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This study aims to investigate the relationship between corporate governance (CG) and performance of Real Estate Investment Trust (REITs) in Singapore and Malaysia.

The CG attributes that contribute best toward R-Index scores are tested followed by analysis of whether R-Index scores contribute toward better performance of the REITs when controlled for growth, firm size and leverage. Regression analysis using structured equation modeling (SEM) is instituted.

All attributes in the R-Index except management ownership are significantly correlated to R-Index. Regression analysis using SEM reveals that all the three measures of performance are significant. When controlled for growth and firm size, CG mechanisms reduce the impact of losses. However, highly levered firms could be risky for investors despite strong CG mechanisms.

All S-REITs and M-REIT sampled were grouped as one regardless of the country differences, which may have limited the results and findings. The R-Index used to score the CG practices for Asia is still very new.

Findings of the study will help REIT policymakers to update scorecards frequently. Loss-making REITs must emphasize on specific CG attributes to enhance their overall CG scores to gain market confidence and procure financial assistance through better disclosure.

Due to research scarcity on CG effectiveness associated with performance of Asian REITs after the global financial crisis, this study comes as a timely contribution in understanding the relationship between CG and performance of REITs.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a firm’s undertaking of a bond IPO influences the monitoring of the private loans granted to the firm by private lenders. If it does, in which direction the monitoring changes?

The author uses both univariate and multivariate analyses to test the hypothesis. For the purposes of this research, the author’s primary data sources are LPC Dealscan, which provides data on private loans; Mergent FISD, which provides data on public bond issues; and the Compustat Industrial Annual Database, which provides the required financial data for the sample firms. The author’s sample covers non-financial US firms for the period of 1991-2010. The author’s final sample consists of nearly 23,000 private loans granted to about 5,500 non-financial US firms.

The major finding of this research is that private lenders increase their degree of monitoring of loans that they extend to a firm after it issues a bond IPO. The results of the two-stage bond IPO anticipation model further strengthen the findings. The evidence suggests that as the firm issues public debt for the first time, private lenders get concerned about the potential increase of agency problems and leverage, and consequently, find it valuable to increase the degree of monitoring of loans. Also, the magnitude of change in monitoring is strongly influenced by the degree of information asymmetry, leverage, profitability, and potential to waste free cash flow.

This paper enhances one’s understanding of the contracting dynamics between private lenders and the firm as it issues in the public debt market. The findings can aid firms anticipate the borrowing conditions they will face if they undertake a bond IPO. Further, the cross-sectional analysis on covenant changes from pre- to post-bond IPO period identifies specific firm characteristics that impact the magnitude of change of covenant intensity and comprehensiveness. As a result, uncertainty regarding post-bond IPO outcomes is reduced for borrowing firms.

Bibliometrics is one of the research fields in library and information science that deals with the analysis of academic entities. In this regard, to gauge the productivity and popularity of authors, publication counts and citation counts are common bibliometric measures. Similarly, the significance of a journal is measured using another bibliometric measure, impact factor. However, scarce attention has been paid to find the impact and productivity of conferences using these bibliometric measures. Moreover, the application of the existing techniques rarely finds the impact of conferences in a distinctive manner. The purpose of this paper is to propose and compare the DS-index with existing bibliometric indices, such as h-index, g-index and R-index, to study and rank conferences distinctively based on their significance.

The DS-index is applied to the self-developed large DBLP data set having publication data over 50 years covering more than 10,000 conferences.

The empirical results of the proposed index are compared with the existing indices using the standard performance evaluation measures. The results confirm that the DS-index performs better than other indices in ranking the conferences in a distinctive manner.

Scarce attention is paid to rank conferences in distinctive manner using bibliometric measures. In addition, exploiting the DS-index to assign unique ranks to the different conferences makes this research work novel.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influences of the interactions of taste, colour and labelling on sensory perception, liking and identification of saffroned products.

The consumer and discrimination tests (N=120, 18, 25, 78, for Experiments 1–4, respectively) were conducted. The analyses of discrimination tests were performed using the Thurstonian model and R-index. The results from consumer studies were analysed using the Kruskal–Wallis test, penalty analysis and correlation matrix.

The study revealed that saffron can interact with the perception of sour and bitter taste and has no significant effects on the sweetness. The colour and labelling generated expectations for quality and sweetness of the samples. When the disparity between the expectation and actual experience was occurred resulted in contrast/assimilation effects on the hedonic ratings and negatively impacted consumer acceptability of the product.

This study showed that the visual cues can modulate the expectation for particular sensory perceptions and also affect the hedonic experiences. Saffron adulteration can be identified by the consumers and can result in a significant decrease in the acceptability of the products. Hence, the practice of substituting saffron with ingredients with a similar colour in these products can be detrimental for business. Additionally, it was revealed that saffron colour is associated with the expected and actual sweet taste perception. Therefore, it is possible to manipulate yellow colour cues to reduce sweeteners in different food products that contain saffron.

The sensory characteristics and consumer perception of saffron have been rarely studied. This study revealed that flavour perception and quality determination of saffroned foods involves the combinations of different sensory modalities and cognitive (expectancy) inputs.

Regional minimum income (RMI) schemes have been a fundamental tool for fighting poverty in Spain at a regional level. However, the redistributive power of these schemes has not been as effective as was expected in reducing inequality during the last decades. On the other hand, the introduction of the new ‘Minimum Vital Income’ (MVI) by the Spanish Central Government represents a novel measure for fighting poverty, by guaranteeing minimum incomes from a national perspective as a policy response to the asymmetric impact of the COVID-19 crisis upon income distribution. Using EUROMOD,¹ this paper simulates both the distributional effects of the introduction of the MVI and what the effects on inequality and poverty in each Spanish region would be if the national scheme were to substitute the current regional schemes. The results referring to MVI introduction indicate that inequality and poverty would decrease in all dimensions: incidence, intensity, and inequality among the poor (Foster–Greer–Thorbecke poverty measures). Additionally, the negative effects of RMI elimination would be offset by the positive effects of MVI introduction for most regions, leading us to consider that the simulated scenario entails better redistributive results, as well as additional savings for Spanish Public Accounts, in a context of growing debt. Our findings can provide public policy-makers with useful information about the convenience of fighting poverty at a national level as regards distribution and revenue.

The purpose of this paper is to propose methods for fast incremental indexing with effective and efficient query processing in XML element retrieval. The effectiveness of a search system becomes lower if document updates are not handled when these occur frequently on the Web. The search accuracy is also reduced if drastic changes in document statistics are not managed. However, existing studies of XML element retrieval do not consider document updates, although these studies have attained both effectiveness and efficiency in query processing. Thus, the authors add a function for handling document updates to the existing techniques for XML element retrieval.

Though it will be important to enable fast updates of indices, preliminary experiments have shown that a simple incremental update approach has two problems: some kinds of statistics are inaccurate, and it takes a long time to update indices. Therefore, two methods are proposed: one to approximate term weights accurately with a small number of documents, even for dynamically changing statistics; and the other to eliminate unnecessary update targets.

Experimental results show that this proposed system can update indices up to 32 per cent faster than the simple incremental updates while the search accuracy improved by 4 per cent compared with the simple approach. The proposed methods can also be fast and accurate in query processing, even if document statistics change drastically.

The paper shows that there could be a more practical XML element search engine, which can access the latest XML documents accurately and efficiently.

This paper evaluates the argument that conditional cash transfer program recipients vote for the incumbent. We also test the hypothesis stating that ceasing to receive the benefit hinders support for the incumbent.

Using a regression discontinuity design, we assess the impact of the Bono de Desarrollo Humano cash transfer program on pro-incumbent voting of each of these four groups.

We did not find a significant impact of the transfer on pro-incumbent vote intention in any of the pairwise comparisons, which suggests that contextual factors determining retrospective voting may play an important role in shaping the relationship between pro-incumbent voting and social policy transfers.

Drawing on quasi-experimental evidence from Ecuador, where the eligibility criteria of the program changed exogenously, we evaluate the impacts of several treatments on pro-incumbent voting. We are able to identify four distinct groups: recipients under both eligibility criteria, nonrecipients under both criteria, new recipients and new nonrecipients.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the dynamic influence of WTI crude oil returns on the stock returns of China’s traditional energy sectors, including oil and gas exploitation, coal mining and processing, petroleum processing and coking, electricity, heat production and supply and mining services.

Hong’s information spill-over test and the DP Granger causality test are applied to investigate the relationship between the two markets. Moreover, a rolling window is introduced into the above two tests to capture time-varying characteristics of the influence of WTI crude oil returns.

The empirical results indicate that, first, there exists significant bidirectional linear causality between WTI crude oil returns and China’s traditional energy sectoral stock returns, but the nonlinear causality appears weaker. Second, the influence of WTI crude oil returns on traditional energy sectoral stock returns has time-varying characteristics and industry heterogeneity both in the linear and nonlinear cases. Finally, the decline of WTI crude oil prices may strengthen its linear influence on the stock returns of traditional energy sectors, while the excessive rise of market values in traditional energy sectors may weaken the linear and nonlinear influence of WTI on them.

The general nexus between international crude oil market and China’s traditional energy stock market is explored both in the linear and nonlinear perspectives. In particular, the dynamic linear and nonlinear influence of WTI crude oil returns on China’s traditional energy sectoral stock returns and its industry heterogeneity are analysed in detail.

This paper argues that the methods of constructing house price indices for UK markets lag behind those employed in Europe, Australasia and North America. This is particularly evident in terms of the range and level of technical sophistication of the index construction methodologies. Importantly, the paper argues that the absence of reliable house price indicators undermines the decision‐making ability of policy makers and investors operating in urban housing markets. The paper suggests that this can, in part, be remedied by the construction of a system of local house price indices for British cities. The empirical research presents the first UK application of the repeat sales method to UK data. Indices are constructed for four cities and a range of diagnostic tests are used to establish the reliability and accuracy of the indices as a means of monitoring house price change. The research concludes by suggesting that the methods used here should be tested further on data from major metropolitan regions in England and Wales.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how best to diversify in Saudi Arabia's stock market.

The analysis proceeds as follows: first, repeated sampling with replacement from a sample of 62 actual companies' monthly stock returns from January 2001 to June 2006 is used to simulate the performance of various portfolio sizes; second, a modified Statman diversification model is used to evaluate the performance of index funds in Saudi Arabia and thus assess the size of a diversified portfolio.

This paper reaches two important findings: first, due to high index funds fees, investors are better off diversifying by purchasing stocks directly from the stock market; second, a portfolio containing five randomly chosen stocks is sufficient to achieve diversification.

This paper provides useful recommendations on how to achieve diversification. Additionally, it highlights the fact that index funds are too expensive to be useful in Saudi Arabia.