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Extensively public concern on “Huge Executive Compensation” makes it urgent to investigate the reasonability of high executive compensation. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effectiveness of compensation contracting based on the specific responsibility of executives. More specifically, this paper is to examine whether high compensation is helpful to mitigate agency problems.

Considering that board secretaries of listed companies are responsible for information disclosure in China, this paper examines the effect of board secretaries’ excess compensation on firms’ disclosure quality using listed company data from 2007 to 2015. The first measure of disclosure quality is based on the disclosure violation behavior of firms, and the second is KV value that represents the extent to which the investors relay on the stock trading volume. To provide additional confidence that the findings are robust, this paper further conducts two indirect tests based on rumors and cost of equity capital.

The results show that board secretaries’ excess compensation is negatively associated with the probability of information disclosure violation and also negatively associated with firms’ KV value, suggesting firms that pay high compensation to their information providers are more likely to provide high-quality disclosures. Besides, this paper further finds that board secretaries’ excess compensation is negatively related to the incidence of rumors, the number of rumors incurred or the cost of equity capital.

Overall, the findings provide support to the efficient contracting of executive compensation, which implies that highly paid board secretaries would be better information providers than those poorly paid.

This paper provides empirical evidence that firms’ disclosure quality can be improved by modifying the compensation contract of information providers. This may indicate a new way to improve the quality of disclosures, so as to mitigate the agency problem.

In spite of the public criticism on executive excess compensation, the high compensation is not always a signal of manipulation, collusion and self-interest. It also can be a signal of individual talents and great efforts. Board secretaries are worth to be highly paid if they can improve firms’ disclosures, thereby reducing the incidence of rumors and reducing the cost of equity capital.

This paper is the first research to examine the effectiveness of compensation contracting based on information providers’ disclosure responsibility in the Chinese context. It documents a positive relation between board secretaries’ excess compensation and corporate disclosure quality.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how curved road and lane-changing rates affect the stability of traffic flow.

An extended two-lane lattice hydrodynamic model on a curved road accounting for the empirical lane-changing rate is presented. The linear analysis of the new model is discussed, the stability condition and the neutral stability condition are obtained. Also, the mKdV equation and its solution are proposed through nonlinear analysis, which discusses the stability of the extended model in the unstable region. Furthermore, the results of theoretical analysis are verified by numerical simulation.

The empirical lane-changing rate on a curved road is an important factor, which can alleviate traffic congestion.

This paper does not take into account the factors such as slope, the drivers’ characters and so on in the actual traffic, which will have more or less influence on the stability of traffic flow, so there is still a certain gap with the real traffic environment.

The curved road and empirical lane-changing rate are researched simultaneously in a two-lane lattice hydrodynamic models in this paper. The improved model can better reflect the actual traffic, which can also provide a theoretical reference for the actual traffic governance.

This study aims to explain the impact of the Beijing Olympic Games 2008 on China's image in the international TV media. It applies agenda-setting theory to analyse foreign TV coverage of the Olympics in nine countries. Using Rivenburgh's national image richness construct, it attempts to make sense of the coverage before and after Beijing 2008, particularly its impact on the image of the host country. The study concludes that the breadth and attribution of China's image remained relatively stable, that these factors did not improve China's national image directly but that indirectly they raised awareness of China in the international media and framed the host country's image more clearly.

WIth limited research on the effects of variable message sign (VMS) message content and verbiage on revealed driver behavior, this study aims to investigate how different verbiage of crash-related messages are related to the diversion rate.

Using ordered logit models, the associations of message verbiage with diversion rates during crash incidents were assessed using five years of VMS message history within a section of I-15 in the state of Utah.

A significant impact of message verbiage on the diversion rate was observed. Based on the analysis results, the crash message verbiage with the highest diversion was found to be miles to crash + “prepare to stop,” followed by crash location + delay information, miles to crash + “use caution” + lane of the crash, etc. In addition, the diversion rate was found to be correlated to some roadway characteristics (e.g. occupancy in mainline, weather condition and light condition) along with the temporal variations.

These findings could be used by transportation agencies (e.g. state department of transportation [DOTs]) to make informed decisions about choosing the message verbiage during future crash incidents. This study also revealed that higher diversion rates are associated with a shorter distance between the crash location and VMS device location, recommending increasing the number of VMS devices, particularly in crash-prone areas.

Based on the theoretical viewpoints of criminal geography and environmental criminology, this research uses spatial multi-criteria decision-making methods. In the process of spatial decision-making and optimization of police resources, researchers fully consider the dynamic application of Geographic Information System (GIS) and the effects of spatial prevention and control.

Researchers use an integrated method combining Policing Geographic Information System (PGIS) and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). On the one hand, police GIS has an excellent visual data analysis platform and integrated decision support system in data management, spatial analysis, data exploration and regression analysis. On the other hand, through the design of the indicator system, the quantification of indicators, the determination of weights, comprehensive evaluation and sensitivity analysis, MCDA can select the best plan from a large number of alternatives. When joining MCDA, the spatial dimension will bring the research results closer to the real world.

The study finds that the crime of burglary is affected to a certain extent by the distribution of police forces, the location of police units. Another important finding of this research is the correlation between more precise preventive measures and the crime of burglary.

From a practical point of view, this research would help advance the role of police units and law enforcement agencies in preventing burglary crimes and provide experience for the allocation of regional police resources.

During the late Qing Dynasty, Western colonists plundered and divided the land as concession where they consequently built European and American architectures. These architectures, such as concession garden architectures, are a result of relevant cultural exchange. Thus, concession garden architectural culture should be studied. In this study, the historical records of the concession and the concession garden in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China were examined on the basis of the representative architectures of Shanghai and Tianjin in China. The origin, classification, characteristic, and development of the concession garden architecture were regarded as the starting point, and the characteristics of the garden architecture in different regions were discovered. Further insights into the development of conservation concession garden buildings in China and the use of modern landscape architectures were provided, and new perspectives for studies on concession landscape architectures were presented through an in-depth understanding and analysis of concession landscape architectures.

From the sixteenth to eighteenth century, China underwent a commercial revolution similar to the one in contemporaneous Europe. The rise of market did foster the rise of a nascent bourgeois and the concomitant rise of a liberal, populist version of Confucianism, which advocated a more decentralized and less authoritarian political system in the last few decades of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). But after the collapse of the Ming Empire and the establishment of the Qing Empire (1644–1911) by the Manchu conquerors, the new rulers designated the late-Ming liberal ideologies as heretics, and they resurrected the most conservative form of Confucianism as the political orthodoxy. Under the principle of filial piety given by this orthodoxy, the whole empire was imagined as a fictitious family with the emperor as the grand patriarch and the civil bureaucrats and subjects as children or grandchildren. Under the highly centralized administrative and communicative apparatus of the Qing state, this ideology of the fictitious patrimonial state penetrated into the lowest level of the society. The subsequent paternalist, authoritarian, and moralizing politics of the Qing state contributed to China’s nontransition to capitalism despite its advanced market economy, and helped explain the peculiar form and trajectory of China’s popular contention in the eighteenth century. I also argue that this tradition of fictitious patrimonial politics continued to shape the state-making processes in twentieth-century China and beyond.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the curvilinear relationship between knowledge leadership and knowledge hiding and the moderating role of psychological ownership on influencing the curvilinear relationship.

In total, 403 data were collected from participants in a high-technology company via a two-wave survey. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses.

Results revealed an inverted U-shaped relationship between knowledge leadership and knowledge hiding. The employees exhibited more knowledge hiding in a moderate level of knowledge leadership than in lower and higher levels of knowledge leadership. Moreover, psychological ownership significantly moderated the curvilinear relationship such that the inverted U-shaped relationship was more pronounced among employees with high psychological ownership.

Employees’ reaction to knowledge leadership may vary from different levels of knowledge leadership. Moreover, organizations should boost employees’ psychological ownership especially for the collective identity that helps them own knowledge as “ours.”

This study extends both the leadership and knowledge management behavior literatures.