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Low interest rates around the world due to adaptive monetary policy regulations for some time a source of concern for the banking sector and depositors of the bank. In this environment, interest rates have raised concerns about nominal deposit interest rates which cannot be lowered below zero without destroying bank customers. Bank loans are becoming less vulnerable to lower interest rates on deposits approaching zero, indicating that the financial channel is weakened when interest rates are close to zero. Demographic pressures associated with longer life expectancy, China's gradual integration into global financial markets and changes in supply and asset requirements are attributed as reasons for low interest rates. Volatility of CPI inflation, interest rates on bank deposits attracting income tax and discontented depositors due to lower rates are cited as reasons for the suffering of bank depositors. This chapter thus discusses the impact of negative rate on economic growth and bank customers besides discussing the future trends of negative interest rates.

This study aims to contribute to the literature on migration by examining the nexus between migration-related fears and housing affordability in France, Germany, the UK and the USA using new datasets for migration-related fears.

This study adopts the feasible quasi-generalized least squares approach wherein a predictor can be isolated in the estimation process. Thus, rather than specifying a multi-predictor model that may also lead to parameter proliferation, a single-predictor model (for the predictor of interest) is formulated while also accounting for other salient features resulting from suppressing other important factors that may not be of interest to the current study. Such salient features include persistence, endogeneity and conditional heteroscedasticity issues.

Overall, the results show heterogeneous responses of housing affordability to migration fears across the four developed countries, as the latter deteriorates housing affordability in Germany and the USA and improves it in France and the UK. Similarly, the GFC makes housing less affordable in all four countries as low interest rate passes the mediation test in the nexus. The results, especially for low interest rates, are robust to different uncertainty measures.

As is often the case with economic phenomena, no single model can capture all the factors influencing an economic variable. Thus, besides examining the nexus between migration fears and housing affordability, the authors also account for the role of GDP per capita, given the influence of population and income dynamics on housing affordability. However, incorporating GDP per capita alone does not substantially enhance the model’s ability to predict housing affordability. Future research should explore additional macroeconomic and social factors, such as human capital development, to further enhance this subject.

The findings have significant implications for policymakers regarding the use of low interest rates to counteract the adverse effects of migration-related fear on housing affordability. Specifically, to mitigate the potential negative impact of migration and the associated fear on housing affordability, monetary authorities could adopt a more accommodative stance on mortgages. By allowing real estate investors to obtain loans at lower rates, this approach would help increase housing supply and reduce the housing gap exacerbated by migration influx.

The values of this study lie in its examination of housing affordability in relation to migration fears from both the demand and supply sides of the market. Furthermore, the analyses are conducted to cover out-of-sample forecast evaluation as in-sample predictability may not guarantee out-of-sample prediction.

This conceptual paper aims to demonstrate a holistic, multifaceted framework of interest development, information search, and knowledge construction (ISK) on children’s diverse information search behaviors.

By reviewing previous literature on children’s interest development, online information seeking and search, and knowledge construction, we propose the ISK framework. Then, we provide example case studies with pilot analyses using qualitative approaches (e.g. video-based interaction analysis, thematic analysis) showing how the framework can be applied to different types of authentic information-seeking situations for children.

The ISK framework demonstrates the multifaceted interplays between children’s information behavior and their cognitive and affective development. This framework was supported using previous studies and pilot empirical applications. We also included potential research questions that could be addressed using the framework.

Our paper provides a conceptual grounding to an in-depth, multidimensional understanding of children’s information behavior, which have been limitedly addressed in previous studies. Considering that children begin to search from their early stage of development and their search behaviors are tightly associated with other developmental states, our paper highlights the importance of investigating children’s search and information seeking and provides theoretical and empirical implications.

Based on the approach/inhibition theory of power, this study explores the relationship between sense of power and exploitative leadership. We particularly examine the role of self-interest as a mediator and the role of ambition at work as a moderator.

The data were collected from 189 supervisors and 702 employees. We analyzed the data using path analysis to test the research model.

The results show the following: (1) sense of power positively affects exploitative leadership; (2) the effects of sense of power on exploitative leadership are mediated by self-interest; (3) the effects of self-interest on exploitative leadership are moderated by ambition at work.

The current study identifies self-interest as a key mediator that links sense of power to exploitative leadership and demonstrates that ambition at work moderates the process of self-interest to exploitative leadership.

Despite the growing body of empirical literature on earnings management in municipal bodies and enterprises on the municipal level, the theoretical foundations often remain limited. This article contributes to filling this research gap by discussing the agency relationships between entities, managers, politicians and the electorate based on the framework of political economy or, more specifically, economic theory of political action. It derives theoretical explanations for earnings management in municipally owned enterprises based on political-economic approaches and provides conceptual guidelines for further theoretical and empirical research in this field.

The article discusses three specific theoretical approaches of political economy (political budget cycles/election cycles, interest fragmentation and partisan ideology) and applies them to the governance structures of municipally owned enterprises. For each of the perspectives, predictions about the use of earnings management and its possible motivations are derived.

The study shows that political budget cycles/election cycles, interest fragmentation and partisan ideology in municipal decision-making bodies can serve as possible explanations as to which extent managers of municipally owned enterprises present manipulated financial statements. All three approaches can help to explain the prevalence of earnings management but lead to different results regarding the methods and aims of earnings management.

As a significant portion of the current literature on earnings management in municipally owned enterprises lacks a theoretical foundation, our article aims to fill this caveat. To do so, we introduce three new conceptual perspectives that explain the prevalence of earnings management in such enterprises and the political-economic environments that are more likely to produce manipulated financial statements.

The collaborative filtering algorithm is a classical and widely used approach in product recommendation systems. However, the existing algorithms rely mostly on common ratings of items and do not consider temporal information about items or user interests. To solve this problem, this study proposes a new user-item composite filtering (UICF) recommendation framework by leveraging temporal semantics.

The UICF framework fully utilizes the time information of item ratings for measuring the similarity of items and takes into account the short-term and long-term interest decay for computing users’ latest interest degrees. For an item to be probably recommended to a user, the interest degrees of the user on all the historically rated items are weighted by their similarities with the item to be recommended and then added up to predict the recommendation degree.

Comprehensive experiments on the MovieLens and KuaiRec datasets for user movie recommendation were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed UICF framework. Experimental results show that the UICF outperformed three well-known recommendation algorithms Item-Based Collaborative Filtering (IBCF), User-Based Collaborative Filtering (UBCF) and User-Popularity Composite Filtering (UPCF) in the root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE) and F1 metrics, especially yielding an average decrease of 11.9% in MAE.

A UICF recommendation framework is proposed that combines a time-aware item similarity model and a time-wise user interest degree model. It overcomes the limitations of common rating items and utilizes temporal information in item ratings and user interests effectively, resulting in more accurate and personalized recommendations.

This study examines the effect of non-audit fees (NAF) provisions on interest payments classification shifting. In addition, we investigate to what extent the NAF economic bonding and interest payments classification shifting is contingent on internal governance and firm financial well-being.

This study employed probit regression using a sample of UK non-financial firms indexed in FT UK (500) over the period from 2009 to 2017.

We find evidence that the economic bonding of NAF between external auditors and their clients is more likely to encourage managers in UK firms to manipulate operating cash flows through interest payment classification shifting. In addition, and interestingly, our results evince that classification-shifting may be the less costly and soft choice of managers in firms with strong governance and charging higher NAF. Furthermore, we show that financially distressed firms associated with their auditors in purchasing non-audit services are more prone to attempting to manipulate and engage in interest payments classification-shifting. Our result did not provide a significant effect of external auditor tenure on the interest payments classification shifting.

Our findings are subject to the following limitations: First, this study uses a composite index to measure the quality of internal corporate governance. It focuses only on the board of directors, but this index does not reflect other internal governance mechanisms. Second, this study is subject to limited study time due to the implementation of key IFRS standards (IFRS 9 Financial Instruments and IFRS 15 Revenue from Contract with Customers) from 2018–2019.

This study was motivated by the UK’s Financial Reporting Council regulators' pressure on the Big 4 audit firms to move more audit time into main auditing activities, reduce cross-selling to audit clients and separate their audit practices by 2024. Overall, we provide new evidence that directs a close spotlight on the threats of NAF that are potentially useful to regulators, shareholders and investors.

It is motivated by the UK’s Financial Reporting Council regulators' pressure on the Big 4 to move more audit firm time into main auditing activities, reduce cross-selling to audit clients and separate their audit practices by 2024. Overall, we provide new evidence that directs a close spotlight on the threats of NAS that are potentially useful to regulators, shareholders and investors.

It is generally believed that business spending on capital expenditure tends to decrease as interest rates rise, and vice versa, this is not always the case. The previous literature produces inconclusive results vis-à-vis the interest rate and investment nexus. This study analyzes the responsiveness of investment to changes in high and low levels of interest rates in India through a quantile-based, non-parametric method utilizing annual data from 1980 to 2022.

This study uses Quantile-on-quantile (QQ) technique proposed by Sim and Zhou (2015) to examine the impact of interest rate quantiles on quantiles of investment. In addition, long-term association and the direction of causality are estimated through the Cho et al. (2015) test of quantile cointegration and the Jeong et al. (2012) Granger causality in quantile (GCQ) test, respectively.

The empirical evidence validates that the linkage between investments and interest rate is not consistently negative and varies from quantile to quantile. The study finds a negative impact at median quantiles and a positive impact at extreme higher quantiles. Conversely, the impact at lower quantiles is negligible, which is also observed from quantile cointegration, indicating the presence of a statistically significant association above the median quantiles. Additionally, the study finds one interesting finding that there exists unidirectional causality from investment to interest rates in India rather than other way around.

The study provides significant implications for policymakers as it suggests that during extreme economic conditions, the effectiveness of traditional monetary policy tools to boost capital formation is restricted. Policymakers may consider alternative measures to stimulate investment during these time periods. The study additionally posits that the neoclassical theory of investment may not be readily applicable in emerging economies in its unaltered state, mostly due to the lack of well-developed financial markets.

There is a limited literature available on non-linear linkage between interest rates and investment. The present study adds to the existing knowledge by investigating how investment responds differently to fluctuations in interest rates, while incorporating the complete distribution of both the variables.

In this study, we examine regulated public accessibility to municipalities’ financial reports and bond interest cost. In particular, we examine whether there is information content in a component of a constrained filing period that is useful to municipal bond market participants. The component of a filing period that we focus on is the period of time between an audit report date and a regulated public accessibility date.

To explore our research question, we collect a sample of observations from municipalities that: (1) are required to post annual/audit financial reports on a centralized state-level repository that includes a “transparent” date stamp on when reports are made publicly available and (2) have issued general obligation bonds. Our sample is limited to one observation per municipality. The sample period is 2006–2019. In terms of approach, we use an ordinary least square (OLS) regression model to empirically test whether the time period between municipalities’ audit report date and state-required repository filing date is associated with general obligation bond interest cost.

We find support for the idea that there is information content in a component of a constrained filing period. In particular, we hypothesize and find a positive association between the time period between an audit report date and a state filing date and general obligation bond interest cost. Seemingly, this component of time may provide something unique or not available in other components of a constrained filing period (e.g. the fiscal year-end date to the audit report date). In post hoc analyses, we also find that both components of the constrained filing period in our setting (i.e. the audit report date to state filing date and the fiscal year-end date to audit report date) need to be considered for either of the components to be significant. Moreover, although both components are necessary, the audit report date to state filing date component appears to have a slightly stronger association (in terms of statistical significance) with general obligation bond interest costs.

To our knowledge, Illinois is the only state that provides a date stamp on when municipalities’ financial information is made publicly available on a centralized repository. As such we focus on municipalities in Illinois. While this increases the internal validity of our research, it potentially limits generalizability across other states. Also, as a reflection of the sample constraint, the number of observations in our study is relatively small. As part of post hoc analyses, we take a closer look at our sample, model and variables used to test our hypothesis.

For stakeholders, each component of a constrained filing period may provide unique information. For example, the time period between an audit report date and a regulated filing date may send a positive signal about the quality of financial management to investors. For regulators, requiring some sort of centralized public access to municipal financial reports that have transparent time constraints may help states provide stronger governance and help lower municipalities’ borrowing costs.

We use a novel approach (with the Illinois date stamp filing information) to examine our research question. Most prior research has often relied on an assumption that the time between fiscal year-end and the audit report date is the component of time that provides useful information to investors (e.g. Henke and Maher, 2016). In our setting, we explore and find that a component of a constrained filing time period (i.e. the date from an audit filing to a required public accessibility filing) may also provide impactful information to investors.

This study aims to investigate the effect of monetary policy on housing prices for US economy. It specifically examines whether nominal or real interest rates are the key drivers behind fluctuations in housing prices in US.

Monthly data from January 1991 to July 2023 and various appropriate analytical tools such as unit root tests, Johansen’s cointegration test, vector error correction model (VECM), impulse response function and Granger causality test were applied for the data analysis.

The Johansen cointegration findings reveal the presence of a long-term relationship among the variables. VECM results indicate a negative correlation between nominal and real interest rates and housing prices in both the short and long terms, suggesting that a strict monetary policy can help in controlling the housing price increase in the USA. However, housing prices are more responsive to changes in nominal interest rates than to real interest rates. Additionally, the study reveals that the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the upsurge in housing prices in the USA.

This study contributes by examining the role that nominal or real interest rates play in shaping housing prices in the USA. Moreover, given the recent significant upsurge in housing prices, this study presents a unique opportunity to investigate whether these price increases are influenced by the Federal Reserve's monetary policy decisions regarding nominal or real interest rates. Additionally, using monthly data, this study provides a deeper understanding of the fluctuations in housing prices and their connection to monetary policy tools.