The Effect of Geographic Distance on Earnings Management Decisions

Prior research has found evidence that country factors and management styles influence earnings management decisions in various geographic locations. Extending this research, we utilize an experimental setting to isolate the effect of geographic distance on the willingness to manage earnings in a near/distant location. In an initial experiment, we find less acceptable earnings management methods generate greater concerns about the method (ethicality and riskiness) leading to less willingness to manage earnings. Yet, greater geographic distance between the decisionmaker and reporting location attenuates these concerns, resulting in increased willingness to use a less acceptable method. In contrast, individuals are willing to use a more acceptable method to manage earnings regardless of geographic distance. These findings are consistent with construal level theory (CLT) and are corroborated in a second experiment where we find that greater geographic distance reduces managers’ focus on the means of earnings management, thereby reducing concerns about the method.

Political leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in selected analytical categories

The aim of the article is to define the political leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and present the attributes and factors which primarily influenced the effectiveness of his leadership in the Turkish society. Erdoğan has a strong and unquestioned position in his own party, as well as on the Turkish political scene. For a significant part of the society, he is an irreplaceable person and the best leader in the history of the country. Factors which have a major influence on his success are of social, economic and cultural nature. He is a leader, who can easily turn a crisis to his own advantage and convince his followers to support his own arguments. Erdoğan’s activities, which were firmly focused on economic issues, health care reforms and Turkey’s integration with the European Union, enabled him to gain the support of even this part of the society whose values are distant from the ones he accepts. At the same time, he represents a confrontational attitude towards political opponents and often expresses his reluctance towards them.

Why do some Development Projects Disburse Funds Faster than Others

The timely disbursement of funds is a necessary condition for the success of international development projects. Disbursements track the progress of projects in completing the products that ultimately will deliver the projects desired outcomes. Moreover, in a world with pressing needs for external financing, project disbursements are an important source of external liquidity for recipient countries. However, some projects start disbursing faster than others and at relatively larger amounts. Hence learning why some projects disburse faster than others is important to understand not only which projects are more likely to achieve development outcomes sooner, but also to assess their value as providers of external liquidity in times of distress. As it has become evident over the past year with the COVID-19 pandemic, multilateral lending has played a crucial role in helping emerging countries face the larger financing needs originated by the crisis. In 2020, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) disbursements increased 49% over 2019, reaching $13.4 billion, more than doubling the baseline disbursement projection. This paper assesses which observable characteristics of investment loans offered by the IDB are associated with faster disbursements. The results indicate substantial heterogeneity across countries, sectors, and loan modalities. All else constant, results-based loans and loans in the social sector are more likely to disburse within 2 years after being approved. Projects in countries where it takes longer to meet at least some of the clauses to start disbursing are less likely to start disbursing 2 years after approval. Projects that are expected to have longer execution times disburse at slower speeds within 24 months after approval. Overall, country factors seem to play a more relevant role than sectorial factors in explaining the probability that a project will disburse funds quickly. These and other findings in the paper can inform future programming exercises and help optimize the disbursement processes.

EXPRESS: Cross-National Differences in Market Response: Line-Length, Price, and Distribution Elasticities in Fourteen Indo-Pacific Rim Economies

Our field’s knowledge of marketing-mix elasticities is largely restricted to developed countries in the North-Atlantic region, even though other parts of the world—especially the Indo-Pacific Rim region—have become economic powerhouses. To better allocate marketing budgets, firms need to have information about marketing-mix elasticities for countries outside the North-Atlantic region. We use data covering over 1,600 brands from 14 product categories collected in 7 developed and 7 emerging Indo-Pacific Rim countries across more than 10 years to estimate marketing elasticities for line length, price, and distribution, and examine which brand, category, and country factors influence these elasticities. Averaged across brands, categories, and countries, line-length elasticity is .459, price elasticity is -.422, and distribution elasticity is .368, but with substantial variation across brands, categories, and countries. Contrary to what has been suggested, we find no systematic differences in marketing responsiveness between emerging and developed economies. Instead, the key country-level factor driving elasticities is societal stratification, with Hofstede’s measure of power inequality (power distance) as its cultural manifestation and income inequality as its economic manifestation. As the effects of virtually all brand, category, and country factors differ across the three marketing-mix instruments, the field needs new theorizing that is contingent on the marketing-mix instrument studied.

Gender and Transnational Dynamics in Immigrant Entrepreneurship

Immigrant enterprises, especially those in the service sector of the urban economy, are largely gendered and seemingly localized. However, the intersection of gender and transnationalism is often overlooked in the research literature. To fill this gap, we draw on the literature of mixed embeddedness and transnationalism to advance an analytical framework of simultaneous embeddedness to explain the gendered pattern of immigrant entrepreneurship. We do so by taking an in-depth look at a female-dominant industry – Chinese-owned nail salons in New York City. Using data collected from face-to-face interviews and on-site observations in New York City, as well as archival records and media reports about labor-market dynamics in both the United States and China, we find that the development of Chinese-owned nail salons is shaped by contextual factors in both home and host countries beyond socioeconomic characteristics of individual entrepreneurs. Home-country factors in China include labor-force demographics, access to economic opportunities, and the gap between education and career aspiration among young women. These home-country factors are intertwined with changes in US immigration policy, local labor-market reception, and gender discrimination, which function to exacerbate the problem of labor shortage for Chinese-owned nail salons in New York City. We discuss the significance of simultaneous embeddedness and gender in understanding contemporary immigrant entrepreneurship.

Nurses’ Attitudes Toward the Importance of Families in Nursing Care: A Multinational Comparative Study

The aim of this study was to examine nurses’ attitudes about the importance of family in nursing care from an international perspective. We used a cross-sectional design. Data were collected online using the Families’ Importance in Nursing Care—Nurses’ Attitudes (FINC-NA) questionnaire from a convenience sample of 740 registered nurses across health care sectors from Sweden, Ontario, Canada, and Hong Kong, China. Mean levels of attitudes were compared across countries using analysis of variance (ANOVA). Multiple regression was used to identify factors associated with nurses’ attitudes and to test for interactions by country. Factors associated with nurse attitudes included country, age, gender, and several practice areas. On average, nurses working in Hong Kong had less positive attitudes compared with Canada and Sweden. The effects of predictors on nurses’ attitudes did not vary by country. Knowledge of nurses’ attitudes could lead to the development of tailored interventions that facilitate nurse-family partnerships in care.

Grief, COVID-19, and the South: Considerations and Recommendations

Purpose COVID-19 has devastated the United States (U.S.). One of the more notably impacted areas is the South. Compared to the rest of the U.S., the South is characterized by increased rurality, lowered access to healthcare, older populations, and higher religiosity, all of which might predispose its residents to more detrimental effects of COVID-19, including COVID-related fatalities. As such, this paper provides important considerations for individuals engaging in work with Southern, rural Americans dealing with COVID-related grief and loss. Methods A review of the literature addressing the impact of Southern legislature, rurality, cross-country factors, and faith on COVID-related grief among Southerners was conducted, with applicable considerations expressed. Conclusions Care should be taken by providers working with rural, Southern residents to attend to tangible and intangible losses experienced as a result of COVID-19. These considerations can help inform work with rural Southerners dealing with grief during the pandemic.

Development Factors of Region’s Foreign Economic Activity in the Context of Global Challenges

New global challenges such as COVID-19 pandemic, strengthening of protectionism, production technologies development, digitalisation and energy transition, require reinterpretation of regions’ foreign economic activity (FEA). In this context, the research aims to identify and classify development factors of such activity in regions described in the international scientific literature. We analysed works obtained from international (Scopus and Web of Science) and Russian (Elibrary.ru, journal websites) databases using the search terms “regional foreign economic activity”, “regional export”, “global challenges”, “export support”, “foreign investments”, etc. 143 Russian- and English-language articles and books published in the period 1980–2021 were chosen. Selected works, focused on Russian federal districts and regions, as well as advanced and emerging countries, describe various approaches to examining the specificity and development patterns of world regions. Based on the data, we performed structural analysis of foreign economic activity factors using the method of multi-parameter classification. The revealed factors were compared and divided into homogeneous groups with multilevel structures (macro-groups — groups — subgroups — individual factors). After analysing the variety of approaches, we identified five macro-groups of factors: 1) global challenges and partner country factors; 2) resource, industrial, transport and infrastructure potential; 3) organisational factors (finances, specialists’ skills, business community); 4) investment, innovation and image potential; 5) state support of foreign economic activity. The proposed classification considers the development of global, national, regional entities, as well as FEA participants and individuals, taking into account both direct and indirect factors. The research findings can be used for developing short-, medium- and long-term approaches, models and forecasts of regions’ foreign economic activity.

The State Expropriation Risk and the Pricing of Foreign Earnings

We examine the pricing of U.S. multinational firms’ foreign earnings in regard to their risk of expropriation and unfair treatment by the governments of the countries in which their international subsidiaries are located. Using 8,891 firm-years observations during the 2001-2013 period, we find that the value relevance of foreign earnings increases with the improvement of the protection from state expropriation risk in the subsidiary host-countries. Our results are not driven by the earnings management practice, investor distraction, country informativeness, and political and trade relationship of a foreign country with the US. Furthermore, our results are robust to the confounding effects of country factors, measurement error in the variable of the risk of expropriation, influence of private contracting institutions, and endogeneity in the decision of location of subsidiaries.