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This paper investigates discrimination against women within the Brazilian labour market using firm-level data from the World Bank Investment Climate Survey. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the female employees in the Brazilian labour market are paid less than their productivity warrants due to the existence of discrimination.

Based on employer discrimination model proposed by Becker (1971) that considered the proportion of female employees as a proxy for the extent of discrimination, the authors estimate the profit function using OLS analysis, and regress it on the proportion of female employees and other firm characteristics. To address the endogeneity problem caused by unobservable productivity shocks, the authors employed the methods proposed by Olley and Pakes (1996) and Levinsohn and Petrin (2003), respectively.

The results indicate that the proportion of female employees has positive effect on firms’ profit in 2002, but has no effect in 2007. This finding gives evidence of the existence of discrimination against female employees within the Brazilian labour market in the early 2000s, while the gender discrimination was reduced overtime.

This paper’s main contribution is to provide an approach that differs from that of previous research to determine whether discrimination exists within the Brazilian labour market. This paper also provides policy insights for Brazilian labour market.

The goal of this review paper is to provide information on several commonly used thermography techniques in semiconductor and micro‐device industry and research today.

The temperature imaging or mapping techniques include thin coating methods such as liquid crystal thermography and fluorescence microthermography, contact mechanical methods such as scanning thermal microscopy, and optical techniques such as infrared microscopy and thermoreflectance. Their principles, characteristics and applications are discussed.

Thermal issues play an important part in optimizing the performance and reliability of high‐frequency and high‐packing density electronic circuits. To improve the performance and reliability of microelectronic devices and also to validate thermal models, accurate knowledge of local temperatures and thermal properties is required.

The paper provides readers, especially technical engineers in industry, a general knowledge of several commonly used thermography techniques in the semiconductor and micro‐device industries.

This paper aims to analyse two ways in which Chinese workers attempt to resist unjust treatment: exit through quitting and voice via collective action. This is in the context of rapid economic growth, rising economic inequality (Lu and Gao, 2011; Qin et al., 2009; Reed, 2012) and escalating industrial conflict (Pringle, 2011).

A model is developed and hypotheses formulated in the light of qualitative data analysis that included archival data, workplace observation and interviews with employees and managers at a large factory. A mediated chain model was tested based on a survey of 234 semi-skilled and skilled manual workers and 353 service employees employed in the same city in Western China.

Organisational identification and organisational cynicism were found to mediate the relationship between interactional justice and the two outcomes, intention to quit and collective opposition.

The authors’ interpretation of these relationships challenge previous research by showing that social identification is a more powerful explanation than social exchange in accounting for variations in these two outcomes. Implications are drawn for human resource theory and practice.

The study aims to find out the university students' health information service needs in post-COVID-19 age and then consider how to do the health information services well and promote it in further work.

This study uses Kano model to design a questionnaire about university students' health information service needs from academic library and investigates 243 students from seven universities in China. The data generated were analyzed using a statistical tool and presented in tables.

The results show the students' different requirements level of health information services from academic library as must-be requirements, one-dimensional requirements, attractive quality attributes and indifferent quality in post-COVID-19 age.

The questionnaire design and the scale of respondents have limitation, such as only focus on Chinese university, have not characteristically research on different group of students. It could optimize to cover more worldwide university students and refer to different groups of students' needs in further research.

The paper expands and deepens the theory about university library health information service and provides a practical reference and proposes some suggestions for academic libraries on how to carry out health information services and give the social health institutions inspiration on how to promote the health services, especially in post-COVID-19 age.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature of blended learning by practically implementing best practices in employee training.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, an organization had modified its training procedures over the course of three years to improve employee and organizational outcomes. Employee candidates who were onboarded into sales positions during the years 2019–2021 were given the opportunity to learn the content in an online format and subsequently evaluated prior to their in-person training and final evaluation to provide them with a self-paced blended learning experience. Both evaluation scores, along with the length it took to complete the trainings, were used to determine the trainings effectiveness and efficiency respectively.

The findings for the study showed that the organization was successfully able to improve upon the efficiency of the training by reducing training length and the effectiveness by improving employee outcomes.

The study’s design was limited to the probation process, which resulted in issues drawing conclusions for employee outcomes that were relevant to their long-term organizational success. This emphasizes the importance of comprehensive investigations for future practical studies.

The findings allow for the improvement of blended learning models within real-world organizational contexts that provide organizations with the opportunity to improve employee outcomes while reducing time costs.

This study provides data from applied blended learning procedures that were validated using empirical findings, which contributes to the practicality of blended learning in workplace training.

Green economy and economic development with high quality have set higher requirements for the development of the urban logistics industry. It can grasp the recent development level of the urban logistics industry by measuring its environmental efficiency to guide its future development direction. The purpose of this study is to improve the environmental efficiency and development level of the urban logistics industry by using a reasonable evaluation method.

This paper uses information entropy to directly aggregate index weights from different models to acquire comprehensive index weights (CIWs) for calculating peer-evaluation efficiency. Then, we weight self and peer-efficiencies to obtain final efficiency. The environmental efficiencies of the urban logistics industry in Anhui Province in 2019 are obtained according to the above method.

Several findings are summarized below. The logistics industry in Anhui is in urgent need of improving environmental efficiency. The environmental efficiency of the logistics industry in North Anhui is the highest one, showing that the logistics industry in North Anhui has achieved a relative balance between economic development and environmental protection. Their final cross-efficiency values based on the CIWs are smaller than those based on the comprehensive efficiency. And the environmental efficiency of almost all urban logistics industries is lower than its economic efficiency. The findings show that the proposed method is feasible and more reasonable. More economic implications and suggestions are proposed.

This paper proposes an extended cross-efficiency evaluation method based on information entropy to measure the environmental efficiency of the urban logistics industry, effectively avoiding the overestimation of efficiency results.

Aiming at the lack of explanatory power of traditional industrial organization theory in cross-border competition, by introducing the idea of ecological niche, the authors aim to explore the competitive situation of platform-based enterprises when they operate in multiple fields.

With the help of ecological niche theory, construct the niche width and niche overlap index of typical enterprises in the platform economy, and find out the advantages and the intensity of competition through comparative analysis.

In an environment of cross-border competition, large enterprises have significant competitive advantages, and the fierce competition is concentrated among medium-sized enterprises.

The conclusions of this paper not only provide new insights for explaining the phenomenon of cross-border competition in the platform economy, but also provide theoretical reference for the anti-trust enforcement practice in the platform economy.

Even though multi-rotor aircrafts are becoming more and more prevalent in the fields of aerial photography, agricultural spraying, disaster searching and rescuing, how to achieve higher reliability and robustness of an aircraft still poses a big challenge. It is not a rare case that a multi-rotor aircraft is severely damaged or crushed when an actuator or sensor is malfunctioned. This paper aims at the resilience of an aircraft when a rotor is malfunctioned.

The reliability of a multi-rotor aircraft can be measured in terms of stability, robustness, resilience and fault tolerance. All of these four aspects are taken into consideration to improve overall reliability of aircrafts. When a rotor malfunction occurs, the control algorithm is cable of adjusting the operation conditions of the rest of rotors to achieve system stability.

In this paper, the authors first present a research topic on the development of a resilient multi-robot aircraft. A multi-rotor aircraft usually possesses more actuated motions than the required degrees of freedom.

The authors proposed to equip the multi-rotor aircraft with malfunction detecting sensors, and they developed the self-repairing algorithm to re-stabilize the aircraft when a malfunction of a rotor occurs. The design concept and methods were implemented on an eight-rotor aircraft, and the performance of the proposed instrumentation and self-repairing algorithm have been verified and validated.

This paper aims to reveal the tribochemical reaction mechanism on the nano-cutting interface between HMX crystal and diamond tool.

Molecular dynamics simulation of HMX crystal nano-cutting by the reactive force field is carried out in this paper. The affinity of activated atoms and friction damage at the different interface have been well identified by comparing two cutting systems with diamond tool or indenter. The analyses of reaction kinetics, decomposition products and reaction pathways are performed to reveal the underlying atomistic origins of tribocatalytic reaction on the nano-cutting interface.

The HMX crystals only undergo damage and removal in the indenter cutting, while they appear to accelerate thermal decomposition in the diamond cutting. the C-O affinity is proved to be the intrinsic reason of the tribocatalytic reaction of the HMX-diamond cutting system. The reaction activation energy of the HMX crystals in the diamond cutting system is lower, resulting in a rapid increase in the decomposition degree. The free O atoms can induce the asymmetric ring-opening mode and change the decomposition pathways, which is the underlying atomistic origins of the thermal stability of the HMX-diamond cutting system.

This paper describes a method for analyzing the tribochemical behavior of HMX and diamond, which is beneficial to study the thermal stability in the nano-cutting of HMX.

This paper aims to review the research on accounting professionalisation in China to develop insights into how the research is developing, offer a critique of the research to date and outline future research directions and opportunities.

This paper adopts a methodological approach of systematic literature review, as suggested by Tranfield et al. (2003) and Denyer and Tranfield (2009), to identify, select and analyse the extant literature on the Chinese public accounting profession. In total, 68 academic works were included in the review process.

This paper finds that the extant literature has produced fruitful insights into the processes and underlying motivation of accounting professionalisation in China, demonstrating that the Chinese experience has differed, to a large extent, from the hitherto mainly Anglo-American-dominated understandings of accounting professionalisation. However, due to the lack of common theoretical vernacular and an agreed upon focus, the extant literature illustrates a fragmented and contradictory picture, making attempts to accumulate prior knowledge in the field increasingly difficult.

This paper focusses only on research published in English. Consequently, the scope of review has been limited as some works published in languages other than English may be excluded.

This paper provides one of the pioneering exercises to systematically review the research on accounting professionalisation in China. It explores significant issues arising from the analysis and provides several suggestions for furthering the research effort in this field.