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While universities and colleges engage in marketing their brands through official communications, there also exists the unique case of social media accounts created by and for university students, which have the sole purpose of disseminating humorous parody content about the university. These accounts and their content are neither managed nor sanctioned by the university. While user-generated satire has been studied in the areas of politics and popular culture, it has not often been considered within the realm of universities and their student stakeholders.

A total of 200 undergraduates at a large public university in the southeastern United States were surveyed regarding their engagement with and thoughts about parody accounts associated with their school.

All students surveyed were aware of these parody accounts associated with their university; however, results suggest that enjoyment of and engagement with these accounts varies. Those students engaged with university parody accounts experience heightened identification with, but reduced concern over this satirical (and often unprofessional) community, which could be harmful to their university's image.

Although educational institutions aim to convey an outward-facing message of academic excellence and professionalism, their student population may create, engage with and disseminate alternative messaging that must be considered.

While this unique form of online brand engagement is potentially harmful to the university image due to its humorous nature, it also can be seen as a form of brand community, lending to feelings of group identification for students. Brand parody within social media remains a largely ignored topic within higher education marketing.

A country is vulnerable when it is susceptible to shocks. This chapter uses data from 34 developing countries to investigate vulnerability trends for them since the 1990s. We find that the level of economic development is inversely related to macroeconomic vulnerability. The countries that became less primarily vulnerable belong to the upper middle-income and middle-income groups; the reverse is true for most vulnerable countries up to 2014. Argentina and Papua New Guinea became more vulnerable from 2016 to 2020. Income plays a crucial role in deciding vulnerability in the globalization era. Geographical location is a key factor in measuring vulnerability, especially in African countries. But the reverse result took place in the de-globalization era. The majority of the upper middle-income and lower middle-income countries are among the most vulnerable. Surprisingly, lower-income groups include the nations with significantly lower IMV values.

Introduction Relativism of all shades and kinds is in fashion. For some decades, it has been trying to enter the very bastion of the academic heartland by questioning the prevailing cognitive realism in the philosophy of science (Kuhn, Feyerabend). More recently a somewhat different and stronger version of relativism has made some extraordinary advances in literary criticism (the movement of “deconstruction”) and spawned some controversy in the field of law (critical legal studies). The same tendencies have now emerged in architecture (Jencks). More alarmingly, perhaps, in the social sciences we observe a brand new interest in so‐ called “post‐modern” perspectives: post‐modern ethnography in anthropology (Tylor), new voices in sociology (Lash and Urri), and, of course, also the novel ideas representing economics as discourse with a distinctly post‐modern flavor (Amariglio; Rossetti; Milberg; Ruccio).

This study aims to comprehensively understand the regulatory landscape and digital transformation (DT) within the banking sector, anchored in the theory of national innovation systems.

Using insights from a comprehensive literature review, an innovative framework is introduced to categorize regulators and digital banking attributes across 88 countries. The study uses k-means clustering to analyze the digital banking and regulatory status of 88 countries, tracing their evolution over two distinct timeframes.

The cross-country analysis spanning 2014 and 2022 reveals compelling trends in regulatory rankings and digital banking across diverse nations. These findings shed light on the dynamic interplay between regulatory environments and technological innovation.

This research contributes to knowledge by establishing a robust framework for understanding regulator dynamics in digital banking across a wide spectrum of countries. It offers valuable insights for academia, practitioners and policymakers by elucidating the complex relationship between the regulatory landscape and DT, shaping discourse and implications in this field, and informing strategic decision-making and policy formulation in the global financial landscape.

This paper is a scoping review that aims to explore the scientific evidence in relation to employment discrimination suffered by LGTBIQ+ migrants.

Following a search in the electronic databases PsycINFO, SCOPUS and WOS, 89 studies were obtained. It has been conducted using PRISMA protocol and applied to an initial corpus of 89 academic texts. Having implemented the suitability, screening and inclusion criteria, this corpus was refined to a sample of four articles. These were evaluated using the Joanna Briggs Institute tools.

Despite the scarce scientific evidence on the subject, we can affirm that power dynamics place migrant LGTBIQ+ people in a clearly disadvantaged position with regard to labour integration. The simultaneous ascription to the multiple groups analysed entails the experience of facing double or triple discrimination.

The review highlights the need for more research on LGTBIQ+ migrant issues across various contexts and sectors. It suggests detailed analysis of homophobia and homophilia in different areas, visibility of good practices and exploration of coping strategies like de-transitioning. The sample of people investigated could be extended to other acronyms of the collective. Scaling up research would also be useful to compensate for the methodological limitations of the studies. For example, the hypothesis that the cultural sector is more inclusive with real job offers could be taken up.

The review highlights the need for comprehensive policy interventions to prevent stigmatisation, ensure healthcare access and recognize the rights of marginalized populations. It calls for intersectional approaches in employment and migration policies to address multiple oppressions faced by LGTBIQ+ migrants. The review also recommends revising foreigner regulations to reduce barriers for refugees, ensuring cultural and gender diversity in transit spaces and reinforcing anti-discrimination legislation to guarantee rights and reduce social exclusion. In addition, it would be advisable to reduce waiting times for the resolution of applications and ensure that spaces they are forced to transit are favourable to gender diversity.

The review emphasizes the importance of awareness-raising strategies to counteract exclusionary narratives and promote empathy towards LGTBIQ+ migrants. It advocates for training resources for healthcare, legal professionals and civil servants and inclusion programmes in workplaces. It suggests following principles of new narratives to foster inclusive perceptions and safe spaces and calls for institutional commitments to diversity and inclusion to challenge discrimination and hierarchical exclusion structures.

It is necessary to approach this phenomenon through the prism of intersectionality in order to understand it and to develop appropriate intervention strategies and policy formulation leading to the eradication of discrimination and the reduction of inequalities in the work environment.

This paper aims to elaborate on the crucial effects that a seemingly detrimental policy change in Spain has had on the international entrepreneurial activities of domestic renewable energy (RE) firms.

Primary data were collected from nine RE companies in Spain and then triangulated with secondary data and interviews from informants in other local institutions.

Domestic RE firms, due to an institutional scape driver action, reacted to an increasingly uncertain and generally more adverse renewable energy policy framework in this country by preferring to internationalise towards foreign markets that had lower political uncertainty than the domestic one.

This paper complements previous research primarily on firm-specific factors that enhance internationalising firms’ survival and growth through a focus on the impact of a changing institutional-political environment at the home country-level.

Practitioners in the RE sector should analyse the risk of focusing only on the home market, as it can be too dependent on uncontrolled variations in domestic energy policy.

The findings indicate that a more stable and supportive, long-term perspective in the domestic RE policy is essential for the sustained growth and development of this emerging industry.

To analyse the strategy by which a number of purposefully selected companies were able to use international expansion as a survival-seeking strategy against a drastic policy-level change in the domestic RE market.

This paper investigates income convergence using different convergence concepts and methodologies for 72 countries over the period between 1960 and 2010.

This study applies beta (β), sigma (s), stochastic and club convergence approaches. For β-convergence analysis, it derives the cross-country growth regressions of the Solow growth model under the basic and augmented Cobb–Douglass (CD) production functions and estimates them using cross-section and panel data estimators. While it employs both the widely used coefficient of variation and recently developed weak s-convergence approaches for s-convergence, it applies three different unit root tests for stochastic convergence. To test club convergence, it estimates the log-t regression.

The results reveal that (1) there exists conditional β-convergence, meaning that poorer countries grow faster than richer countries; (2) income per worker is not (weakly) s-converging, and cross-sectional variation does not tend to fall over the years; (3) stochastic convergence is not found and (4) countries in the sample do not converge to the unique equilibrium, and there exist five distinctive convergence clubs.

The results clearly show that heavily relying on one of the convergence techniques might lead researchers to obtain misleading results regarding the existence of convergence. Therefore, to draw reliable inferences, the results should be checked using different convergence concepts and methodologies.

Contrary to the previous literature, which is generally restricted to testing the existence of absolute and conditional β-convergence between countries, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to consider and compare all originally and recently developed fundamental concepts of convergence altogether. Besides, it uses the Penn World Table (PWT) 9.1 and extends the period to 2010. From this point of view, this study is believed to provide the most up-to-date empirical evidence.

The risk-return relationship is one of the most widely investigated topics in finance, yet this relationship remains one of the most controversial topics. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the asymmetric volatility and the risk-return tradeoff at the sector level in the emerging stock market of Jordan.

Data consist of daily prices for 22 sub-sectors spanning from August 1, 2006, to September 30, 2015, covering the periods of pre, during, and after the global financial crisis. The EGARCH-M model is used to document the patterns of asymmetric volatility of sub-sector returns and the risk-return tradeoff during the non-overlapping three sub-sample periods.

The major findings of this study are as follows. In the pre-crisis period, the results suggest some evidence of a positive relationship between risk and return. The results also reveal that good news has more effect than bad news during the same period. In the crisis period, there is a negative but insignificant risk-return relationship and negative shocks have more impact than positive ones. In the post-crisis period, the authors find positive but insignificant risk-return tradeoff with weak evidence of volatility asymmetry.

The results have major implications for investors willing to engage their investment decisions in the Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) and for policymakers who seek to attract and retain regional and international investors. Since the empirical investigation is conducted at the sector level, the study may aid investors to target specific sub-sectors with positive and significant risk-return tradeoff. In addition, investors need to monitor the asymmetric patterns which make the level of risk-aversion more susceptible to coming news. For policymakers, the latest infrastructure reforms are crucial to achieving the potential for growth but the ASE market authority needs to undergo further reforms and provide various promotional incentives.

Although there are numerous studies on asymmetric volatility and risk-return tradeoff, there is a lack of parallel studies at the sector level for both developed and emerging stock markets. Such assessment at the sector level is crucial for international investors after their choice of countries or markets for better choice of portfolio diversification and allocation of financial resources.