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The purpose of this paper is to provide guidance to universities revisiting their international partnerships involving travel by relaying the experiences, which saw marked changes via the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper compares the mechanics, costs, preferences and performances of students in a Germany-based MBA program, partnered with the AACSB-accredited US institution, after increased reliance on a blended program model.

A preference emerged for less international travel by students and fewer face-to-face meetings with instructors’ traveling internationally. Student performance with the revised model of the program improved in regard to grade point average, but major field test performance remained similar. At the same time, students report a bit better satisfaction with the structure of the program while travel cost savings were realized.

This case study describes the specific experiences, which may suggest program development for other, similar partnerships.

To the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to use Detail I/B/E/S to study directly the timeliness of security analysts’ next-year earnings-per-share (EPS) estimates relative to the SEC filings of annual (10-K) and quarterly (10-Q) financial statements. Although the authors do not prove a causal relationship, they provide evidence that the average time from firms’ filings of 10-Ks and 10-Qs to the release of analysts’ annual EPS forecasts during short timeframes (for example, 15-day timeframe from a 10-K’s SEC file date) subsequent to the 10-K and 10-Q filing dates significantly shortened with XBRL implementation and then remained relatively constant following implementation.

Using filing dates hand-collected from the SEC website for 10-Ks during 2009-2011 and filing dates for 10-Ks and 10-Qs during 2003-2014 input from Compustat along with analysts’ estimated values for next year EPS, actual estimated next year EPS realized and estimate announcement dates in Detail I/B/E/S, the authors study the days from 10-K and 10-Q file dates to announcement dates and the per cent errors for individual estimates during per- and post-XBRL eras.

The authors find that analysts are announcing next-year EPS forecasts significantly more frequently and in significantly shorter time in zero to 15 days immediately following 10-K and 10-Q file dates post-XBRL as compared to pre-XBRL. However, the authors do not find a significant change in forecast accuracy post-XBRL as compared to pre-XBRL.

Because this study uses short timeframes immediately following the events (filings of 10-Ks and 10-Qs), the relationship between 10-Ks and 10-Qs with and without XBRL and improved forecast timeliness is strengthened. However, even this strengthened difference-in-difference methodology does not establish causality. Future research may determine whether XBRL or other factors cause the improved forecast timeliness the authors’ evidence.

This improved efficiency may become critical if financial statement reporting expands as a result of new innovations such as Big Data and continuous reporting. In the future, users may be able to electronically connect to financial statement data that firms are maintaining on a perpetual basis on the SEC website and continuously monitor and analyze the financial statement data dynamically in real time. If so, then unquestionably, XBRL will have played a critical role in bringing about this future innovation.

Whereas previous studies have utilized Summary IBES data to assess the impact of XBRL on analyst forecasts, the authors use Detail IBES to study the effects of XBRL adoption directly by measuring days from 10-K and 10-Q file dates in Compustat to each estimate’s announcement date recorded in IBES and by computing the per cent error using each estimate’s VALUE and ACTUAL recorded in Detail IBES. The authors are the first to evidence a significant shortening in average days and an increase in per cent of 30-day counts in the zero- to 15-day timeframe immediately following the fillings of 10-K s and 10-Qs.

Urban design has historically occupied the gap between architecture and planning. Although there have long been calls for the discipline to bridge this gap, urban design has continued to lean more heavily on design than planning. The efforts to revitalize downtown Toledo, a mid-western U.S. town experiencing steep economic decline, present a classic example of the potentially unfortunate results of this approach. Over the past three decades, there have been many attempts to revitalize the city, especially its downtown, by constructing several large public buildings, all within a few blocks of each other, all designed with little attention to each other or to the surrounding public spaces, and with a remarkable lack of civic engagement.

Responding to calls in the literature for inter-disciplinarity in urban design, and to the city's experience with urban design, the authors created a collaborative studio for architects and planners from two neighboring universities with two purposes: first, to establish a collaborative work environment where any design interventions would be firmly rooted in the planning context (i.e., to erase boundaries between architects and planners); second, to draw lessons from this experience for the practice and teaching of urban design.

Despite the difficulties of collaborating, architects and planners benefited from exposure to each other, learning about each other's work, as well as learning to collaborate. The interdisciplinary teams developed richer proposals than the architect-only teams. Finally, critical engagement with the community is essential to shaping downtown development.

The purpose of this paper is to identify three (maturity, agency, and information) effects that help explain the change in idiosyncratic volatility after a firm initiates a dividend.

The paper uses a cross-sectional analysis where the standard errors are adjusted for heteroskedasticity. As for robustness check, the authors perform two-stage analysis to control for potential self-selection bias. The authors also control for 2003 Dividend Tax Cut effect, matching-firm volatility, and confounding events.

Using a sample of 688 dividend-initiating firms for a period of 1977 to 2010, the authors find evidence consistent with the hypotheses based on the maturity, agency, and information effects. The volatility changes upon the dividend initiation can be reliably explained by the changes in profit volatility and free cash flow per total assets, and whether the firm consummated a stock split prior to the dividend initiation. The information effect is also found to be economically significant.

By studying a firm’s decision to initiate a dividend and its impact on the change in its volatility, the research helps contribute to the payout policy and volatility literatures.

Donald Trump entered the presidency in 2017 with an electoral mandate to reduce US military involvement around the world and to abandon the trade and investment treaties that empowered global corporations. Yet he mostly continued the foreign policies adopted by previous administrations. In recent decades, those policies have increasingly served particularistic elite interests at the expense of the US ruling class as a whole, and they have also been unsuccessful in stemming the decline of US imperial power. This chapter explores the factors that explain this continuity of policy. In analyzing the reasons for policy stasis, it offers an analytical basis to evaluate what might change under President Biden. It also assesses what strategies might be most effective for those who hope to resist US militarism and to undermine the US capacity to enforce a hegemony based on rapacious capitalism.

Police services, police associations and police foundations now engage in philanthropy and these efforts are communicated using social media. This paper examines social media framing of the philanthropic and charitable work of police in Canada.

Drawing from discourse and semiotic analyses, the authors examined the ways that police communications frame contributions to charity and community’s well-being. Tweets were analyzed for themes, hashtags and images that conveyed the philanthropic work of police services, police associations as well as police foundations.

The authors discovered four main forms of framing in these social media communications, focusing on community, diversity, youth and crime prevention. The authors argue that police used these communications as mechanisms to flaunt social capital and to boost perceptions of legitimacy and benevolence.

More analyses are needed to examine such representations over time and in multiple jurisdictions.

Examining police communications about philanthropy not only reveals insights about the politics of giving but also the political use of social media by police.

Social media is used by organizations to position themselves in social networks. The increased use of social media by police, for promoting philanthropic work, is political in the sense that it aims to bolster a sense of legitimacy.