Search results

This work uses survey data from the Portuguese Securities Market Commission (Comissão de Mercado de Valores Mobiliários – CMVM) to examine financial literacy and literacy bias. The main objective of this study is to shed light on this issue by identifying the individual characteristics that are associated with financial literacy, namely overconfidence and underconfidence, which in turn might help explain individuals' financial decisions. The study distinguishes two groups, i.e. students and nonstudents, and considers several characteristics that are usually employed in this stream of research.

The data are based on a survey conducted by a partnership between the CMVM and a consortium of Portuguese universities. This paper has a three-fold aim. First, it studies the main individual features associated with objective financial literacy. Second, it analyzes the relationship between those variables and the bias between self-perceived and objective literacy, distinguishing overconfidence and underconfidence. Third, and most originally, this framework was also used to examine the differences between students and nonstudents. Those aims are pursued using cross-sectional ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions, except for the study of the literacy bias, for which the authors use an ordered probit.

Literacy is higher in individuals of the male gender who are older, have higher incomes, live in metropolitan areas, are highly educated, have a field of study related to finance and have high self-perceived literacy. Younger people are more overconfident. Unconditionally, women are less overconfident than men, but conditionally, they overestimate their knowledge. People holding securities and with a field of study related to finance are more overconfident. The gender effect is mainly driven by students, and the impact of a field of study and of holding securities on overconfidence decreases and increases, respectively, for students. The results highlight the importance of financial education.

Due to the way that the questionnaire was made available, there is no guarantee that the sample is representative of the Portuguese general population, or, for that matter, representative of the typical Portuguese retail investors or households. Also, there is no guarantee that the same individual did not answer the questionnaire more than once, although this is highly improbable. The link to the online questionnaire was only transmitted within e-mail databases owned by the CMVM and Portuguese universities, so the authors cannot guarantee its unbiasedness.

The authors' results may help the National Plan for Financial Education (the acronym in Portuguese is PNFF) fine-tune the required actions towards different target groups and, most importantly, highlight that different groups may require different approaches aiming to narrow the gap between objective and perceived literacy. The first step should be creating procedures to provide feedback on the objective and perceived literacy of those who enroll in financial formation programs.

The study distinguishes two groups, students and nonstudents, providing additional insights that might guide policymakers on how to structure financial education to enhance individual financial behavior. This is especially important in a country such as Portugal which has the lowest objective financial literacy in the Eurozone.

This study contributes to the financial literacy literature, in particular to the stream of research that focuses on psychological biases, by shedding light on the factors associated with both individual overconfidence and underconfidence. Differentiating between students and nonstudents provides additional insights, which might guide policymakers on how to structure financial education to enhance individual financial behavior.

The aim of this study is to analyze the differences between non-standard forms of employment (FoE) (i.e. dependent self-employment/business-to-business/B2B contract and contract of mandate) in terms of investing in the development of future competencies by employees and employers. This study also examined additional factors which influence these investments.

To collect data, the computer-assisted telephone interview technique was used. 200 employees from different companies located in Poland participated in this study, wherein each of the above-mentioned FoEs (i.e. dependent self-employment and contract of mandate) was represented by 100 people. The Chi-Square test and multivariate logistic regression analysis were used in the statistical analyses.

In the case of only 2 out of 14 competencies, there were statistically significant differences between the two groups of respondents: the employers financed training courses for B2B employees more frequently than for mandate contract workers. Moreover, in only one case there was a statistically significant difference: the self-employed financed training courses themselves more often than mandate contract workers. This study revealed an important impact of other variables such as respondents’ age, education level, parental status and industry on the training activities undertaken by employers and employees.

Although the issue of developing future competencies is important, there is little research examining this problem in the context of people who work in non-standard FoE. Moreover, previous research primarily focused on identifying differences between people working under employment contracts and the self-employed. This article fills these research gaps as well as shows that more factors should be considered in the research models to get a deeper insight into the problem of non-standard FoEs.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate if, given personal, supply-related features, and labour demand-related variables, there is a difference in the share of women finding more stable jobs with respect to men, in an eight-year time span.

Fragmentation leads to a lower probability of transitioning into more certain, full-time work positions. The authors analyse a rich cohort of dependent workers in Emilia-Romagna to investigate whether part-time jobs lead to full-time jobs in a “stepping-stone” fashion and whether this happens with the same probability for men and women. The focus is on the cost of part-time jobs rather than the contrast between permanent and temporary jobs, as often observed in the literature. The authors also evaluate the transition between part-time job formulae and open-ended work arrangements to determine whether women's transition to full-fledged, stable work positions is slightly rarer than their male counterparts. Even if the authors allow for the fact that part-time contracts can be a choice and not an obligation, these contracts generate more flexibility in managing the equilibrium between private and work life and create more uncertainty than full-time contracts because of the fragmentation associated with these arrangements.

The authors find that women have a more fragmented working career than men, in that they hold more contracts than men in the same time span; moreover, the authors find that part-time jobs act more as bottlenecks for women than for men.

The authors use a large administrative dataset with over 600,000 workers observed in the 2008–2015 time span, in Emilia Romagna, Italy. The authors can disentangle the number of contracts per worker and observe individual, anonymise personal features, that the authors consider in the authors' propensity score estimate. The authors ran a robustness check of the PSM estimates through coarsened exact matching (CEM).

While much of the literature testing for shirking by professional athletes have used performance metrics, some works have quantified shirking in dollar terms by comparing salary to estimated marginal revenue product (MRP). However, Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) approaches to measuring shirking by comparing salary to MRP have an endogeneity problem, as salary and contract length are determined simultaneously. We test for shirking in Major League Baseball (MLB) using an MRP approach, addressing this potential endogeneity.

This paper uses instrumental variables regression to address potential endogeneity using MLB season-level player and team data from 2010 to 2017.

Using OLS regression, the impact of an additional year of guaranteed contract on shirking is estimated at approximately $1m in 2010 US dollars, and the impact of having a long-term contract is estimated at $5m, estimates comparable to those in the literature. Using instrumental variables regression, these impacts increase to $1.6m and over $9m in 2010 dollars.

Given large, causal shirking estimates, profit maximizing sports organizations should take caution when negotiating long-term contracts. These findings also have important implications for other labor market settings where workers feel job security.

To our knowledge, this is the first work testing for shirking in sports using an MRP approach which uses instrumental variables regression to address potential endogeneity.

This study aims to seek, on the basis of Hofstede's culture consequences, to explore the notion that regional characteristics may influence the prioritisation of certain types of public-private partnerships (PPP) contract governance skills over others. It further sets out to determine which skills are considered the most critical between the groups of respondents surveyed.

To bring this important and neglected perspective into the mainstream of PPP discussions, the study, being of an exploratory nature, relied on a survey of 340 respondents from around the globe. The respondents are a rich mix of public policy experts, economists, construction professionals, project finance experts, lawyers and academic researchers in PPP.s.

Analysis revealed that, regional characteristics was an important factor influencing skills prioritisation. Furthermore, exploratory factor analysis with Monte Carlo principal component analysis (PCA) confirmation revealed that project management, contract design, negotiations, performance management and stakeholder management skills were very critical for successful contract management of PPP projects.

The findings indicate that the design and implementation of regulatory governance for infrastructure PPPs should be context-specific rather than the current one-size-fits all model. Training should be tailored to reflect regional specific characteristics.

Studies are increasingly pointing to the absence of critical PPP skills among institutions responsible for managing PPP contracts. This lack of capacity has resulted in poor oversight of private companies providing public services resulting in poor services, and financial recklessness, which threaten the sustainability of service provision.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of board characteristics (board size, board independence and duality) on the performance of takaful insurance providers with distinguishable muamalah contracts (wakalah and hybrid) moderated by ownership concentration.

The sample consists of 30 takaful insurances. The authors divided it into two subsamples: 18 insurance companies using wakalah contracts provided by Southeast Asia and 12 insurance companies using hybrid contracts provided by the Gulf Cooperation Council over the period 2010–2020. For data analysis, the authors used the partial least squares path modeling method.

The results show that the larger the board of directors and the higher the number of independent directors, the greater the takaful performance in both the wakalah and hybrid subsamples. Nondual functions improve the takaful performance in both the wakalah and hybrid subsamples. The results also reveal that a highly concentrated ownership structure positively (negatively) moderates the relationship between board size and takaful performance in the wakalah (hybrid) subsamples. Moreover, highly concentrated ownership insignificantly (negatively) moderates the relationship between independent directors and takaful’s performance in the hybrid (wakalah) subsample. Furthermore, a highly concentrated ownership structure insignificantly (negatively) moderates the relationship between the nondual structure and takaful performance in the wakalah (hybrid) subsample.

This study contributes to the understanding of the moderating role of a highly concentrated ownership structure between the characteristics of the board of directors and the performance of takaful insurance, which applies wakalah and hybrid contracts. In addition, this study contributes to takaful insurance by determining the appropriate board characteristics that must be adopted to achieve oversight and improve performance. Regulators should appreciate this contribution to the formulation of suitable approaches for efficiently supervising takaful insurance activities.

This paper aims to investigate whether the establishment of commodity futures can effectively hedge systemic risk in the spot network, given the context of financialization in the commodity futures market.

Utilizing industry association data from the Chinese commodity market, the authors identify systemically important commodities based on their importance in the production process using multiple graph analysis methods. Then the authors analyze the effect of listing futures on the systemic risk in the spot market with the staggered difference-in-differences (DID) method.

The findings suggest that futures contracts help reduce systemic risks in the underlying spot network. Systemic risk for a commodity will decrease by approximately 5.7% with the introduction of each corresponding futures contract, since the hedging function of futures reduces the timing behavior of firms in the spot market. Establishing futures contracts for upstream commodities lowers systemic risks for downstream commodities. Energy commodities, such as crude oil and coal, have higher systemic importance, with the energy sector dominating systemic importance, while some chemical commodities also have considerable systemic importance. Meanwhile, the shortest transmission path for risk propagation is composed of the energy industry, chemical industry, agriculture/metal industry and final products.

The paper provides the following policy insights: (1) The role of futures contracts is still positive, and future contracts should be established upstream and at more systemically important nodes in the spot production chain. (2) More attention should be paid to the chemical industry chain, as some chemical commodities are systemically important but do not have corresponding futures contracts. (3) The risk source of the commodity spot market network is the energy industry, and therefore, energy-related commodities should continue to be closely monitored.

The global insurance industry has implemented International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) 17 insurance contracts effective from January 1, 2023. The Islamic insurance (Takaful) industry would find itself at a crossroads if IFRS 17 should also be adopted for Takaful contracts. This paper aims to explore the process of IFRS 17 adoption for Takaful contracts in Malaysia and the implementation of the standard in the early adoption year.

Applying a qualitative approach, this study uses a literature review search and interviews to analyze deeper into the adoption process in Malaysia. Using institutional work, this paper analyses the process timeline, the actors and their roles and actions in the adoption process. The authors interviewed 12 informants from different backgrounds comprising the national standard setters, preparers and the IFRS 17 consultants.

The adoption process of IFRS 17 in Malaysia is an interplay between the accounting standard setter, the government and the industry associations who are the major actors in the process. These actors have different roles and contributions, but they work together to accomplish a single vision, adopting IFRS 17 for all. There is an interplay between actors to disrupt the accounting practice and involved in creating various institutional work to ensure the concerns of Takaful practitioners are well addressed. This research also found that the companies faced significant challenges in applying the standard in the early months of implementation.

This paper contributes to the literature by providing an explanation and examples of the IFRS adoption for Shariah transactions. The story of Malaysia can become a case study for other countries that are still deciding on adopting IFRS 17, especially for the Islamic insurance industry.

The story of Malaysia can become a case study for other countries that are still deciding on adopting IFRS 17, especially for the Islamic insurance industry.

This paper contributes to the literature on the debate of the application of IFRS to Shariah transactions by using institutional work theory as a framework.

Drawing on organismic integration theory, we aim to examine whether the reasons independent contractors choose contract work are related to their on-the-job motivation and job satisfaction and whether their perceived support enhances positive (or buffers negative) effects.

We collected data at three separate time points from 241 adjunct instructors to test a moderated mediation model using bootstrapping analyses.

The positive relationship between pull factors (e.g. autonomy) and job satisfaction is fully mediated by the autonomous motivation contractors experienced at work. The inverse relationship between push factors (e.g. inability to secure desired work role) and job satisfaction is not mediated by autonomous nor controlled motivation experienced at work. Contractors' perceived organizational support does not moderate the relationship between either push or pull factors and autonomous motivation. Post hoc analysis shows a moderating effect of perceived supervisor support on the nonlinear relationship between push factors and autonomous motivation.

Recruiting individuals drawn to the benefits of contract work may have important implications for worker motivation, job satisfaction and potentially beyond. Moreover, organizations may consider whether existing support resources and infrastructure are appropriate for contractors.

Despite the abundance of evidence demonstrating the benefits of organizational and supervisor support among traditional employee populations, such support may be of limited value to those drawn to contract work.

Management of power distribution companies (discoms) in India has been historically criticized on the ground of inefficient management. Inefficiency in operations triggered management by private franchisees for promotion of managerial and technical expertise. However, franchise contracts have achieved mixed outcomes despite the business model being a decade old in the Indian power distribution sector. Therefore, this study sheds light on the drivers of discoms (principal) with the franchisees (agent) for the achievement of the common performance goals, highlighting the agency issues at multiple levels across the organizational hierarchies. The study seeks to acknowledge the commonalities and differences between and across varying levels.

A qualitative embedded single case study was conducted in an Indian state, namely Odisha. The study was built on archival analysis, personal observations and semi-structured interviews with the franchisors and franchisee officials across the organization's hierarchical levels. A conceptual model based on the review of prior literature formed the set of coding and presentation for the study.

The study provides insights on factors that play a role in effective power distribution management, operational efficiency and improved financial performance through the partnership of the principal and the agent.

The study is predominantly dependent upon interviews. This paved the way for the limitation of human biases. Additionally, deep insights were drawn from a single case study of a discom's decision to hire franchisees. However, this was at the cost of the number of organizations interviewed. The findings of the study could be built across other areas or nations.

There is adequate literature on franchising as a business model. However, literature is lacking in highlighting the commonalities and differences between different contracting parties and their impact on the performance of the contract. Additionally, there is a dearth of literature on franchising in the power distribution sector. Therefore, studying the model from multiple perspectives would contribute to the literature on the power sector and franchising.