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The purpose of this paper is to explore the demand for conditional accounting conservatism from equity shareholders in state-controlled firms.

This study presents empirical investigation of firms listed on Hong Kong Stock Exchange from 1997 to 2013.

The first finding is the extent of conditional conservatism in state-controlled firms increases when the leverage ratio decreases. It is also found that the high control rights held by the government in state-controlled firms are associated with high conditional conservatism. In addition, further analyses document the an offsetting effect between high control rights and firm leverage; a reinforcing effect between high control rights and year of incorporation after 1992; and a substituting effect between high control rights and dividend payments.

These findings suggest that the demand from equity shareholders, in addition to the debt demand, can be an important determinant of conditional conservatism and examination of these differing sources of demand can enhance the understanding on accounting conservatism in state-controlled firms.

Discusses a successful business process reengineering project that involved purchasing, receiving and accounts payable departments in an international firm in the USA. These three departments’ business processes, workflows and functions are described and analyzed. Methods for improving the existing workflows by developing an auto vouchering system and an electronic data interchange system are suggested. The cost and benefit analysis is applied to evaluate these methods. Implications and recommendations for the top management are discussed, including the insights of the cross‐functional design among departments, the empowerment of employees, the improvement of morale in the departments, the formulation of new policies and procedures for the new system, and the establishment of a separate database system for reference.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of resilience enablers in combating counterfeits in the medicine supply chain based on a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). The objective is also to help practitioners and scholars as the review revealed that little research has been conducted on selecting and implementing practices to improve resilience to counterfeiting.

Based on the literature review, a content analysis was performed for 84 selected papers to explore the potential relationship among resilience enablers and counterfeit anti-measures.

This paper contributes to Supply Chain Resilience (SCR) research by summarizing the highly fragmented literature concerning how to combat counterfeiting. The SLR indicated reengineering, collaboration, visibility, innovation, SCR culture and trust as six key enablers to combat counterfeit medicines and identified literature gaps. Moreover, the paper discusses other resilience enablers which have been less studied in the literature and shows new avenues of research.

This paper is limited in that it is an exploratory literature review and focuses only on three databases over the past 15 years. Furthermore, counterfeit is a rapidly evolving issue and anti-measure studies require frequent surveillance concerning new discoveries.

The main contribution of this paper is to provide a better understanding of enablers most often associated with counterfeit anti-measures, which, therefore, might help to increase resilience to counterfeit medicines. Moreover, research gaps involving enablers less associated with anti-measures are presented.

Surely an article whose author is also part of its subject will seem at best odd to some and at worst self‐serving to others. Perhaps a bit of explanation of this article's genesis will moderate those reactions.

Rural Australian patients continue to receive inadequate medical attention. One potential solution to this is to train Indigenous Australians to become medical doctors and return to their community to serve their people. The study aims to examine whether Indigenous medical students have a stronger intention to practice in underserved communities.

A sample of Indigenous (N = 17) and non-Indigenous students (N = 188) from a medical program in Sydney was surveyed about their medical self-concept and motivation. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted, group differences were tested, and correlation patterns were examined.

CFA found seven distinct factors – three medical self-concepts (affective, cognitive, and cultural competence), one motivation factor, and three work-related variables – intention to serve underserved communities (intention), understanding of Indigenous health (understanding), and work-related anxiety (anxiety). Indigenous medical students were higher in cultural competence, intention, and understanding. Both the affective and cognitive components of medical self-concept were more highly correlated with intention and understanding for Indigenous students than for non-Indigenous students.

It is important to examine medical students’ self-concepts as well as their cultural characteristics and strengths that seed success in promoting service to underserved Indigenous communities.

The findings show that Indigenous medical students tended to understand Indigenous health issues better and to be more willing to serve underserved Indigenous communities. By enhancing both the affective and cognitive components of medical self-concepts, the “home-grown” medical education program is more likely to produce medical doctors to serve underserved communities with a good understanding of Indigenous health.

The paper studies the simultaneous effect of formal and informal volunteering on self-perceived individual health across nine European countries while controlling, among other things, for socioeconomic characteristics and social and cultural participation.

This paper employs the 2006 wave of the EU-SILC dataset for estimating recursive trivariate probit models using instrumental variables.

The paper finds that although formal volunteering and informal volunteering are correlated with each other, they have different impacts on health. Formal volunteering is never correlated with higher self-perceived individual health except in the Netherlands. In contrast, informal volunteering is related to lower self-perceived individual health in Austria, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy.

The first limitation concerns the absence of other measures of volunteering, such as volunteering hours that are not available in the employed dataset. The second limitation is that the dataset collection on social and cultural variables in EU-SILC is cross-sectional while the optimal dataset should be a panel data. The third limitation is that instrumental variables are observed in the same year of declaring self-perceived individual health while the optimal timing would be at least one year before.

Findings of the paper show that formal volunteering has no effect on self-perceived individual health while informal volunteering has negative consequences.

Volunteering is performed because of an individual decision and could be considered a consequence of how social responsibilities are distributed within countries. Our results show that informal volunteering has a negative effect on health; this is likely to depend on how people manage stress coming from performing this altruistic activity. It is likely that a more cautious distribution of social responsibilities could prevent the negative effects of informal volunteering on health.

The originality of the present paper is in simultaneously examining the impact of formal and informal volunteering on self-perceived individual health. Furthermore, most of the existing studies on formal volunteering and health focus on a single country; this paper compares nine European countries characterized by different social, cultural, economic, and institutional features. Finally, the paper addresses the issue of reverse causation.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-11-2017-0548

Near the end of his life, the eminent literary critic Edmund Wilson was editing his notebooks from the Twenties for publication. At one point he added a long passage on Elinor Wylie, a close friend and successful writer whose work he admired:

The purpose of this paper is to determine if the US Treasury's at‐the‐market sales of 5.27 billion Citigroup shares in 2010 drove down the banks' share price. It attempts to use the evidence of Citigroup's stock returns to accept or reject competing hypotheses of larger stock sales.

The paper uses a geometric Brownian motion model to test if there were abnormal returns at various points in the US Treasury's highly publicized stock sale that lasted from 26 April to 6 December 2010.

There was a weakly significant drop in the stock price at the announcement of the sale and a weakly significant rise in the stock price just after it ended. This is evidence that the demand curve for the stock had a negative slope.

The evidence from this study will influence policy makers and investors in the upcoming privatizations of large bailed‐out firms such as American International Group, Ally Financial, Chrysler, and General Motors. The evidence indicates that slow at‐the‐market sales may temporarily depress stock prices more than quicker, underwritten secondary offerings. Patient investors may experience modest abnormal returns from providing liquidity to the US Treasury as it privatizes its holdings.

This is the only paper to study the stock price impacts of the US Treasury's liquidation of its 27 percent stake in Citigroup in 2010. Because the stock sales were delegated to a third party and highly publicized, unlike most other large stock sales, the Citigroup privatization is an unprecedented opportunity to test if the demand curve for common stocks is perfectly elastic.