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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the importance of innovation for the performance of small firms in the construction sector. Furthermore, this paper also examines the influence of several factors related to entrepreneurial capital (entrepreneurial value, business strategy, experience and training) on small firm performance in the sector.

This study uses primary data of 255 small firms in the construction sector under the category of small contractors (G1). Stratified sampling method was utilized for data collection, which is then analyzed using the descriptive and multiple regression analysis to achieve the objectives of the study.

The findings showed that the factor of innovation and several factors related to entrepreneurial capital (entrepreneurial value, business strategy and business experience) have a significant positive relationship with the performance of small firms in the construction sector. However, factor of training indicated a significant negative correlation with small firm performance.

Although this study found a significant impact in explaining the factors that affect performance, particularly in the construction sector, it only takes into account only some internal factors (entrepreneurial capital and innovation). Proposed future research should consider a variety of other factors mainly related to external factors, such as economic development, growth potential, industry structure, internal social capital and government policy.

This study provides clear implications related to the theory and contributions to the literature related to research in the construction sector. The study also provides invaluable insightfulness to various stakeholders including policy makers, institutional support and small contractors about the importance of innovation and entrepreneurial capital in determining the performance of small firms in the sector.

The results provide supportive evidence that entrepreneurial values and business strategy are important internal factors in determining the performance of a firm, which is consistent with the theory of resource-based view. Experience and training factors, as indicators of firm performance, are articulated in the theory of human capital. Hence, the findings not only can strengthen both the theories but also make a significant contribution to the literature of the study, particularly in the construction sector.

This paper aims to evaluate the microcredit position in the performance of micro and small enterprises (MSEs). In the case of Malaysian MSEs, the paper also aims to examine other relevant factors, especially entrepreneur‐specific factors, which may be equally important for improving firm performance.

Primary data were collected from 756 MSE samples in Kelantan, the state where a large majority of the microcredit recipients under AIM and TEKUN run their business. Descriptive and multiple regression analyses were used to analyze the data.

Microcredit is positively and significantly related to the performance of MSEs across all the microcredit programs under investigation. Other entrepreneur‐specific factors, especially entrepreneurial values and management practices are equally significant for enhancing firm performance.

This study reminds policy makers, support institutions and small entrepreneurs that the microcredit program alone is not enough for improving the performance of MSEs. Besides microcredit, entrepreneur‐specific factors are equally important for firm performance. Thus, readjustment to the existing microcredit programs, especially on entrepreneurial and managerial developments, should be made so that entrepreneurial values and management competencies of the entrepreneurs could be enhanced from time to time for superior performance of MSEs.

This paper proves that microcredit is important for firm performance. It also reminds theorists and practitioners that entrepreneur‐specific factors should not be neglected in their theoretical or practical consideration of micro and small firm performance.

This paper systematically reviews the evidence of reliability and validity of scales available in studies that reported surveys of students to assess their perceived self-efficacy of information literacy (IL) skills.

Search in two subject and two general databases and scanning of titles, abstracts and full texts of documents have been carried out in this paper.

In total, 45 studies met the eligibility criteria. A large number of studies did not report any psychometric characteristics of data collection instruments they used. The selected studies provided information on 22 scales. The instruments were heterogeneous in number of items and type of scale options. The most used reliability measure was internal consistency (with high values of Cronbach’s alpha), and the most used validity was face/content validity by experts.

The culture of using good-quality scales needs to be promoted by IL practitioners, authors and journal editors.

This paper is the first review of its kind, which is useful for IL stakeholders.

This chapter advances understandings of emotion work by examining how “doing gender” and “doing health” are implicated in the pursuit of emotional tranquility. The study examines the role of hair loss in women’s illness narratives of cancer using in-depth interviews with 16 white women in the US Northwest who vary in age, marital status, diagnoses, and treatments. The absence of women’s hair presents an appearance of illness that prevents them from doing femininity, which calls into question their health status because of Western beauty standards. To overcome this barrier, the women use emotion work to manage the effects of their appearance through necessarily co-occurring bodily, cognitive, and expressive strategies (Hochschild, 1979). The required emotion work during women’s hair loss makes explicit the symbolic linking of the healthy body with the feminine body through women’s head hair. Pursuing treatment for cancer is often seen as a “fight” or a “battle” against the disease and the bodily assaults of such treatments, including unwanted visible bodily changes. A substantial body of empirical work has established the complex web of social psychological problems associated with breasts and breast cancer, but less attention has been given to the side effect of hair loss that is common across cancer types and treatments.

This study examines the association between financial literacy confidence and financial satisfaction. The authors posit that overconfident poor performers will experience greater levels of financial satisfaction and underconfident high performers will experience lower levels of financial satisfaction.

Based on the results of an objective financial literacy assessment and a subjective financial literacy assessment, variables measuring study participants' financial literacy overconfidence and financial literacy underconfidence are constructed. The variables are analyzed for their associations with financial satisfaction.

The results from the multivariate analysis suggest that financial literacy overconfidence (underconfidence) is associated positively (negatively) with higher levels of financial satisfaction and is associated negatively (positively) with lower levels of financial satisfaction.

The discussion first highlights that to increase objective financial literacy, the disconnect between subjective financial literacy assessment and objective financial literacy must be recognized. Secondly, the discussion encourages financial literacy and education programs to incorporate behavioral education, which can provide learners with an awareness of the role of financial literacy confidence when making financial decisions.

Financial literacy overconfidence can result in an inability to recognize the realities of one's financial situation. Individuals who are overconfident in their level of financial literacy preformed lower on an objective assessment of their financial literacy, yet also tended to have a greater sense of financial satisfaction. This finding not only suggests that financial literacy overconfidence results in financial ineptitude, but also suggest that financial literacy overconfidence can result in specious conclusions regarding one's financial situation. The financial literacy underconfidence finding suggests that those who are financial literate, and who are also underconfident in their financial literacy, are less likely to have high financial satisfaction.

The existing literature asserted that the Islamic banking industry progress significantly, but it has increasingly found asset deficient which assaulted the performance of Islamic banks (IBs). The aim of this study to examine the mediating role of intellectual capital (IC) on the relationship between corporate governance (CG) mechanisms and IBs performance is examined (ATO, NPM).

A panel sample of 129 IBs is drawn from the 29 organisation of Islamic cooperation (OIC) countries from 2008 to 2017. Two-step system generalized method of moments (2SYS-GMM) was used to account for the unobserved endogeneity and heteroscedasticity problem.

The empirical findings demonstrate that there is a significant impact of the CG mechanism on IC. Moreover, the empirical findings indicate that CG has a direct influence on banking performance but it affects indirectly through IC. IC also appears to have a mediation role in the relationship between the CG mechanism and the performance of IBs.

As the empirical research on IC from CG point of view in Islamic banking is generally new in the banking literature, the output of this research will contribute to the building up of empirical framework and practices regarding IC in the Islamic banking industry by using the resource-based theory as a leading theory and agency theory as a sub theory. It is anticipated that this study provided a superior comprehensive discussion of the IC in IBs across OIC countries which discovers the CG mechanism to influence the IC to improve banking performance.

This study offers useful insights to the regulators and practitioners to draw the rules and regulations in improving the CG mechanism and the effectiveness of internal controls by acknowledging the importance of IC in Islamic banking institutions. Particularly, the findings of this study may be of benefit to bankers to efficiently use the IC as a premise to design new and creative strategies to achieve a competitive advantage in the banking industry.

The study is unique in its nature because it presents a successful model for IBs to concentrate more on the role of IC in enhancing banking performance, which might be used by the banks to rearrange the roles within CG, to place their priorities regarding the internal governance system and financial plans for competency enhancement.

This paper aims to highlight recent resources on information literacy (IL) and library instruction, providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering all library types.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations and other materials on library instruction and IL published in 2015.

This paper provides information about each source, describes the characteristics of current scholarship and highlights sources that contain either unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and IL.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the total factor productivity (TFP)[1] change and to investigate its determinants in the case of MENA Islamic banks.

In the first stage, bootstrapped Malmquist index approach is used to provide a robust analysis of the changes in the productivity of 33 Islamic banks operating in 10 MENA countries during the period 2006-2011. In the second stage, panel data models are used to investigate the determinants of TFP change.

The results of the first stage show that Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) banks have known a productivity decline between 2006 and 2011 due to technical regress and scale inefficiency. In contrast, non-GCC banks have improved their productivity by benefiting from scale economies. The results of the second stage show that the productivity growth of MENA Islamic banks was mainly determined by bank-specific factors and that TFP indices decreased in the period of global financial crisis.

This paper provides relevant recommendations for improving the productivity of Islamic banks operating in the MENA countries.

This paper attempts to fill a demanding gap in the literature by examining productivity change and investigating its determinants using cross-country data of MENA Islamic banks. In addition, it is one of the few studies that have applied the bootstrapped Malmquist index approach in the case of Islamic banking.

This paper aims to present recently published resources on information literacy and library instruction providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering all library types.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2016.

The paper provides information about each source, describes the characteristics of current scholarship and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is considered one of the crucial branding and promotional tools for banks to legitimise their role in society to become socially and environmentally responsible corporate citizen. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of CSR on stock price volatility of the US banks. This study further examined the moderating role of tax on the relationship between CSR and stock price volatility.

This study uses the random-effects panel regression estimation technique to test the hypotheses. The authors include a sample of 37 US banks from 2013 to 2017 with 144 bank-years observation. The authors consider the environmental, social and governance (ESG) scores from Refinitiv as a proxy for CSR. The financial data are also collected from the Refinitiv Datastream database.

This study finds a significant and positive relationship between CSR and stock price volatility, which indicates that shareholders of the US banks may not prefer excess concentration on CSR because of the additional cost of investment associated with implementing CSR. Also, tax payments and stock price volatility show a significant positive association, which implies that there is a higher possibility of an increase in stock price volatility if the tax rate increases. Generally, shareholders are not interested in paying more taxes, so they may swap the market instead of paying more tax. On the other hand, the authors find a non-significant moderating effect of tax payment on CSR-volatility nexus.

Previous studies mainly focussed on CSR and financial performance of banks. Conversely, studies focussing on CSR and stock volatility are limited. This study will fill the gap in the literature by considering the effect of CSR on the stock price volatility of the US banks.