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This study aims to investigate whether firms purchase directors' and officers' liability (D&O) insurance when the country-level economic policy uncertainty (EPU) is high.

This study uses D&O insurance data from Chinese listed firms between 2003 and 2019 to conduct regression analyses to examine the association between D&O insurance and EPU.

The results show that government EPU, despite being an exogenous factor, increases the likelihood of firms' purchasing D&O insurance, and this effect is more pronounced when firms are exposed to great share price crash risk and high litigation risk, suggesting that firms intend to purchase D&O insurance possibly due to the accentuated stock price crash risk and litigation risk associated with EPU. In addition, the results indicate that the effect of EPU on the D&O insurance purchase decision is moderated by the provincial capital market development and internal control quality.

The study highlights the role of uncertain economic policies in shareholder approval of D&O insurance purchases.

The study enriches the literature on the determinants of D&O insurance purchases by documenting novel evidence that country-level EPU is a key institutional factor shaping firms' decisions to purchase D&O insurance.

With the yearly increase of mileage and passenger volume in China's high-speed railway, the problems of traditional paper railway tickets have become increasingly prominent, including complexity of business handling process, low efficiency of ticket inspection and high cost of usage and management. This paper aims to make extensive references to successful experiences of electronic ticket applications both domestically and internationally. The research on key technologies and system implementation of railway electronic ticket with Chinese characteristics has been carried out.

Research in key technologies is conducted including synchronization technique in distributed heterogeneous database system, the grid-oriented passenger service record (PSR) data storage model, efficient access to massive PSR data under high concurrency condition, the linkage between face recognition service platforms and various terminals in large scenarios, and two-factor authentication of the e-ticket identification code based on the key and the user identity information. Focusing on the key technologies and architecture the of existing ticketing system, multiple service resources are expanded and developed such as electronic ticket clusters, PSR clusters, face recognition clusters and electronic ticket identification code clusters.

The proportion of paper ticket printed has dropped to 20%, saving more than 2 billion tickets annually since the launch of the application of E-ticketing nationwide. The average time for passengers to pass through the automatic ticket gates has decreased from 3 seconds to 1.3 seconds, significantly improving the efficiency of passenger transport organization. Meanwhile, problems of paper ticket counterfeiting, reselling and loss have been generally eliminated.

E-ticketing has laid a technical foundation for the further development of railway passenger transport services in the direction of digitalization and intelligence.

The paper aims to solve the problem of personnel intrusion identification within the limits of high-speed railways. It adopts the fusion method of millimeter wave radar and camera to improve the accuracy of object recognition in dark and harsh weather conditions.

This paper adopts the fusion strategy of radar and camera linkage to achieve focus amplification of long-distance targets and solves the problem of low illumination by laser light filling of the focus point. In order to improve the recognition effect, this paper adopts the YOLOv8 algorithm for multi-scale target recognition. In addition, for the image distortion caused by bad weather, this paper proposes a linkage and tracking fusion strategy to output the correct alarm results.

Simulated intrusion tests show that the proposed method can effectively detect human intrusion within 0–200 m during the day and night in sunny weather and can achieve more than 80% recognition accuracy for extreme severe weather conditions.

(1) The authors propose a personnel intrusion monitoring scheme based on the fusion of millimeter wave radar and camera, achieving all-weather intrusion monitoring; (2) The authors propose a new multi-level fusion algorithm based on linkage and tracking to achieve intrusion target monitoring under adverse weather conditions; (3) The authors have conducted a large number of innovative simulation experiments to verify the effectiveness of the method proposed in this article.

This paper aims to investigate the reliability, availability, maintenance and safety analysis method for railway network operation.

The reliability of the railway network is proposed based on the accident frequency and the topology of the railway network. Network efficiency and capacity are proposed to evaluate the availability of the railway network. The maintenance of the railway network is analyzed from the perspective of accident recovery time. The safety index of the railway network is proposed to measure the safety of railway stations and sections and the K-means method is proposed to find the safety critical stations and sections. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated through a real-world case study.

The case study shows that the proposed model can produce a big-picture averaged view of the network-wide safety level and help us identify the safety critical stations and sections by considering both the expected reduction of network efficiency and capacity.

The potential application of the proposed model is to help the safety managers determine the investments in safety management of each section and station and then increase the safety and robustness of railway network operation.

The safety analysis of the railway network should consider the reliability, availability and maintenance of the railway network. In this paper, the reliability of the railway network is proposed based on the accident frequency and the topology of the railway network. Network efficiency and capacity are proposed to evaluate the availability of the railway network. The maintenance of the railway network is analyzed from the perspective of recovery time. Finally, the safety index of the railway network is proposed to analyze the safety critical stations and sections.

Based on the textual-analyzed data covering 2148 IPO firms in China’s stock market during the 2007–2018 period, the authors’ purpose is to examine the influence of anti-takeover provision (ATP) adoption on initial public offerings (IPO) underpricing and identify the reducing effect of the former.

The authors examine the sample consisting of Chinese A-share listed IPO firms between 2007 and 2018 from China Stock Market Accounting Research and Chinese Research Data Services, with ATP data collected from the IPO firm chapters. Specifically, the authors use text analysis to identify whether there are ATPs in the IPO firm chapters, as well as the number of ATPs. H1: IPO underpricing is less severe for firms adopting ATPs. H2: The effect of ATP adoption on IPO underpricing is more salient for firms in worse information environments.

The authors examine the influence of ATP adoption on IPO underpricing and identify the reducing effect of the former. This effect can be explained by the fact that adopting ATPs in IPO firm chapters can reduce information asymmetry to a large extent by helping external investors obtain more private information, which alleviates IPO underpricing. The authors also find that the reducing effect is more significant in the worsened information environment. Furthermore, the authors explore the influence of adopting ATPs on other IPO characteristics and find positive effects on IPO over-subscription, funds raised and trading activity and negative effects on listing fees.

This study mainly contributes to the literature from the following two aspects. First, the study enriches the literature about the influencing factors of IPO underpricing. Second, the study also enriches the literature about the economic consequences of ATP adoption. This study also has important policy implications. With the coming of the era of decentralized ownership in China’s capital market, ATP adoption has become more important and attracted more attention. Also, investors focus more on pricing efficiency. The findings in this paper provide a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between ATP adoption and IPO underpricing.

Highly committed, motivated and engaged employees assure organizational success and competitiveness. The study aims to examine the association between human resource development (HRD) practices and employee engagement with organizational commitment as a mediating variable.

Data were collected from 760 employees of 13 star-rated hotels comprising 5 (five-star) and 8 (four-star). The data supported the hypothesized relationships. Structural equation modeling was used to evaluate the proposed model and hypotheses. Construct validity and reliability were established through confirmatory factor analysis.

The results indicate that HRD practices and affective commitment are significantly associated. HRD practices and continuance commitment were shown to be non-significantly associated. HRD practices and normative commitment were shown to be non-significantly associated. Employee engagement and organizational commitment are significantly associated. The results further show that organizational commitment mediates the association between HRD practices and employee engagement.

The generalizability of the findings will be constrained due to the research's hotel industry focus and cross sectional data.

The study's findings will serve as valuable pointers for stakeholders and policymakers of the hotel industry in the adoption, design and implementation of proactive HRD interventions to keep highly engaged and committed employees for organizational competitiveness and sustainability.

By evidencing empirically that organizational commitment mediates the nexus between HRD practices and employee engagement, the study extends the literature.

This paper aims to comprehensively clarify the research status of thermal transport of supercritical aviation kerosene, with particular interests in the effect of cracking on heat transfer.

A brief review of current research on supercritical aviation kerosene is presented in views of the surrogate model of hydrocarbon fuels, chemical cracking mechanism of hydrocarbon fuels, thermo-physical properties of hydrocarbon fuels, turbulence models, flow characteristics and thermal performances, which indicates that more efforts need to be directed into these topics. Therefore, supercritical thermal transport of n-decane is then computationally investigated in the condition of thermal pyrolysis, while the ASPEN HYSYS gives the properties of n-decane and pyrolysis products. In addition, the one-step chemical cracking mechanism and SST k-ω turbulence model are applied with relatively high precision.

The existing surrogate models of aviation kerosene are limited to a specific scope of application and their thermo-physical properties deviate from the experimental data. The turbulence models used to implement numerical simulation should be studied to further improve the prediction accuracy. The thermal-induced acceleration is driven by the drastic density change, which is caused by the production of small molecules. The wall temperature of the combustion chamber can be effectively reduced by this behavior, i.e. the phenomenon of heat transfer deterioration can be attenuated or suppressed by thermal pyrolysis.

The issues in numerical studies of supercritical aviation kerosene are clearly revealed, and the conjugation mechanism between thermal pyrolysis and convective heat transfer is initially presented.

This paper analyzes the application of digital twin technology in the field of intelligent operation and maintenance of high-speed railway infrastructure from the perspective of top-level design.

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the definition, connotations, characteristics and key technologies of digital twin technology. It also conducts a thorough analysis of the current state of digital twin applications, with a particular focus on the overall requirements for intelligent operation and maintenance of high-speed railway infrastructure. Using the Jinan Yellow River Bridge on the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed railway as a case study, the paper details the construction process of the twin system from the perspectives of system architecture, theoretical definition, model construction and platform design.

Digital twin technology can play an important role in the whole life cycle management, fault prediction and condition monitoring in the field of high-speed rail operation and maintenance. Digital twin technology is of great significance to improve the intelligent level of high-speed railway operation and management.

This paper systematically summarizes the main components of digital twin railway. The general framework of the digital twin bridge is given, and its application in the field of intelligent operation and maintenance is prospected.

Engaged employees assure organizational competitiveness and sustainability. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between job resources and employee turnover intentions, with employee engagement as a mediating variable.

Data were collected from 934 employees of eight wholly-owned pharmaceutical industries. The proposed model and hypotheses were evaluated using structural equation modeling. Construct reliability and validity was established through confirmatory factor analysis.

Data supported the hypothesized relationship. The results show that job autonomy and employee engagement were significantly associated. Supervisory support and employee engagement were significantly associated. However, performance feedback and employee engagement were nonsignificantly associated. Employee engagement had a significant influence on employee turnover intentions. The results further show that employee engagement mediates the association between job resources and employee turnover intentions.

The generalizability of the findings will be constrained due to the research’s pharmaceutical industry focus and cross-sectional data.

The study’s findings will serve as valuable pointers for stakeholders and decision-makers in the pharmacuetical industry to develop a proactive and well-articulated employee engagement intervention to ensure organizational effectiveness, innovativeness and competitiveness.

By empirically demonstrating that employee engagement mediates the nexus of job resources and employee turnover intentions, the study adds to the corpus of literature.

This study explores the characteristics of high-speed rail (HSR) and air transportation networks in China based on the weighted complex network approach. Previous related studies have largely implemented unweighted (binary) network analysis, or have constructed a weighted network, limited by unweighted centrality measures. This study applies weighted centrality measures (mean association [MA], triangle betweenness centrality [TBC], and weighted harmonic centrality [WHC]) to represent traffic dynamics in HSR and air transportation weighted networks, where nodes represent cities and links represent passenger traffic. The spatial distribution of centrality results is visualized by using ArcGIS 10.2. Moreover, we analyze the network robustness of HSR, air transportation, and multimodal networks by measuring weighted efficiency (WE) subjected to the highest weighted centrality node attacks. In the HSR network, centrality results show that cities with a higher MA are concentrated in the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta; cities with a higher TBC are mostly provincial capitals or regional centers; and cities with a higher WHC are grouped in eastern and central regions. Furthermore, spatial differentiation of centrality results is found between HSR and air transportation networks. There is a little bit of difference in eastern cities; cities in the central region have complementary roles in HSR and air transportation networks, but air transport is still dominant in western cities. The robustness analysis results show that the multimodal network, which includes both airports and high-speed rail stations, has the best connectivity and shows robustness.