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Recent news articles about pension funding issues highlight the importance of transparent financial reporting and disclosures for defined benefit pension plans. Using pension-related data for local governments in Michigan and Pennsylvania, we provide descriptive evidence regarding the actuarial methods and assumptions adopted and the factors that explain a government’s propensity to adopt optimistic actuarial methods and assumptions that reduce the annual required contribution. Our descriptive data suggests that actuaries are making aggressive assumptions for some governments' pension benefits. Our regression results also suggest there is an association between monitoring mechanisms, fiscal constraints, and socioeconomic factors and the choice of optimistic actuarial methods and assumptions that reduce the annual required contribution. The GASB should consider our findings as they determine whether existing standards should be clarified or whether allowable actuarial methods and assumptions should be restricted.

This study examines the relationship between board composition and firm value, and the extent to which this relationship may be affected by a company’s investment opportunity set. There is little research that examines this issue, particularly for the New Zealand market. Of the research that exists, and generally for the research that examines how board composition affects firm performance, the findings have been mixed. Using a randomly chosen sample, which improves the external validity of results from prior studies, we find that board composition of high growth option firms is positively related to firm value, and this relationship is maintained when more refined measures that proxy the characteristics of outside directors (such as tenure of outside directors, the level of outside director equity ownership, the number of other board positions held by outside directors, and the total proportion of non‐executive directors, including grey directors) are recognised.

This paper seeks to analyze the shelf management actions undertaken by dealers between manufacturer and store brands, from the manufacturer perspective. Particularly, to know whether there is an agreement in manufacturers' perceptions on the merchandising of the different brands on the shelf or, on the contrary, whether different groups of manufacturers can be identified – in the latter case, to characterize these groups of manufacturers.

The data come from a survey aimed at the business units of mass commodity companies in Spain. The variables are: seven items on agreement degree regarding the shelf management carried out by distributors, manufacturer's descriptive variables and manufacturer's competitive strategy variables. The manufacturers' perceptions are analyzed by univariate and bivariate descriptive analysis techniques. Different groups of manufacturers in relation to their merchandising and shelf space perceptions are identified by multivariate techniques of cluster and hierarchical segmentation.

On average, manufacturers consider that retailers are favoring unequal competition terms between manufacturer and store brands through better merchandising management for their own brands. Nevertheless, different groups of manufacturers are identified according to their perceptions.

The potential contribution of this research lies in the identification and characterization of different groups of manufacturers regarding their opinions about shelf management actions undertaken by retailers. Moreover, the results evidence an increasing power of retailers and show manufacturers how they can respond.

This study aims to investigate the factors affecting the motivation of graduate students of information science in scientific and research activities and science production. This research is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive in terms of type and method.

The study's statistical population includes all postgraduate information science students studying in public universities. The random sampling method was simple. The data collection tool was a questionnaire. Descriptive statistics and one-sample t-test, independent t-test, and ANOVA were used to analyze the collected data by SPSS software.

Findings showed that all the main variables (internal motivations, external motivations, self-empowerment, and intellectual and specialized interactions) affect the participation of postgraduate students in research and scientific activities. Among the identified components, the creation of opportunities, research facilities, innovation, and formal relations between students and professors, has the most significant impact on students' motivation to participate in scientific and research activities and science production. There was no significant difference between education and age. From the results obtained from the present study, it can be said that the above variables, which were divided into four categories, with the intensity of the participation of graduate students of universities that in the present study examined the field of librarianship and information, with power and Or weakness are influential. This means that the students at the beginning of the research path, in other words, will be future researchers, should be constantly monitored as a source in the production of science.

This research is one of the few types of research that examines the influential variables in increasing the motivation to participate in the study, considering the population of postgraduate students of universities and scientific institutions as drivers of science production.

This study aims to shed light on the experience of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in balancing three main pillars: the environmental criteria, the reduction of CO₂ emissions and the economic growth. Based on the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) framework, it will assess the causal relationship between economic indicators such as gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, trade openness and energy use and environmental indicators such as CO₂ emissions.

The analysis relies on a period of 40 years (1981–2020) where data is extracted from the World Bank database. This study uses the unit root test for time series stationarity, the optimal lag length test, the “Johansen” test for co-integration and the vector error correction model.

The paper concludes to two major findings. On a short-term basis, CO₂ emissions and economic indicators are negatively correlated, whereas on a long-term basis, there is no association between CO₂ emissions and economic indicators in the UAE.

The research ends with important recommendations. It illustrates the importance of rationalizing the use of primary resources and the necessity to embrace successful and efficient policies in the energy production.

More specifically, UAE is urged to address the problem of CO₂ emissions in the electricity sector and increase awareness of the use of environmentally friendly processes in the transport and industrial sectors. While setting their economic agendas, UAE are encouraged to meet environmental criteria and invest in renewable energy projects such as “Shams 1”, the largest solar power plant outside of Spain and the USA.

The current study is significant in its research on the environmental impact of economic development, trade openness and energy use policies in the UAE. It uses CO₂ emissions as an environmental proxy and evaluates the environmental policies adopted in the UAE to reduce its impact.

The purpose of this paper is to test the existence of true persistence in the generation and adoption of product innovations in the context of a developing country.

A dynamic probit model with random effects is used to test true persistence relying on a panel data set constructed from three waves of the Colombian innovation survey (Encuesta de Desarrollo e Innvovación Tecnológica) covering the time span from 2003 to 2008.

This paper empirically shows the existence of true innovation persistence for two of the three types of product innovation studied: the adoption of product innovation that is new to the firm; and the adoption of product innovation that is new to the national market. However, the study could not confirm true persistence in the generation of product innovation.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that systematically tests innovation persistence differentiating between the adoption of innovations that are new to the firm and innovation that is new to the national market. It is also the first study in this research area that uses a dynamic probit model with random effects according to the original specification by Wooldridge (2005).

En este trabajo se prueba la existencia de verdadera persistencia en la generación y adopción de innovaciones de productos en el contexto de un país en desarrollo.

Para probar la existencia de verdadera persistencia se estima un modelo probit dinámico con efectos aleatorios utilizando tres cohortes de la Encuesta de Desarrollo e Innvovación Tecnológica (EDIT) que cubren el periodo de tiempo 2003-2008.

Este trabajo muestra empíricamente la existencia de verdadera persistencia en dos de los tres tipos de innovación de productos estudiados: en i) la adopción de innovación de productos nuevo para la empresa, y ii) la adopción de innovación de productos nuevo para el mercado nacional. Sin embargo, el estudio no pudo confirmar la verdadera persistencia en la generación de innovación de productos.

Este es el primer estudio que evalúa sistemáticamente la persistencia en la innovación diferenciando entre la adopción de innovaciones que son nuevas para la empresa de las que lo son para el mercado nacional. También es el primer estudio en esta área de investigación que utiliza un modelo probit dinámico con efectos aleatorios de acuerdo con la especificación original de Wooldridge (2005).

The purpose of this paper is to determine how and why differences in gender affect entrepreneurial intention (EI). Although there are many studies in this area, scholars have yet to reach a consensus.

This study uses a survey of students at Malaga University in two stages to introduce a new perspective that links gender and university degree subject with the predisposition towards business creation. Structural equation modelling (SEM) is applied.

Comparing the explanatory power of an additive model and a multiplicative model, this paper confirms that socialisation conditions both men and women in their choice of university studies. Consequently, gender and university degree subject choice are shown to be linked and both affect EI.

These findings provide a starting point for closing the information gap in the literature, but deeper analysis is required to combine other factors, such as international variations and the influence of different education systems on entrepreneurship.

These results are of special value to universities interested in fomenting entrepreneurship in their graduates, allowing them to better propose educational policies and communication campaigns reducing the effect of gender on degree choice.

The contribution of this research is the development of introducing university degree subjects as tied to gender. The study forms one construct together, and not a descriptive variable of the sample selected or as two independent exogenous variables, as is the case in most of the literature in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of agricultural cooperative membership on farmers’ decisions to adopt integrated pest management (IPM) technology and to estimate the impact of IPM adoption on farm economic performance.

An endogenous switching probit model that addresses the sample selection bias issue arising from both observed and unobserved factors is used to estimate the survey data from a sample of 481 apple households in China. A treatment effects model is employed to estimate the impact of IPM adoption on apple yields, net returns and agricultural income. In order to address the potential endogeneity associated with off-farm work variable in estimating both cooperative membership choice specification and IPM adoption specifications, a control function approach is used.

The empirical results show that cooperative membership exerts a positive and significant impact on the adoption of IPM technology. In particular, farmers’ IPM adoption decision is significantly associated with household and farm-level characteristics (e.g. education, farm size and price knowledge). IPM adoption has a positive and statistically significant impact on apple yields, net returns and agricultural income.

The findings indicate that agricultural cooperatives can be a transmission route in the efforts to proliferate the adoption and diffusion of IPM technology, and increased IPM adoption tends to improve the economic performance of farm households.

Despite the widespread evidence of health and environmental benefits associated with IPM technology, the adoption rate of this technology remains significantly low. This paper provides a first attempt by investigating to what extent and how agricultural cooperative membership affects IPM adoption and how IPM adoption influences farm economic performance.