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Discusses decision analysis with reference to a particular model and analysis procedure which has been successfully used in measuring project risk for insurers and bankers. Notes that it works by analysing the main risks and uncertainties to which the project is subject and then quantifies their probability of occurrence. Concludes that a further benefit is the provision of valuable evidence for prospective lenders that a project has been thoroughly studied and understood.

Law enforcement agents enforce rules that they might transgress in their private lives. Building from a theory of “hypocrisy aversion” where agents incur psychological costs from imposing a sanction on others for rules that they might break, the authors design a two-player game in which players are simultaneously placed in the roles of enforcer and potential transgressor. In this model, discretionary enforcement is endogenous to the size of the sanction. Conditional on rewards to enforcement and punishment that are both sufficiently small in the status quo, the authors demonstrate that price effects can be dominated by second-order hypocrisy effects, leading to rates of transgression that increase with larger sanctions. The authors test the model within a laboratory experiment where individuals can simultaneously gamble at the expense of a third party and punish those they observe gambling. Examining the comparable testable predictions of models of (i) selfish agents, (ii) pro-social agents, and (iii) pro-social agents who are averse to hypocrisy, the authors find evidence of hypocrisy aversion in the rates of gambling, sanctioning, and the changing composition of agent strategies. Our results suggest that increasing sanctions can backfire in the deterrence of common criminal and non-criminal offenses.

Responsible innovation (RI) and social innovation (SI) are two fields of innovation study experiencing burgeoning policy, practice and research interest. Despite this rapid rise in popularity, the scholarly literature in these two related areas of innovation study remains quite separate, stymieing the growth of shared research insights. The purpose of this paper is to propose a pragmatic, process-based framework that lends itself to advancing systematic research in both fields while retaining their distinct identities.

This conceptual paper outlines an analogy-inspired framework that builds on the logical thinking put forward by Philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine in 1962. It focusses on key processes that cross-cut both fields.

Reflexivity, collaboration and design are identified as three broad core processes that span both the RI and SI fields and form the basis of an integrative framework that highlights the scope for cross-field research pollination.

The literature that draws these two fields together is virtually non-existent. The paper uses analogy to facilitate awareness of the parallels between these two areas of innovation study. The integrative framework put forward in the paper is of value for advancing cumulative research in innovation fields of critical importance to the society.

Introduction The ever increasing demands made on materials by advanced technology has led, in recent years, to a greater awareness of the importance of mechano‐chemical behaviour. These may be defined as the synergistic effect of mechanical forces and chemical reactions on the material. Although possibly interrelated, three classes of mechano‐chemical reactions have been identified as; stress‐corrosion (SCC), corrosion fatigue (CF) and hydrogen embrittlement. SCC has become one of the ‘in’ subjects of corrosion science during the last decade, while the importance of CF has emerged comparatively recently. In a review of the national corrosion and protection scene in 1970, it was revealed that 62 postgraduate research workers, representing 21% of the total effort in the corrosion and protection field, were involved in mechano‐chemical corrosion studies1. The bulk of these were working on SCC. This large research effort has not resulted in a standardisation of test methods nor, despite several attempts, in a unifying theory for SCC2. The newcomer to the field is faced with a bewildering variety of tests of varying complexity and validity. The supporters of each type of test tend to make exaggerated claims particularly when the test they are advocating is the only one which has caused a particular alloy‐environment system to exhibit SCC.

After a series of recent Delaware Chancery Court and Delaware Supreme Court decisions and the standard of judicial review applied in challenges to “going‐private” transactions, controlling stockholders seeking to privatize their subsidiaries may be induced to do so by means of a two‐step acquisition (i.e., unilateral tender or exchange offer, followed by a short‐form merger) instead of a negotiated, single‐step merger. That said, there are a range of practical considerations for public M&A advisors in the wake of these decisions that may not necessarily make the two‐step method the “be all and end all” approach. In any case, there is an incongruity in Delaware’s common law, which is policy‐driven and, to some degree, formalistic, and which may no longer be as defensible today as it once may have been. Accordingly, a critical review of the applicable Delaware precedents and, ultimately, the reversal or modification thereof, seems appropriate at this time.

This paper aims to analyse the Portuguese companies’ determinants of capital structure. To reach this objective, the authors used data from 37 non-financial Portuguese large enterprises and from 4,233 non-financial small and medium enterprises for the period 2010-2016. Additionally, the authors selected a sub-period from 2010 to 2014 for a deeper understanding of the impact of the sovereign debt crisis and the Economic Adjustment Programme of Troika on the capital structure of those companies.

Three dependent variables were tested according to debt maturity, and a dynamic panel data model, namely, the generalised method of moments system estimator, was used to test the formulated research hypotheses following Arellano and Bover (1995) and Blundell and Bond (1998) to capture the dynamic nature of the firm’s capital structure decisions.

In general, the results point out that the capital structure decisions depend on a set of firm-specific factors, and that the effects of the determinants of the debt maturity ratios differ according to the type of firm, i.e. large/small firms, and the economic cycle.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that has been carried out in Portugal by using two samples of large and small companies for analysing the effects of the Economic Adjustment Programme of Troika on the capital structure of companies. The authors seek to understand which type of companies suffered more because of the effects of the Economic Adjustment Programme of Troika during this period, and which are the capital structure determinants that present greater change. Contrary to what might be expected, large companies are the firms that suffer most from the Economic Adjustment Programme. Probably, because these companies are the most immediate, most scrutinised and those that must show abroad that the bank did not fund them in the long term, because of the imposition and limits to grant credit faced by the banks themselves.

Over the last few decades, corporate environmental reporting (CER) has received substantial attention due to complex societal and ecological challenges experienced at a global scale. While there has been growth in CER research across the world, we know very little of the state of CER research in Africa. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive literature review of CER in sub-Saharan Africa to demonstrate its current state, uncover gaps in extant studies and identify areas for further research in the region. We perform a metasearch on the Financial Times Top 50 journals in addition to wider analyses using African Journals Online (AJOL) and Google Scholar between 2008 and 2020. Though there is some progress in interrogating CER in the region, there is much leeway for further research into how public and private corporations provide an account for their interaction with nature. Extant studies have examined how CER is often subsumed within corporate social responsibility initiatives while other studies explore ways in which CER can provide accountability mechanisms in the mining sector of select countries. Important areas of future research include the influences of legal, cultural and political systems on the level of CER, the tensions between economic development driven by multinational corporations and the necessity for ecological protection. Finally, further research could investigate the role CER can play in encouraging specific corporate disclosures around GHG emissions, especially given global efforts being undertaken to mitigate the effects of climate change.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

This article studies the moderating effect of institutional pressures on the impact of bank ties on the capital structure of small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs).

The study uses an unbalanced longitudinal dataset covering three years—2011, 2013 and 2015—from a project on small manufacturing enterprises in Vietnam. The sample consists of 7,680 firm-year observations.

Pressures from formal and informal institutions lessen the positive effect of bank ties on the capital structure of SMEs. These moderating effects are more salient in regions having lower institutional quality.

Empirically showing how institutional factors can be investigated together with relational factors to explain the capital structure of SMEs in a developing economy. Distinguishing between formal and informal institutional pressures and revealing their indirect effect on SMEs' capital structure through impacting the effect of bank ties.

Presents the scientific methodology from the enlarged cybernetical perspective that recognizes the anisotropy of time, the probabilistic character of natural laws, and the entry that the incomplete determinism in Nature opens to the occurrence of innovation, growth, organization, teleology communication, control, contest and freedom. The new tier to the methodological edifice that cybernetics provides stands on the earlier tiers, which go back to the Ionians (c. 500 BC). However, the new insights reveal flaws in the earlier tiers, and their removal strengthens the entire edifice. The new concepts of teleological activity and contest allow the clear demarcation of the military sciences as those whose subject matter is teleological activity involving contest. The paramount question “what ought to be done”, outside the empirical realm, is embraced by the scientific methodology. It also embraces the cognitive sciences that ask how the human mind is able to discover, and how the sequence of discoveries might converge to a true description of reality.