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This study aims to investigate the influence of tendon layout, pre-stressing force, bond condition and concrete spalling on the structural behaviour of two-way post-tensioned flat slabs at elevated temperatures.

Fire tests of four scale specimens of two-way post-tensioned concrete flat slabs were performed and analysed. Three of them were provided with bonded tendons, while the other was unbonded for comparison. The fabrication of specimens, phenomena observed during testing, temperature distributions, deflections and occurrence of concrete spalling were examined.

Different degrees of concrete spalling observed at the soffit had significant effects on the temperature distribution and stress redistribution. This was the major reason for the progressive concrete spalling observed, resulting in loss of structural integrity and stiffness.

The structural behaviour of two-way post-tensioned concrete flat slabs at elevated temperatures is less understood compared to their one-way counterparts. Therefore, the present study has focused on the structural behaviour of two-way post-tensioned concrete flat slabs with bonded tendons in fire, a field in which relatively little information on experimental work can be found.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of brand love by studying its intensity and the nature of extreme forms of it, rather than its presence or absence. The love of a sports team is a type of brand love and is a valuable context to study of brand love intensity because the intensity of love can become more extreme than for products; it has two distinctive features that are theoretically, management and policy relevant; and it is an under-researched context in marketing that is socially and economically significant.

The authors empirically develop and test a multidimensional hierarchical higher-order measure of the intensity of team love and a model of its drivers and outcomes using a sample of supporter club members of a professional sports team who vary in their intensity of love for the team.

The results support our measurement model and its distinctive features, especially the importance of the perceived two-way bond fans have with their team. While overall intensity of team love is not related to social influence or on-field performance, as hypothesized, they are related to sub-dimensions of team love, reflecting its multidimensionality. As hypothesized, the intensity of team love and social influence are related to the intention to renew club membership even with increased costs and poor performance and social influence is directly related to word of mouth and game attendance.

The research is limited to the club members of one sports team in a particular sport in one country and one cultural context. Future research opportunities include: extending it to other sports and brand contexts, refining the methodology and addressing other issues highlighted by the research.

The results indicate the limits of management control of team love intensity because it develops over time independently through social processes. However, firms can help facilitate these processes. The social dimensions indicate the need to develop socially, as well as individually-focussed relationship management strategies. Most devoted fans are valuable customers, but some hardcore elements can be dysfunctional and sabotage the brand.

Sport is personally, social and economically significant in most cultures and love of a sports team love can be an important glue that binds people and communities. However, the existence of extreme hardcore fans and heated rivalries can also be divisive and pose challenges for social policy. Hence, the need to better understand the factors driving more extreme forms of team love to better inform the development of social policy.

The authors focus on the intensity of brand love rather than its presence and absence as in prior research. The authors develop and test a new hierarchical measure of sports team love intensity and a model of its drivers and outcomes. The sports context is under-researched in marketing but reveals the important role played by dimensions that are obscured in studies of product brand love – its social nature and the perceived reciprocal relation with devoted fans. The results contribute to developing extended theories of brand love, open up new research opportunities and have management and policy implications.

This paper investigates the static and dynamic directional return spillovers and dependence among green investments, carbon markets, financial markets and commodity markets from January 2013 to September 2020.

This study employed both the quantile vector autoregression (QVAR) and time-varying parameter VAR (TVP-VAR) technique to examine the magnitude of static and dynamic directional spillovers and dependence of markets.

Results show that the magnitude of connectedness is extremely higher at quantile levels (q = 0.05 and q = 0.95) compared to those in the mean of the conditional distribution. This connotes that connectedness between green bonds and other assets increases with shock size for both negative and positive shocks. This further indicates that return shocks spread at a higher magnitude during extreme market conditions relative to normal periods. Additional analyses show the behavior of return transmission between green bond and other assets is asymmetric.

The findings of this study offer significant implications for portfolio investors, policymakers, regulatory authorities and investment community in terms of carefully assessing the unique characteristics offered by each markets in terms of return spillovers and dependence and diversifying the portfolios.

The study, first, uses a relatively new statistical technique, the QVAR advanced by Ando et al. (2018), to capture upper and lower tails’ quantile price connectedness and directional spillover. Therefore, the results possess adequate power against departure from mean-based conditional connectedness. Second, using a portfolio of green investments, carbon markets, financial markets and commodity markets, the uniqueness of this study lies in the examination of the static and dynamic dependence of the markets examined.

The business model of monoline insurers is to guarantee payments of debt issues in case of defaults by the issuer. Although sparse attention is given to monolines in literature, they play an important role in enabling municipalities and firms in refinancing. This study aims to conduct a systematic review of 181 articles from 1990 to 2020 from 23,130 records and a case study on the key monoline insurers. Key failure, success factors and demand for future monoline insurance are identified. Finally, the study explores monolines’ potential during COVID-19 and develops a framework for monoline governance and regulation.

The study follows Briner and Denyer and Moher et al. to implement the systematic review. The methodology involves ascertaining the motivation behind the review, and formulating research questions; aggregating relevant prior literature from scientific databases, conducting quality assessment and synthesising the data; and conducting extensive analysis for framework development. Case study methodology foundation phase focuses on understanding the research philosophy. The second phase involves documenting the procedures involved. The final phase involves collecting the relevant quantitative and qualitative material. In addition, collecting empirical data from numerous sources allows triangulation.

The review results of 181 articles from 1990 to 2020 show that peak article counts occur in 2010 and 2013 (nine academic studies) and in 2008 and 2010 (six industry studies). Over- and under-explored domains happen to be bond pricing (86 academic studies) and bond markets (36 industry studies) and corporate bonds (19 academic studies), respectively. The study highlights failure factors such as adverse selection, premiums mispricings, inadequate capital and regulation, untimely downgrades and governance issues; and identifies success factors such as conservative underwriting, early financing, competitor business acquisitions and obtaining put-back claims. Potential during COVID-19 is discussed and a monoline governance framework is developed.

Search and selection criteria distortions may lead to sample selection bias in systematic reviews. Issue is addressed by using different permutations of the search key words to refine the search criteria. Reference list of collected final sample of articles are perused to identify additional articles. It is difficult to obtain verifiable empirical data on the bond/monoline insurers or their insured products, especially for the structured finance sector. Most of the information available on data stream and firm’s quarterly financial reports for publicly traded monoline/bond insurers and credit rating reports are included to overcome this issue.

Demand for bond/monoline insurance still persists even in the USA. Although borrowing costs are low, obtaining bank loans would be challenging for municipalities and corporates with increased risks. Especially, given worldwide government stimulus on wages, most municipalities would possess reduced budgets for public finance. Monoline insurance can play a key role in financing such projects. Thus, it is important to understand their unique traditional and transformed business model and applicability during and post-COVID-19. Given the near extinction of bond/monoline insurers during the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC), an adequate framework for bond/monoline insurers as developed in this study is key for future business continuity.

There is significant interest, especially, from the industry on monolines as identified in our systematic review. Monoline insurance has major effects on taxpayers, government policies and bond investors. They aid in financing public finance projects that have significant societal impact. This study contributes by filling existing gaps in the literature, especially, from a behavioural, ethical and social perspective of the monolines, regulators, other stakeholders and new entrants to the industry during COVID-19. This study links prior finance theories to the impact of bond/monoline insurer’s during the 2008 GFC and their stakeholders involved that has societal implications.

This study can be differentiated from prior research on monoline insurers as follows: The study identifies, gaps, similarities, trends between prior academic and industry literature and develop a bond/monoline governance framework; identifies key failure and success factors during the 2008 GFC crisis to develop the governance framework and identify monolines’ potential during COVID-19; as opposed to most prior literature that only focus on one (Drake and Neal, 2011 analyse MBIA) or two key bond/monoline insurers, this study focuses on five key bond/monoline insurers in detail and all other key insurers as well in the empirical analysis section.

The last great financial crisis which arose in the middle of 2007 in the USA produced contagion effects over others economies. The purpose of this paper is focused on analyzing the evolution of a set of economic variables of 17 European countries since 1991 until 2013. Sovereign bond spreads are also considered to compare the incidence of the financial crisis over the economies considering macroeconomics fundamentals and fixed bonds.

Self-organizing maps (SOMs) are used to achieve the purpose of the research. With this methodology, it is possible to analyze the evolution of the macroeconomic fundamentals of each country, obtaining particular and general conclusions according to the position of each country in the SOM. Moreover, the countries are compared between them and with its respective sovereign bond spreads level for each year of analysis.

The impact of the crisis is different between the countries was analyzed. Belonging to the European Monetary Union is an interesting characteristic of some of the most affect economies.

This research presents wide implications for the economies to control the most vulnerable economic variables in front of financial crisis to prevent the contagion effect. The inclusion of more economic variables and countries could enhance the study.

This research analyzes the relationship between macroeconomic variables and sovereign bond spreads using an infrequent methodology. The results obtained are valuable because they highlight how the present crisis has differently affected the European countries.

Empowerment has been added to the long list of environmental hazards facing the organizationally endangered species known as “middle managers”. For the sake of balance and interest, the author asked middle managers for their views regarding empowerment. This article presents the views of middle managers along with those found in the literature. Definitions are set forth, pros and cons are covered, and dos and don’ts are delineated. The author closes with the following advice for those seeking to implement empowerment: organizations should set the unifying vision for empowerment at the top management level; organizations should train and develop their line employees prior to giving them full empowerment; and organizations should rely on middle managers to provide two‐way communication and coaching for line employees as they are trained for empowerment. The article concludes that organizations should view middle managers as “bridges” rather than “blockages” to the implementation of empowerment.

The purpose of this paper is to propose new 3D light emitting diodes (LED) and integrated circuits (IC) integration packages.

These packages consist of the multi‐LEDs and active IC chip such as the application specific IC, LED driver, processor, memory, radio frequency, sensor, or power controller in a 3D manner. The assembly processes of these packages are also presented and discussed.

The advantages of these 3D integration packages are found to be: better performance, lower cost, less footprint, lighter package, and smaller form factor.

A thermal management system for 3D IC and LEDs integration packages is proposed.

4 Heat exchanger experiments To study the performance of the ferritic 18 Cr‐2 Mo steel under actual heat exchanger conditions, large scale model heat exchangers were fabricated. After experiments to fabricate heat exchanger plates under standard stretch‐forming conditions, our investigations were confined to heat exchangers of the tubular type.

This paper aims to address the nature of docility in organizations, its practical role in attention scarcity and knowledge diffusion in complex organizations and the management implications for organizational learning and innovation to improve knowledge management.

This paper examines knowledge organizations from the perspective of human resource strategies, their role in information abundance and attention scarcity and techniques to enhance docility mechanisms at different levels of the organization to increase innovation and performance.

This paper, in reviewing the organization literature on attention scarcity, addresses the shortage of studies linking the need for docility – the desire to learn from workers and the desire to teach – in personnel practices of knowledge firms, where intense social interaction, social feedback and social learning are the norms.

Knowledge management – scanning, creation, coordination, interpreting, transfer and integration – may well be the basis of competitive advantage, based on human resource strategies to mobilize explicit and tacit knowledge via docility mechanisms, including mentoring, teamwork, coaching and deep collaboration.

Decades ago, Herbert A. Simon introduced this new concept, docility, which is now central to knowledge organizations that face information abundance and attention scarcity. Knowledge organizations require tools of docility to align human resource strategies to both strategic management and operational functions to enhance teaching and learning in design structures that are time-constrained.

This study aims to examine the factor of social experience influencing an individual’s purchase decision in the social commerce (SC) environment by proposing a model developed based on the social impact theory. The proposed model consists of the number, closeness and tie strength of the influencing factor and the receiver.

A total of 288 responses were collected from Indonesian SC users to validate the theoretical model, which consists of perceived herd behavior, peer communication, emotional support, parasocial interaction and subjective norms. This study also explores the moderating effects of gender, age, experiences and occupations on the direct effect of model variables, which affect the individual’s intention to purchase in SC.

The results of this study showed that parasocial interaction is the strongest determinant of intention to purchase in SC, followed by perceived herd behavior and peer communication. However, the direct effect of subjective norms and emotional support were found insignificant in this study. For moderating effects, only gender and occupation were significant in terms of the immediate effect of peer communication, perceived herd behavior and subjective norms on intention to purchase.

The study contributes to theory in the form of insight on immediate effect and the exploratory investigation of moderating effects. It also contributes to practice by suggesting several practical actions based on the findings designed to achieve the objective of improving customers’ intention to purchase in SC.