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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.