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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the Dual Use (DU) Option – a crop insurance policy created by the 2018 Farm Bill – relative to other policies available to dual-purpose annual forage producers. The new policy combines existing rainfall-based policies for annual forage crops and multi-peril policies for grain, allowing coverage for multiple crop uses on the same acres during the same growing season.

The paper uses a simulation model to examine crop insurance choices for a typical Texas dual-purpose wheat farm. The certainty equivalent (CE) of wealth is used to rank choices within and between three insurance plans and to analyze the effects of those choices over a range of producer risk aversion levels and for three cases of yield expectations.

The DU Option is more preferred as risk aversion increases, but it is not universally preferred. Therefore, while the policy can be a viable risk management tool, certain restrictions may be limiting its effectiveness.

The findings of this paper can help explain farm-level decision making related to dual-purpose annual forage crop insurance program choices.

This paper contributes to the literature by documenting a new crop insurance program made available in the 2018 Farm Bill and provides insights into producers' possible choices by evaluating extensive scenarios.

Purpose – This chapter examines place-based social practices and experiences, conceptualized as ‘belonging’, among older Americans who live in senior mobile home communities in Florida.

Design/Methodology/Approach – Pursuing a grounded theory approach, the chapter is based on 18 ethnographic interviews with senior mobile home households, conducted between 2005 and 2007.

Findings – Following lifestyle migration, senior Floridians developed interrelated, yet distinct, forms of belonging within their varying social and spatial environments, combining elements of selective, elective and resistant belonging.

Originality/Value – The study participants’ focus on shared and socially valued group characteristics in their construction of place-based identity problematizes the possibility of a successful integration of outsiders, raising new questions for the concept and future study of belonging.

In the last five years, there has been an increased interest across the globe, and in the United Kingdom in particular, to define, conceptualise and measure learning gains. The concept of learning gains, briefly summarised as the improvement in knowledge, skills, work-readiness and personal development made by students during their time spent in higher education, has been hailed by some as an opportunity to measure ‘excellence’ in teaching. This chapter will review some of the common definitions and the methods employed in research on learning gains. Secondly, we will provide a critical evaluation of the computational aspects of learning gains (e.g., raw gain, normalised gain). Finally, we will critically reflect upon the lessons learnt and what is not yet known in terms of learning gains.

Michael Brown argues that what unites the human and social sciences is their evolving character, made explicit in the concepts of “reflexivity,” “course of activity,” and “theorizing.” Once the social sciences are taken as a whole, the notion of “sociality” will allow to grasp society as ever changing, as a becoming. I shall examine the notion of sociality in the literary criticism of Lukács, Goldmann, and Adorno, three authors who consider the essay as the adequate open form of critique in times of rapid social change. Originally adopted by the young Lukács, the essay tended to be abandoned by him when elaborating the concept of critical or socialist realism as a repository of timeless cultural values. In his studies in the European realist or the soviet novel, for example, on Balzac, Stendhal, Thomas Mann, or Solzhenitsyn, the dialectical concept of social totality becomes a sum of orientations, presenting the individual writer with the moral task to choose “progress” and discard “negativity.” The social is thus narrowed to individual choice. Different from Lukács, Goldmann's literary theory defines cultural production as a matter of the social group, the transindividual subject. Goldmann was deeply marked by Lukács's early writings from which he gained notably the notion of tragedy and the concept of maximum possible consciousness—the world vision of a social group which structures the work of a writer. Cultural creation is resistance to capitalist society, as evident in the literature of absence, Malraux's novels, and the nouveau roman. In the writings of Adorno the social is lodged within the avant-garde, provided that one takes its means and procedures literally, e.g., the writings of Kafka. By formal innovation—among others the adoption of the essay, the small form, the fragment—art exercises criticism of the ongoing rationalization process and preserves the possibility of change (p. 319).

This article aims to analyze how gender and decision-making styles of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) impact the financial performance of the firms they manage.

Data were obtained for 2017 for 185 SMEs in Chile, an emerging economy, including firm information, CEO's sociodemographic characteristics and CEOs' decision-making styles. Generalized Least Squares (GLS) models were estimated to explain the influence of gender and decision-making styles on firm performance, controlling for a series of covariates. To test whether gender moderates the effect of decision-making styles on firm performance, interaction terms were included. Furthermore, models were subject to several robustness procedures, with no significant differences in results.

The authors find evidence of significant relationships for both gender and the avoidant style. Likewise, the authors find evidence of interaction effects between gender and decision-making styles, particularly between gender and the dependent style.

Findings contribute to prior research by analyzing the relationship between CEO gender and SME performance in the context of a Latin American emerging economy; by providing evidence of the impact of decision-making styles on the financial performance of SMEs; and by examining how a specific decision-making style, namely the dependent style, operates differently according to CEO gender, shedding some light on its ambiguous character as described by prior research. For policymakers and authorities, findings indicate the importance of incorporating women to SMEs and supporting their way towards higher management.

Esta investigación analiza cómo el género y los estilos de toma de decisiones de los gerentes generales (CEOs) de las pequeñas y medianas empresas (PYMEs) impactan en el desempeño financiero de las empresas que administran.

Se obtuvieron datos del año 2017 para 185 PYMEs ubicadas en Chile, una economía emergente, incluyendo información de la empresa, así como características sociodemográficas y estilos de toma de decisiones de los gerentes generales. Se estimaron modelos de Mínimos Cuadrados Generalizados (GLS) para explicar la influencia del género y los estilos de toma de decisiones en el rendimiento de la empresa, controlando por una serie de covariables. Para determinar si el género modera el efecto de los estilos de toma de decisiones en el rendimiento de la empresa, se incluyeron términos de interacción. Además, los modelos fueron sometidos a varios procedimientos de robustez, sin encontrar diferencias significativas en los resultados.

Los autores encuentran evidencia de relaciones significativas tanto para el género como para el estilo evitativo. Asimismo, los autores encuentran evidencia de efectos interacción entre el género y estilos de toma de decisiones, particularmente entre el género y el estilo dependiente.

Los hallazgos contribuyen a investigaciones anteriores al analizar la relación entre el género del CEO y el rendimiento de las PYMEs en el contexto de una economía latinoamericana emergente; al proporcionar evidencia del impacto de los estilos de toma de decisiones en el rendimiento financiero de las PYMEs; y al examinar cómo un estilo de toma de decisiones específico, a saber, el estilo dependiente, opera de manera diferente según el género del CEO, esclareciendo su carácter ambiguo tal como ha sido descrito en investigaciones anteriores. Para las autoridades y los responsables de políticas, los hallazgos indican la importancia de incorporar mujeres a las PYMEs y apoyarlas en su ascenso hacia la alta administración.

Technology has disrupted many industries from the start of Industrialization era to the Industry 4.0 era. There has been an exponential growth in the technological front and people are talking about Industry 5.0. Digital transformation is a critical direction in which organizations will have to move toward in order to succeed in this competitive world. To make a smooth transition, firms must understand the basic building blocks of the digital transformation process and the key areas it touches upon namely customer experience, operational process and dynamic business models. Organizations will also have to identify the enablers of digital transformation which they can work on to smoothen the transformative process. Firms will also need the framework of digital transformation spelling out the roadmap for effective digital transformation. Firms on the urge to go for digital transformation will face numerous challenges in all the stages of implementation namely the initiation phase, the execution phase and the governance phase. A clear understanding of these challenges will help the firms to overcome or mitigate these challenges and be successful in their digital transformation process.

This paper aims to investigate the association between the level of voluntary disclosure and cost of equity capital (COEC).

Two disclosure indices following Botosan and Hail are developed and applied in an OLS regression on 95 listed companies from Austria, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark; the indices are defined according to the temporal context (historical, forward‐oriented) of information provided in annual reports.

An expected negative relationship is found between the level of forward‐oriented information and COEC, and an unexpected positive relationship is found between the level of historical information and COEC.

The sample is restricted to 95 listed companies in 2005. The disclosure index and COEC are not directly observable, and thus rely on constructs. Methodological drawbacks might include an endogeneity bias as well as investors not having homogeneous expectations and knowledge about capital markets.

Traditional financial reporting models might not provide enough information in order to reduce information asymmetry and COEC. The findings provide insight into the impact of a required increased level of additional corporate information on corporate metrics, especially to standard setters and academic researchers as well as practitioners.

The current research contributes in three ways: the application of a disclosure index on an international sample; the employment of a new approach to computing COEC, explicitly matching input variables to a pre‐specified estimation date; and the provision of evidence on the different impact of the temporal context of voluntarily disclosed information.