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In this paper the authors aim to argue that the existence of a strong corporate governance mechanism (a formal credibility-enhancing mechanism) and the presence of a more trustworthy-looking CEO (an informal credibility-enhancing mechanism) are substitutes.

By using machine-learning-based facial-feature-point detection technique, the authors construct a proprietary facial-trustworthiness database for a large-scale of CEOs in the US listed companies. First, the authors manually search for qualifying CEO image from websites and annual reports. Second, by following the neuroscience and psychology literature, the authors use the machine-learning-based face detector to identify the facial features in the CEO photos to calculate a rich and reliable set of facial-trustworthiness measures. The authors then construct a composite facial-trustworthiness index for each CEO. After obtaining accounting data, the authors’ final sample comprises 16,201 firm-year observations for 3,186 CEOs in the sample period of 2000-2018.

The results of the authors’ regression analyses show a negative association between board monitoring intensity and CEOs' facial trustworthiness, indicating that board directors may factor CEOs' facial trustworthiness into their monitoring decisions. Moreover, the authors find that these results are mainly driven by CEOs whose tenure is below the third quartile (i.e. eight years). The authors further find stronger results for externally hired CEOs than internally promoted CEOs. Finally, the authors’ results remain robust when using change models or subsample of CEO photos in recent years.

First, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that adopts a large sample to provide systematic evidence on the directors' use of facial trustworthiness. This study extends the literature by documenting the impacts of CEOs' individual characteristics on the board monitoring intensity. Second, the results of this study emphasized the important role of perceptions based on executives' facial appearance in firm valuation, executive compensation and audit fee, and by presenting empirical evidence that CEOs' facial trustworthiness affects board monitoring intensity. Third, this study responds to the call for research on personalized trust by Hsieh et al. (2020).

This paper aims to investigate internet reporting and social media strategies by Australian firms. This study looks at the extent of internet reporting and considers firm characteristics associated with disclosing information on the internet. This research is timely as in the past decade, this paper has witnessed the rapid growth of technologies such as the internet and social media and their subsequent impact on business and the economy.

This paper constructs a disclosure index featuring a wide range of both financial and non-financial disclosures including social media strategy. This study then investigates the firm characteristics associated with the level of internet disclosure.

This paper finds that a firm’s internet reporting is associated with firm size, financial performance and analysts’ coverage but not associated with the percentage of independent board members. A firm’s social media strategy is associated with firm size and its environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) ranking.

The findings can help firms improve their internet reporting disclosures by providing a comprehensive list of disclosures that could benefit users of financial reports. It also helps standard setters and regulators understand some of the firm factors related to internet reporting and provide guidance for standard setters to consider in developing best practice internet reporting standards.

The research features the top 100 Australian companies’ internet disclosures in 2018 and also includes social media strategy. The results highlight that there is room for improvement with firms’ internet disclosure. By constructing a comprehensive index, this study provides guidance for standard setters to consider in developing best practice internet reporting standards.

The purpose of this study is to examine how the childhood trauma experiences of CEOs influence firms’ internationalization.

The research used a difference-in-difference method with constructing a treatment group whose chief executive officer (CEO) experienced the great famine in China between the ages of 7 and 11, and a control group whose CEO was born within three years after 1961.

The study reveals a significant inverse correlation between CEOs’ childhood trauma experiences and firm internationalization. However, this correlation is weaker in the case of state-owned enterprises and firms led by CEOs with overseas work experience.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to extend the theoretical framework to elucidate firms’ internationalization by introducing childhood trauma theory into the field of international business literature. Second, the authors link the literature on the effect of CEO explicit traits and psychological traits on firm internationalization by exploring how CEOs’ childhood trauma experience shapes their risk aversion, which, in turn, influences firm internationalization. Third, the authors address the call for examining the interplay of CEO life experiences by scrutinizing the moderating effect of CEO overseas work experience on the association between CEOs’ childhood trauma exposure and firm internationalization.

The purpose of this paper is to answer the following research question: at the time of founding of a startup, what entrepreneurial conditions would influence the long-term offerings of HR benefits? To answer this question, our study examines the effects of four founding conditions of startups – total assets, founder’s education, industry experience and startup experience – on the basis of the resource-based view of firms.

Using data from the Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS) conducted in the period 2005–2010, this paper analyzed the relationships between the founding conditions and the offering of HR benefits by 4,148 new ventures during the first five years after founding. In addition, this paper examined the relationships of the same founding conditions to the offering of each of seven specific benefits: alternative work schedule, bonus plan, health insurance, paid time off, retirement plan, tuition reimbursement and stock options.

Three conditions at founding – total assets, founders’ education level, industry experience – have a positive and enduring influence on the offering of HR benefits to the employees. Startup experience has a significant effect on benefit offerings during the first year after founding but no significant effect on benefit offerings in subsequent years. All founding conditions have significant and long-lasting positive effects on each benefit, except for startup experience, which has a negative effect on some benefits.

The HRM literature indicates that there has been a surprising gap between practical interest and academic research with regard to benefits. In addition, there is a dearth of research on how entrepreneurs make strategic decisions such as offering benefits to their employees. The study represents an attempt to fill in this gap.

This paper aims to check the presence of such relationship in the field. Certain values are at stake for the success of economic behavior. Since the genesis of modern capitalism, a set of beliefs proper of Calvinism (mainly Predestination but also Beruf, inner-worldly asceticism, role of Sects […] ) was said by Max Weber to cause an anxiety about salvation and generate a propensity to economic success as a sign of election. The author argues on the contrary that the Calvinist belief in the Perpetual Assurance of Salvation might cause a sense of self-efficacy able to favor economic success. To observe this in action today, it is crucial to consider the evolution that the Protestant ethic went through migrating first in North America and, finally, through the Protestant revival of China. Wenzhou is called “Jerusalem of China” for its large Protestant community that is also strongly involved in business. Some scholar already pointed out the presence among those entrepreneurs of this Protestant ethic (Yi Xiang, Boss-Christian […]).

The data presented in this comparative qualitative study pertain to ethnographic observations, job-shadowing and interviews done among Chinese Christian and non-Christian entrepreneurs from Wenzhou living in Milan, Italy.

The results show, with some adjustments, the presence of a Chinese version of the Protestant ethic overlapping with several values proper to the Chinese context (Confucianism, lineage, social network). The extension of the study to other cases must be done with caution considering the non-causal justificatory role of the belief.

Successful entrepreneurship involves specific social, cultural and even religious aspects that move beyond mere business strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to compare and understand how age, gender and culture affect individual career and work-related attitudes in Chinese and American samples.

Online and printed questionnaires were administered to employees and managers in China, whereas in the USA, faculty, staff and students at a Midwestern university responded to an online survey. Snowball sampling technique was used to collect data. Independent sample t-tests were conducted to test the hypothesis.

The study showed different work values and attitudes in the workplace between Chinese and the US samples, and indicated the specifics influences that national culture has on them. Culture affects generational changes; generational differences in the US sample are bigger than in Chinese sample; work values differ across generations and cultures; traditional gender role differences persist more strongly across generations in Chinese sample than in the US sample.

Generalizability issues; cross-sectional data.

US-based multi-national corporations need to understand these differences and better manage their diverse employees operating in China.

This study compared generation, culture and gender differences simultaneously; parallel groups at similar life stages were used by basing the boundaries of each generation on the distinct cultural events of each nation. This approach is more consistent with generation definitions than by using influential specific events of each country, respectively. Useful to managers, it will provide guidance for understanding work values and attitudes across gender and generations in the USA and China. Most benefit will occur for US based multinational companies that have Chinese operations, and manage employees with cultural, gender and generational differences.

The purpose of this paper is to examine generational differences in attitudes toward careers in China. Generational differences are quite apparent in Chinese society. People who were born in the 1960s experienced the Cultural Revolution in their childhood. Those born in the 1970s witnessed the dramatic and profound social changes after China's open‐door policy was enforced. The generation born in the 1980s is believed to be the spoiled generation that highly values materialism and self‐realization, due to being the only child in the family as a result of the “One Child” policy.

The authors surveyed Chinese people between 20 and 50 years old about their career attitudes to explore six hypotheses based on predicted patterns of generational change.

The paper found more differences in desired attributes of their manager than in their perception of themselves. Some career attitudes and abilities vary across the three generations but, given the historical and common assumptions of generational change, extensive differences were not found.

The authors' sample of 277 can only provide general insights into Chinese attitudes, given the size and diversity of the Chinese population. The study hopes to spur further research into generational differences in China and elsewhere.

The paper provides insight into how the generational groups in China currently in the workforce think about their careers. Generational clashes in the workplace are also discussed.

No previous projects directly use the studies method or concepts in China. It builds on past work examining work values and career attitudes in China to contribute insights into generational differences within China.

Reverse floating interest rate‐linked structured products are important innovative products for investors to achieve a relatively high yield at low interest rates, and the reasonable pricing of such products is an important factor to influence investors' needs and issuers' profits. The purpose of this paper is to empirically analyze the rationality of the pricing of reverse floating interest rate‐linked products.

This paper combines the Itô's Lemma and introduces the Black‐Derman‐Toy (BDT) model into the time‐varying volatility to build a binary tree interest rates BDT model under the time‐varying volatility, and to establish the pricing model of reverse floating interest rate‐linked products. Dozens of product data of ABN AMRO Bank and other world‐renowned banks or financial institutions are empirically analyzed.

The results show that the average pricing of these products is high, and the expected rate of return of the product is lower than the same period of the Five‐year US Treasury Bill rate.

This paper has combined the theory and practice together. The research method described in this paper is of significance to the pricing of interest rate‐linked structured products, and the pricing method of binary tree BDT model to solve the term structure of interest rates and estimation problem of volatility term structure of interest rates.

As Chinese companies move to the world stage of business, they must leverage a more knowledgeable and collaborative workforce to meet new challenges. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how two prominent individual attributes, education, and allocentrism, create work tension for human capital practices in Chinese companies.

Surveying nearly 500 workers in four Chinese companies and using multi-level methodology.

The authors found that higher levels of education work to the detriment of employees’ affective organizational commitment (AOC) and positively influence seeking-to-leave behavior. In addition, this study suggests a positive relation between allocentrism and AOC. Personalized leadership, a common leadership style in high-power distance cultures such as China, further exacerbates the problems with higher levels of education and diminishes the commitment benefits of allocentrism. Conversely, regardless of leadership style, if supervisors involve workers in decision-making activities, those workers who are more educated will become more committed to the organization and less likely to leave.

The data were collected using self-reported questionnaires, which may cause common method variance. The reliability for personalized leadership was slightly below 0.70. This may be due to the multiple dimensions that are reflected in leadership styles. Another limitation of this study is its focus on allocentrism without considering other personal expression of cultural values. This approach could be too narrow (Gelfand et al., 2007).

This study suggests that members who endorse allocentrism might be more likely to have high-affective commitment. If managers can select individuals high on the allocentrism scale, there is a higher likelihood these individuals will attach emotionally to the organization. Managers should not simply conclude that idiocentrics are “worse” employees than allocentrics. Instead, managers may utilize effective management tactics to cultivate more socialized leadership visions among their supervisors. Finally, the authors find that independent of whether leadership is more or less personalized, managers can retain valued educated workers by including them in decision-making activities.

The authors have found that education may serve as a double edged sword for employers. As hypothesized, the findings suggested that employees’ level of education negatively relates to their affective commitment for their organizations. This study also contributes to the knowledge on the role of culture at the individual level (i.e. allocentrism) and how it affects employees’ attitudes and behavior. The authors found that workers who more highly value the group that they function within (allocentrics) tend to be more affectively committed to their organization.

It is one of the first studies to examine educational level and cultural orientation as antecedents to affective commitment, especially in Chinese businesses where workers’ education level is a growing phenomenon and allocentrism is a traditional characteristic of Chinese workers. Also, understanding the dynamics of group-individual linkages is generally most helpful to understanding organizational phenomenon (House et al., 1995). This meso framework is a hallmark feature of the study, given the hierarchical nature of the research inquiry and data set.

First, the authors analyze the key problems faced by the protection of digital library readers' data privacy and behavior privacy. Second, the authors introduce the characteristics of all kinds of existing approaches to privacy protection and their application limitations in the protection of readers' data privacy and behavior privacy. Lastly, the authors compare the advantages and disadvantages of each kind of existing approaches in terms of security, efficiency, accuracy and practicality and analyze the challenges faced by the protection of digital library reader privacy.

In this paper, the authors review a number of research achievements relevant to privacy protection and analyze and evaluate the application limitations of them in the reader privacy protection of a digital library, consequently, establishing the constraints that an ideal approach to library reader privacy protection should meet, so as to provide references for the follow-up research of the problem.

As a result, the authors conclude that an ideal approach to reader privacy protection should be able to comprehensively improve the security of all kinds of readers' privacy information on the untrusted server-side as a whole, under the premise of not changing the architecture, efficiency, accuracy and practicality of a digital library system.

Along with the rapid development of new network technologies, such as cloud computing, the server-side of a digital library is becoming more and more untrustworthy, thereby, posing a serious threat to the privacy of library readers. In fact, the problem of reader privacy has become one of the important obstacles to the further development and application of digital libraries.