Evaluating the participation of an ethnic minority group in informal employment: a product of exit or exclusion?

This paper critically evaluates competing explanations for the participation of ethnic minority groups in informal employment. These interpret their participation either through a structuralist lens arising out of ‘exclusion’ from formal employment or through a neo-liberal and/or post-structuralist lens driven by voluntary ‘exit’ from formal institutions. To evaluate critically these competing explanations, this paper reports a survey of the experiences of Pakistani immigrants in informal employment in Sheffield, including fifty face-to-face interviews and two focus groups. The findings highlight informal employment amongst this Pakistani ethnic minority group is neither universally driven by exclusion nor exit. Instead, some participate mostly due to exclusion, others mostly for exit rationales and some for a combination of the two, with different mixtures across different groups and types of informal employment. The outcome is a call for greater appreciation of the multifarious character of undeclared work and a move beyond simplistic explanations and policy responses.     

Does inflation cause gold market price changes? evidence on the G7 countries from the tests of nonparametric quantile causality in mean and variance

This article utilizes the newly proposed nonparametric causality-in-quantiles test to examine the predictability of mean and variance of changes in gold prices based on inflation for G7 countries. The causality-in-quantiles approach permits us to test for not only causality in mean but also causality in variance. We start our investigation by utilizing tests for nonlinearity. These tests identify nonlinearity, showing that the linear Granger causality tests are subject to misspecification error. Unlike tests of misspecified linear models, our nonparametric causality-in-quantiles tests find causality in mean and variance from inflation to gold market price changes between the 0.20 quantile and the 0.70 quantile, implying that very low- and high-price changes in gold markets are not related to inflation. These changes should be related to other sources, such as financial shocks and exchange market shocks. We find support that gold serves as a hedge against inflation, but only in the mid-quantile ranges, i.e. quantiles from 0.20 to 0.70. Our results show that gold does not serve as a hedge against inflation during periods when gold market price changes are very low or very high, which are respectively quiet and highly volatile periods.     

The Determinants of Chinese Outward Foreign Direct Investment: A Closer Look

Over the last fifteen years, China rapidly expanded its outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) through remarkable economic growth and the “go global” policy. Chinese firms explored investment avenues especially in developing and emerging countries. As a result, China became the third largest contributor of OFDI. We examine the determinants of Chinese OFDI in 67 countries during the period lasting from 2006 to 2015 using the feasible generalized least square method. We find that the size of the economy, market opportunities, cost advantages due to low wage structure, ease of doing business, country risk, and geographical proximity are the prominent factors leading to changes in Chinese OFDI in developing and emerging economies. We find that China’s investments in different developing and emerging countries are driven by a different set of factors and the determinants of Chinese OFDI vary in low and high per capita income countries.     

Board gender diversity and environmental,social, and economic value creation: Does family ownership matter?

Prior literature on firm value creation for stakeholders has oversimplified and narrowed the concept of value down to “economic returns.” Although economic returns are fundamental to a firm's core stakeholders (i.e., shareholders), other legitimate stakeholders want “value” beyond economic returns. We define stakeholder value as the financial and nonfinancial returns a firm can offer to its legitimate stakeholders, and empirically investigate whether board gender diversity (BGD) improves our multidimensional measure of value. Using Thomson Reuters' ASSET4 data for U.K.‐listed firms available from Eikon for the period 2007–2017, we report a significant positive relationship between BGD and stakeholder value creation. In particular, BGD increases social and environmental value creation in addition to economic returns. Furthermore, our results suggest that even though gender‐diverse boards are associated with stakeholder value creation in family firms, this is only conspicuous for environmental value creation. The findings suggest that although female directors cater to the interests of broader stakeholder groups, family ownership causes them to mainly focus on environmental stakeholders. The study provides important implications for regulators, stakeholders, and academic scholars.     

Listening to the patient voice: using a sentic computing model to evaluate physicians’ healthcare service quality for strategic planning in hospitals

Online physician reviews (OPRs), also known as electronic word of mouth, have become the primary source of information for patients while making health consultation decisions. However, different techniques to analyze these reviews by machines have not been frequently applied yet in this domain. In this study, a novel method for opinion mining is being proposed to fill the existing research gap, that is, a hybrid approach to sentic computing. This approach integrates artificial intelligence and semantic web techniques to implicitly analyze OPRs in order to evaluate patient perceptions of healthcare service quality. We develop our methodology by using the following three main tasks: (1) sentence-level topic spotting (a topic-analysis procedure) to extract major topics, (2) a sentic computing framework to perform concept-level sentiment analysis (polarity detection on the categorized sentences), and (3) root cause and strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analyses to identify SWOT for healthcare organizations. Analyses results of 47,499 OPRs from the UK-based website (Iwantgreatcare.org) show that the proposed hybrid approach has accurately classified concept words to their corresponding topics, and it has also outperformed the similar other methods of topic extraction in the healthcare domain. The results also indicate that the proposed approach can better contribute to the overall performance analyses for healthcare organizations, which could help practitioners in improving service-quality measures based on the real voices of patients. The proposed model also provides a theoretical basis for formulating quality measures for the healthcare sector.

     

Asymmetric J-curve: evidence from industry trade between U.S. and U.K.

ABSTRACT

Previous research that assessed the impact of exchange rate changes on the trade balance between the U.S. and U.K. assumed the effects are symmetric. In this paper, we add to the literature on the asymmetric J-curve phenomenon by considering the trade balance of 68 two-digit industries that trade between the two countries. We find short-run asymmetric effects of the real dollar-pound rate in almost all industries. However, short-run asymmetric effects were translated into significant long-run asymmetric effects in 25 industries. Indeed, the asymmetric J-curve hypothesis was supported in 18 industries.     

基于组合赋权和AHP法的农机化可持续发展研究

[目的]通过定量分析,明确不同准则层对农业机械化可持续发展的影响,衡量农机化可持续发展在时间维度上的演变趋势。[方法]建立了新疆农机化可持续发展评价指标体系,并构建了2001~2015年可持续发展水平评价指标关系数据模型。提出了组合赋权和专家法相结合的判断矩阵构建方法,并基于层次分析法(Analytic Hierarchy Process,AHP)分别定量分析了2001年和2015年农机化可持续发展状态。[结果](1)2015年新疆农机化可持续发展水平达到了80.31,和2001年相比提高了1.284 7倍。(2)从准则层来看,新疆可持续发展水平在农机化作业能力、农机化经济效益和农机化发展能力方面分别提高了69.70、85.94和48.64,但资源消耗方面的得分下降了1.12。[结论]2001~2005年新疆农业机械化可持续发展水平在作业能力、经济效益和发展能力等因素推动下进一步提升;揭示资源环境影响是约束农机化可持续发展的主要因素。从新疆农业机械化发展现状来看,文章方法得出的量化结果与实际情况较接近,表明研究方法有效和可行。