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To resolve the limited access to capital by local governments due to the Great Recession, the United States Federal Government responded with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) which included the Build America Bond (BAB) program. The result of this program was considerable interest cost savings to state and local governments, but many local governments chose to issue traditional tax-exempt bonds instead of BABs. Using a policy diffusion framework and hazard model approach, we identify factors that affected the speed of BAB adoption by local governments. Results show that underwriter and financial adviser experience along with the internal characteristics of the local governments played a significant role in adoption. These findings have implications for future fiscal policies targeting local governments for the purpose of timely economic recovery.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the relationships between consumers' body types and characteristics such as shopping orientation, past experience with fit problems, attitudes toward internet shopping and attitudes toward 3‐D body scanning.

This study collected body data from 441 Korean females who participated in 3‐D body scanning. Using a hierarchical cluster analysis, the body scanning identified five body types. Then body types and shopping characteristics variables were analyzed.

Slim respondents showed significantly higher hedonic shopping orientation and their attitude to internet shopping was positive, since they evaluated using the internet as being “fun”. By contrast, respondents with larger body types considered the convenience of internet shopping to be the most important feature. Respondents, regardless of their body types, regarded 3‐D body scanning as an enjoyable, futuristic and interesting experience. Moreover, respondents showed a high inclination to spend more money for customization services which utilize the 3‐D scanning technique.

This study analyzed Korean females' body shapes using 3‐D scanned body measurements. This study can contribute to integrate knowledge in the body measurement sector and the consumer behavior sector.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of the strength of auditing and reporting standards (SARS, hereafter) on the quality of infrastructure in African countries and tests whether the ethical behaviour of firms and judicial independence affect this relationship.

The sample consists of 108 country-year observations spanning from of 2014–2017. Data concerning the main variables in this study (the quality of infrastructure, SARS, ethical behaviour of firms and judicial independence) are gathered from the Global Competitiveness Reports for 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017.

The findings of this study suggest that the SARS is positively related to the quality of infrastructure. Similarly, the ethical behaviour of firms has a positive and significant effect on the same variable. When testing for the moderating effects of ethical behaviour of firms and judicial independence, the association between SARS and the quality of infrastructure remains positive and significant for high ethical behaviour and high judicial independence sub-samples, while it is insignificant for settings characterised by low ethical behaviour of firms or low judicial independence.

The results of this study highlight the importance of the SARS in combination with business ethics and judicial independence in improving the quality of infrastructure in African countries. These results may have policy implications for African governments aiming to improve the quality of their infrastructures by strengthening auditing and reporting standards, enforcing laws obliging firms to act ethically and giving importance to the role played by judicial independence in imposing strict sanctions on all violations that can affect the quality of infrastructure in one country.

This paper aims to examine the association between money laundering and infrastructure quality and whether the strength of auditing and reporting standards (SARS) moderates this association.

The sample includes 348 country-year observations over the period of 2015–2017. The authors use Basel Anti-Money Laundering reports for 2015, 2016 and 2017 to collect data concerning money laundering. Infrastructure quality and the remaining variables are gathered from the Global Competitiveness reports for the same years.

Results show that money laundering is negatively associated with infrastructure quality. This negative association remains stable for countries characterised by low SARS, while it becomes less pronounced for countries with high SARS. Additional tests for the moderating impact of the SARS, using an interaction term between money laundering and SARS dummy variable, confirm that high SARS mitigates the adverse effect of money laundering on infrastructure quality.

These findings are important for policymakers, as they put emphasis on the adverse effect of money laundering and financial crimes on infrastructure quality and how solid auditing and reporting standards may improve infrastructure quality and reduce the negative effect of money laundering on the same variable. Thus, strengthening legislations concerning auditing and reporting standards in one country may improve infrastructure quality and combat money laundering and its adverse impacts.

Our prior work has identified a trade-off that new entrants face in obtaining favorable market reception, whereby initial entrants suffer from a deficit of legitimacy whereas later entrants suffer from a deficit of authenticity. This research has also proposed that a single mechanism is responsible for this trade-off: the tendency for customers and other stakeholders to assess the entrant's claim to originality based on the visible work that it has done to legitimate the new product or organizational form. This chapter extends and deepens our understanding of such “legitimation work” by showing how it can illuminate cases that seem in the first instance to defy this trade-off. In particular, we focus on two “off-diagonal” cases: (a) when, as in the case of “patent trolls” and fraudulent innovators, early entrants are viewed as inauthentic despite having a credible claim to originality; (b) when late entrants, as in the case of Dell Computers, mechanical watches and baseball ballparks, are viewed as authentic despite obviously not being the originators. We clarify how each off-diagonal case represents an ‘exception that proves the rule’ whereby audiences attribute authenticity on the basis of legitimation work rather than on the order of entry per se. The last case also leads to an opportunity to clarify why “cultural appropriation” can sometimes project authenticity and sometimes inauthenticity, why audiences bother to make inferences about a producer's authenticity on the basis of visible legitimation work, and why legitimacy is a universal goal of early movers whereas authenticity varies in its importance.

Fashion and textile industry has confronted to participate with the sustainable industry and society proactively not by the government regulations, but by the shareholders or consumers driven with corporate social responsibility. The purpose of this paper is to consider methods applied for the sustainability of products according to Korean domestic fashion and textile companies and clothing types and to investigate the limitation of current sustainability methods of companies.

The study used document analysis and case studies of 396 companies. The study looked into newspapers, monthly magazines, and publications of fashion companies and internet web sites of almost every possible type that have been issued to date and analyzed the previous studies as well.

The companies’ strategies are of three groups, the uses of environmental friendly materials: 36.9 percent (natural fibers, recycled fibers and biodegradable fibers), apparel reuse: 4.5 percent (remodeling/alteration and transform/combination with more materials), and eco-marketing promotions: 58.6 percent. For women’s and casual wear section, the methods used with organic materials and the green-campaign messages appeared frequently, while in the men’s wear section, coolMapsi, 0or warm OnMapsi for business wear did a lot for the low indoor energy consumption, such as no neck-tie in the hot season or wearing underwear in the cold season.

Fashion and textile products have provided the key solutions for the generation’s happiness, identity, value, self-realization, health and role. There have been the low quality and similarity of fashion products from mass production and high speed and we should consider sustainability for the next generation and society. But the current problem in the industry is that most of eco-product developments are only short term. Also, from the high cost of eco materials and processes, there is a limited portion of sustainability section among total products and low design quality of fashion or the low profit outcomes.