003). For policymakers, it can act as a tool to investigate whether the regulatory changes have been able to bring the intended transparency, accountability and enhanced shareholder participation. This will encourage policymakers to be more agile, as their efforts are bearing fruit. This will also act as a guide to formulating future policies and regulations.

This study is an effort to provide a holistic view of SA scenarios in a developing economy setting like India, where SA is a very recent phenomenon. Although there are studies in the area of SA, there is a dearth of studies that have investigated the various dimensions of SA in the Indian context in a very systematic and extensive manner, investigating all the different dimensions of SA. Furthermore, this study also intends to investigate the impact of SA, which is normally perceived as a threat to financial performance and provide valuable contrasting evidence.

Outlines previous research on the relationship between dividend policy and stock returns; and uses a linear programme and multi‐index model to form an investment strategy to see whether dividend yields increase stock returns. Explains the methodology, tests it on 1965‐1989 US data and presents the results, which suggests that the multi‐index model is superior to the single index market model in terms of explanatory power and volatility; but provides conflicting conclusions on the relevance of dividends to stock returns. Suggests that the negative relationship between dividends and stock returns can be explained by Jensen’s (1986) free cash flow theory and the influence of transaction costs.

Re‐analyses of data from Canadian samples of management undergraduates in three independent studies of ethical dilemmas, as presented in vignettes, were conducted to test the hypothesis that women are more ethical than men. Several statistically significant gender differences were found when t‐tests for mean differences were used; however, the effect sizes were all small as measured by Cohen’s d. Three existing frameworks were used to explain these gender differences: gender socialization, underlying ethical frameworks, and situational specificity. When the Bonferroni adjustment was applied to control for Type I error rate, only three of the 76 t‐tests for gender differences across the three studies were significant. It is suggested that these findings of very few gender differences in ethical beliefs, when conservative statistical tests are used, reflect the effects of changing gender socialization and sex roles in contemporary Canadian society among other factors that de‐emphasize gender differences

This paper aims to research as to how Twitter is influential as an electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) communication tool and thereby affecting movie market. In present days, social media is playing an important role in connecting people around the globe. The technology has provided a platform in the social media space for people to share their experiences through text, photos and videos. Twitter is one such online social networking media that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”. Twitter has nearly 200 million users and billions of such tweets are generated by users every other day. Social media micro-blogging broadcasting networks such as Twitter are transforming the way e-WOM is disseminated and consumed in the digital world. Twitter social behaviour for the Hollywood movies has been assessed across seven countries to validate the two basic blocks of the honeycomb model – sharing and conversation. Twitter behaviour was studied for 27 movies in 22 different cities of seven countries and for six genres with a total tweets of 9.28 million. The difference of Twitter social media behaviour was compared across countries, and “sharing” and “conversation” as two building blocks of the honeycomb model were studied. t-Test results revealed that the behaviour is different across countries and across genres.

The objective of the paper is to analyse Twitter messages on an entertainment product (movies) across different regions of the world. Hollywood movies are released across different parts of the world, and Twitter users are also in different parts of the world. The objective is to hence validate “conversation” and “sharing” building blocks of the honeycomb model. The research is confined to analysing Twitter data related to a few Hollywood movies. The tweets were collected across nine different cities spanning four different countries where English language is prominent. To understand the Twitter social media behaviour, a crawler application using Python and Java was developed to collect tweets of Hollywood movies from the Twitter database. The application has incorporated Twitter application programming interfaces (APIs) to access the Twitter database to extract tweets according to movies search queries across different parts of the world. The searching, collecting and analysing of the tweets is a rather challenging task because of various reasons. The tweets are stored in a Twitter corpus and can be accessed by the public using APIs. To understand whether tweets vary from one country to another, the analysis of variance test was conducted. To assess whether Twitter behaviour is different, and to compare the behaviour across countries, t-tests were conducted taking two countries at a time. The comparisons were made across all the six genres. In this way, an attempt was made to obtain a microscopic view of the Twitter behaviour for each of the seven countries and the six genres.

The findings show that the people use social media across the world. Nearly 9.28 million tweets were from seven countries, namely, USA, UK, Canada, South Africa, Australia, India and New Zealand for 27 Hollywood movies. This is indicative of the fact that today, people are exchanging information across different countries, that people are conversing about a product on social media and people are sharing information about a product on social media and, thus, proving the hypothesis. Further, the results indicate that the users in USA, Canada and UK, tweet more than the other countries, USA and UK being the highest in tweets followed by the Canada. On the other hand, the number of tweets in Australia, India and South Africa are low with New Zealand being the lowest of all the countries. This indicates that different countries’ users have different social media behaviour. Some countries use social media to communicate about their experience more than in some other country. However, consumers from all over the world are using Twitter to express their views openly and freely.

This research is useful to scholars and enterprises to understand opinions on Twitter social media and predict their impact. The study can be extended to any products which can lead to better customer relationship management. Companies can use the Internet and social media to promote and get feedback on their products and services across different parts of the world. Governments can inform the public about their new policies, benefits of governmental programmes to people and ways to improve the Internet reach to more people and also for creating awareness about health, hygiene, natural calamities and safety.

India is an emerging economy and one of the preferred investment destinations for environmental, social and governance (ESG) fund issuers. Institutional investors invest retail investors’ money, and hence, it becomes imperative for ESG fund managers to understand the social investment preferences of retail investors. This study aims to compare the Indian socially responsible (SR) investors and conventional investors in terms of their socially responsible investment (SRI) awareness level, opinions about broad and specific ESG issues, investment behavior and demographics. In addition, this paper makes an attempt to have a deeper insight into Indian investors’ behavior toward SRI by segmenting the Indian retail investors based on their SRI awareness level, attitude toward ESG issues and intention to accept lower financial returns, and choices made by them as consumers.

After collecting the data through the survey method an independent t-test is used to compare SR investors with conventional investors. Chi-square has been used to analyze the data related to demographics, and cluster analysis is used to identify segments among Indian retail investors.

The results indicated that Indian SR investors’ SRI awareness level is more, they are more concerned about broad and specific ESG issues, they are more into faith-based investing, and are responsible consumers vis-à-vis conventional investors. As per demographic, SR investors are in the middle age group of 30–40 years, male, hold a postgraduate degree and have an annual income of 10–20 lakhs in comparison to conventional investors. The results of cluster analysis indicated that Indian retail investors can be classified into three groups based on their SRI awareness, intention to sacrifice financial return, attitude toward ESG issues and choices made by them as consumers.

Results have implications for national and international fund managers, policymakers, regulators and society. These results will help mutual fund companies to provide curated SR mutual funds as per the behavior and choice of retail investors and penetrate the Indian investment market more deeply.

This research study contributes to the literature on SRI by identifying the differentiating characteristics of Indian SR and conventional investors and segmenting Indian retail investors on the basis of their SRI awareness, the importance of ESG issues and choices made by them as investors and consumers.

With the development of Web 2.0 virtual communities, the authors see a useful platform for knowledge sharing. However, knowledge sharing in virtual communities still remains a big challenge given the concern of knowledge quantity and quality. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of individual differences on knowledge contributing, knowledge seeking, trust and norm of reciprocity. This study also explores the mean difference between knowledge seeking and knowledge contributing as well as the correlations between knowledge seeking, knowledge contributing, trust and reciprocity so as to provide some guidance for knowledge management practice in China.

Data collected from 430 users of Web 2.0 virtual communities were used for data analysis. The independent samples t-test, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), paired samples t-test and correlation analysis were employed.

The independent samples t-test and one-way ANOVA present the effect of individual differences on knowledge contributing, knowledge seeking, trust and norm of reciprocity. The paired samples t-test suggests that employees are more likely to seek knowledge from than contribute knowledge to Web 2.0 virtual communities. The correlation analysis suggests there are positive correlations between knowledge contributing, knowledge seeking, trust and reciprocity.

Knowledge management initiatives in Chinese organizations are encountered relatively less frequently, compared with western countries. The authors suggest the findings of this study provide useful insights into the informal knowledge sharing in Web 2.0 virtual communities, which is helpful for guiding knowledge management practice in China.

Based on knowledge quantity and knowledge quality whose significance cannot be over-emphasized in virtual communities, this study explores employee perceptions of Web 2.0 virtual communities from the perspective of knowledge sharing, which the authors think provides a new view for knowledge sharing research and practice alike in China.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a method to have more accurate results in comparing performance of the paired information retrieval (IR) systems with reference to the current method, which is based on the mean effectiveness scores of the systems across a set of identified topics/queries.

Based on the proposed approach, instead of the classic method of using a set of topic scores, the documents level scores are considered as the evaluation unit. These document scores are the defined document’s weight, which play the role of the mean average precision (MAP) score of the systems as a significance test’s statics. The experiments were conducted using the TREC 9 Web track collection.

The p-values generated through the two types of significance tests, namely the Student’s t-test and Mann-Whitney show that by using the document level scores as an evaluation unit, the difference between IR systems is more significant compared with utilizing topic scores.

Utilizing a suitable test collection is a primary prerequisite for IR systems comparative evaluation. However, in addition to reusable test collections, having an accurate statistical testing is a necessity for these evaluations. The findings of this study will assist IR researchers to evaluate their retrieval systems and algorithms more accurately.

The aim of this paper is to better understand the impact of petroleum production facilities on ambient air quality of host airshed.

Field measurements were taken daily for four consecutive months around petroleum production facilities in the Niger Delta area, of Nigeria, one of the world's important petroleum producing areas. Statistical analysis tool and air quality analytical tool known as the air quality index (AQI) were applied on the field data obtained.

The mean measured daily concentrations of both carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) between distances 50 and 500 m of petroleum flow stations were of the range 140 – 3400 μg/m3 and 23 – 1250 μg/m3 respectively. The AQI from measured CO concentrations in the study area ranged between 1 and 44, an indication of good AQI category with no known health effects but a need for cautionary statement. Similarly, over 97 percent of the measured concentrations of NO₂ were below 0.60 ppm which implies that the AQI of the host environment of the flow stations were below 200 with respect to NO₂ thus indicating a good category of air with no health alarm. However, at the 60 m distance around a flow station, the AQI was 210 thus the quality of available air at this point could be described as very unhealthy. Generally the concentrations of CO were higher than NO₂ in all the distances from the flow stations and were corroborated with their significant T‐test values. The T‐test results of the relationship between the concentrations of the air pollutants per time of the day, showed that their T‐test values were not significant, indicating that concentrations of these air pollutants were independent of the sampling time. A strong and positive correlation existed between the two air pollutants signifying common sources.

The paper highlights that at 60 m distance around petroleum production facilities, people with respiratory or heart disease, the elderly and children should be prevented from gaining access in the morning without taking necessary precautionary measures against the inhalation of air pollutants.