Search results

A performance-based financing (PBF) pilot project was implemented in 2011 in Burkina Faso. After more than five years of implementation (data collection in 2016), the project's sustainability was not guaranteed. This study's objective is to assess this project's sustainability in 2016 by identifying the presence/absence of different determinants of sustainability according to the conceptual framework of Seppey et al. (2017).

It uses a case study approach using in-depth interviews with various actors at the local, district/regional and national levels. Participants (n = 37) included health practitioners, management team members, implementers and senior members of health directions. A thematic analysis based on the conceptual framework was conducted, as well as an inductive analysis.

Results show the project's sustainability level was weak according to an unequal presence of sustainability's determinants; some activities are being maintained but not fully routinised. Discrepancies between the project and the context's values appeared to be important barriers towards sustainability. Project's ownership by key stakeholders also seemed superficial despite the implementers' leadership towards its success. The project's objective towards greater autonomy for health centres was also directly confronting the Burkinabe's hierarchical health system.

This study reveals many fits and misfits between a PBF project and its context affecting its ability to sustain activities through time. It also underlines the importance of using a conceptual framework in implementing and evaluating interventions. These results could be interesting for decision-makers and implementers in further assessing PBF projects elsewhere.

Contemporary entrepreneurial ecosystem models and frameworks advocate that culture is a criterion for entrepreneurial intention and central to entrepreneurship discourse. However, there is limited research from resource-constrained economies, such as sub-Saharan Africa and at a sub-national level. Responding to calls for bottom-up perspectives hinged on local context and heterogeneous nature, this paper aims to provide an in-depth understanding from multiple perspectives about the effect that culture and entrepreneurial intention have on the entrepreneurship process and performance in Nelson Mandela Bay, South Africa.

A mixed-method research design followed a sequential independent process consisting of two phases. Phase 1 included the dissemination of questionnaires to economically active participants, and 300 responses were statistically analysed. In Phase 2, 15 semi-structured interviews with influential economic development agents were conducted.

The results indicated that social legitimacy towards entrepreneurship existed and self-employment was viewed positively. However, self-employment endeavours were mainly necessity driven, and the systemic low levels of innovation, poor business competitiveness and the inability to scale were highlighted. The findings indicated that individuals venturing into business had a culture of being dependant on the government, lacking a risk appetite, fearing failure, with disparate groups suffering from a poor legacy of entrepreneurship.

Despite research done on the role of culture and entrepreneurial intention on entrepreneurial ecosystems, there are few case studies showing their influence at a sub-national level. This study responds to calls for studies on a sub-national level by exploring the influence that culture and entrepreneurial intention have on entrepreneurship in a resource-constrained metropole.

We examine whether the percentage of independent members sitting on the audit committee, in different institutional settings, impacts the market reaction (measured by the abnormal stock returns variance and the abnormal trading volume) to earnings announcements. For our sample composed of more than 7'600 earnings announcements made by European firms from 15 countries between 2006 and 2014, we find that the market reactions to earnings announcements are significantly larger when the audit committee is more independent in countries with weak institutional setting. Our results generally hold after controlling for numerous methodological issues. We conclude that more independent audit committees are substitutes for weak institutions to increase the credibility of earnings announcements. Our results should be of great interest for European regulators who recently introduced new requirements for public firms regarding audit committees’ independence.

THE best description of this Indicator is published on a large folio four‐page statement written by Mr. John Maclauchlan, Chief Librarian of the Dundee Free Library, and issued on September 22nd, 1879. This sheet is headed, “ Description and Method of using Kennedy's Indicator, invented for the Dundee Free Library in January, 1875, and constantly used therein since July of that year” and contains illustrations of the counter and details of the construction of the Indicator. The following description is abstracted from it:—“This contrivance consists of a series of upright glazed frames so placed as to be easily inspected by the public at the front, or glazed side, and by the library attendants at the back. … Each frame is divided into twenty vertical columns by slips of mahogany, and each of these slips is again sub‐divided into 100 sloping slits by pieces of stiff millboard [now zinc], tightly held in saw cuts made in the sides of the mahogany slips … As the lower edge of each piece of millboard is a little above that of the next one below it, sufficient space is visible of their lower ends in front, and of their upper ends at the back of the Indicator, to receive the catalogue number of each book in the library, printed in bold figures and pasted at the end of the millboard [zinc] strips with strong paste.” Each borrower is provided with a ticket measuring 5⅜ inches by 1 inch, ruled as follows :—

The purpose of this paper is to address an important but neglected aspect of evidence-based management, how to apply actionable data to strategic decision making to support the organization in reaching appropriate decisions. This process involves connecting advocacy work with active measures to collect and interpret impact data, which are the real ingredient to help understand the big picture and make advocacy more efficient.

The paper presents two complementary models of intervention to better use relevant data to help management decisions, within the program team and beyond the program team. In both cases the paper attempts to identify the key factors in understanding outcome evidence in order to have better communication and help the decision-taking process.

Customizing evaluation results in order to present the information in an accessible form for various stakeholders appears to be a key factor in delivering the right message and having a successful advocacy campaign.

This paper reports on two complementary approaches to persuade stakeholders (program managers, or stakeholders external to the program team) to take action based on specific impact or management data delivery. The idea is potentially appropriate for any program, or project, where advocacy processes are needed to determine appropriate actions. Processing and presenting data in an actionable way is a key success factor to determine the expected management decision or successful advocacy step.

The authors examine how performance measurement systems (PMSs) and academic agency influence the meaning of research quality in practice. The worries are that the notion of research quality is becoming too simplistically and narrowly determined by research quality's measurable proxies and that academics, especially manager-academics, do not sufficiently realise this risk. Whilst prior literature has covered the effects of performance measurement in the university sector broadly and how PMSs are mobilised locally, there is only little understanding of whether and how PMSs affect the meaning of research quality in practice.

The study is designed as a comparative case study of two university faculties in Finland. The role of conceptual analysis plays a notable role in the study, too.

The authors find that manager-academics of the two examined faculties have rather similar conceptual understandings of research quality. However, there were differences in the degree of slippage between the “espoused-meaning” of research quality and “meaning-in-practice” of research quality. The authors traced these differences to how the local PMS and manager-academics’ agency relate to one another within the context of increasing global and national performance pressures. The authors developed a tentative framework for the various “styles of agency”. This suggests how the relationship between the local PMS and manager-academics’ exerted agency shapes the “degrees of freedom” of the meaning of research quality in practice.

Given that research quality lies at the heart of academic work, the authors' paper indicates that exploring the three matters – performance measurement, the agency of manager-academics and the meaning of research quality in practice – in combination is crucial for the sustainability of the academe. The authors contribute to the literature by detailing the way in which local PMS and manager-academics' agency have material impacts on what research quality means in practice. The authors conclude by highlighting the pressing need for manager-academics to exercise the agency in efforts to safeguard a broad and pluralistic understanding of research quality in practice.

The purpose of this paper is to address recent calls for research regarding the valuation implications of mandatory disclosure requirements (cf. Hassan et al., 2009; Leuz and Wysocki, 2008; Schipper, 2007).

The paper measures compliance with all International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) mandatory disclosure requirements for a sample of firms. The paper subsequently explores whether the compliance scores (i.e. the mandatory disclosure levels) are value relevant and whether the value relevance of accounting numbers differs across high- and low-compliance/disclosure companies.

The paper finds that the levels of mandatory disclosures are value relevant. Additionally, not only the relative value relevance (i.e. R2) but also the valuation coefficient of net income of high-compliance companies is significantly higher than that of low-compliance companies.

This paper is an indicative single country case study that focuses on the IFRS adoption year (2005) in the EU. It forms a new avenue for research regarding the valuation implications of mandatory disclosure requirements. It remains to future research to examine whether the findings also hold in other countries and periods.

These findings are expected to be particularly relevant to standard setters and regulatory bodies that are concerned about the implications of mandatory disclosure requirements (Schipper, 2007).

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that examines the value relevance implications of IFRS mandatory disclosure requirements, focusing on European country after 2005. The authors indicate that IFRS mandatory disclosures do lead to more transparent financial statements (cf. Pownall and Schipper, 1999), mitigating concerns about companies’ fundamentals (cf. Anctil et al., 2004).

To help investors find an investment policy with strong competitiveness, the purpose of this paper is to construct a multi-period investment decision model with practicality and superior performance.

The paper uses a suitable multi-period risk measure to construct a multi-period portfolio selection model, where target returns at intermediate periods and market frictions are taken into account simultaneously. An efficient scenario tree generation approach is proposed in order to transform the complex multi-period portfolio selection problem into a tractable one.

Numerical results show the new scenario tree generation algorithms are stable and can further reduce the tree size. With the scenario tree generated by the new scenario tree generation approach, the optimal investment strategy obtained under the multi-period investment decision model has more superior performance and robustness than the corresponding optimal investment strategy obtained under the single period investment model or the multi-period investment model only paying attention to the terminal cash flow.

The new risk measure and multi-period investment decision models can stimulate readers to find even better models and to efficiently solve realistic multi-period portfolio selection problems.

The empirical results show the superior performance and robustness of optimal investment strategy obtained with the new models. What's more important, the empirical analyses tell readers how different market frictions affect the performance of optimal portfolios, which can guide them to efficiently solve real multi-period investment decision problems in practice.

The paper first derives the concrete structure of the time consistent generalized convex multi-period risk measure, then constructs a multi-period portfolio selection model based on the new multi-period risk measure, and proposes a new extremum scenario tree generation algorithm. The authors construct a realistic multi-period investment decision model. Furthermore, using the proposed scenario tree generation algorithm, the authors transform the established stochastic investment decision model into a deterministic optimization problem, which can provide optimal investment decisions with robustness and superior performance.

The research on sustainable campus is related to environmental protection and the realization of global sustainable development goals (SDGs). Because the sustainable campus development in China and Japan is carried out around buildings, this paper takes Kitakyushu Science and Research Park as a case to study the characteristics and typical model of sustainable campus in Japan by combined with the characteristics of Chinese sustainable campus.

This study compares the evaluation standards of green buildings between China and Japan, then compares the assessment results of the same typical green building case and finally summarizes the development mode and main realization path by discussing the implications of green buildings on campus sustainability.

The results show that (1) the sustainable campus evaluation in Japan mainly pays attention to the indoor environment, energy utilization and environmental problems. (2) Buildings mainly affect the sustainability of the campus in three aspects: construction, transportation and local. (3) The sustainable campus development model of Science and Research Park can be summarized as follows: taking green building as the core; SDGs as the goals; education as the guarantee; and the integration of industry, education and research as the characteristics.

It mainly provides construction experience for other campuses around the world to coordinate the contradictions between campus buildings and the environment based on sustainable principles in their own construction. It proposes a new sustainable campus construction path of “building–region–environment” integrated development.

This study provides theoretical framework for the development of sustainable campuses that includes long-term construction ideas and current technological support greatly improving the operability of practical applications. It not only enriches the sample cases of global sustainable campuses but also provides new ideas and perspectives for the sustainable development research of the overall campus through quantitative evaluation of building and environmental impacts.