The Quadruple Sustainability

This chapter analyzes the relationship between ownership structure and sustainability performance adopting the socioemotional wealth approach. This work extends previous literature on the topic by considering the three dimensions of sustainability performance: economic, social, and environmental. Analysis with the matching technique revealed that being a family firm has a positive effect on economic profitability, growth sales, employees training and commitment, investment in R&D, environmental commitment, and cooperation agreements with external partners. The authors use a sample of Spanish firms operating in the tourism industry.

Phonons transmission through atomic interface connecting two semi-infinite 2D lattices with different meshes

A calculation of the phonon contribution to the coherent transport between two-dimensional (2D) lattices is presented in this paper. The model structure is obtained by the juxtaposition of semi-infinites square ([Formula: see text] and triangular ([Formula: see text] leads, which thus define the nanojunction [Formula: see text]/[Formula: see text] and its inverse [Formula: see text]/[Formula: see text]. We determine, numerically and by simulation, the 2D interface observables for different values of masses and elastic coupling in the nanojunction zone. The local dynamics and atomic nanojunction response to the microscopic changes, in the interfacial domain, are subjects to our investigation. The theoretical formalism based on the matching technique is applied to describe the lattice dynamics and the evanescent phonon modes, in the two studied 2D interfaces. We mainly analyze the vibration spectra, the coherent phonon transmission/reflection and the phononic transmittance through the interface, as elements of a Landauer–Büttiker type scattering matrix. The obtained results show that the nanojunction domain is an effective phonon splitter and suggest that its characteristics may be controlled by varying its nanometric parameters. The observed fluctuations are due to the coherent coupling between continuum modes and the phonons’ discrete states induced by the connected atomic sites.

The impact of credit on the technical efficiency of food crop producing smallholder farmers in Ethiopia

PurposeThis study examines the impact of access to credit on the technical efficiency (TE) of maize-producing smallholder farmers in Ethiopia and explores factors determining credit utilization.Design/methodology/approachThe study relies on nationally representative data collected in 2015/2016. The data are analyzed by combining the Propensity Score Matching technique with a stochastic frontier model that corrects selectivity bias arising from unobserved variables.FindingsThe result shows that credit service improves TE and helps smallholder farmers to achieve the maximum possible output level from a given set of inputs used.Originality/valueTo the best of author’s knowledge, no study has yet measured the impact of access to credit on TE by controlling for both observed and unobserved heterogeneities. Existing research relied on a single production frontier model, assuming that credit users and non-users have similar production characteristics or ignored selection bias due to observable and unobservable characteristics.

Big Data for Big Insights: Quantifying the Adverse Effect of Air Pollution on the Tourism Industry in China

Adverse meteorological conditions and air pollution resulting from human activities, such as extreme weather and smog, adversely affect the global tourism industry. However, such impacts are difficult to quantify. This study strives to quantify the adverse impact of air pollution on foreign tourists’ revisiting behaviors to China by analyzing large numbers of TripAdvisor reviews. The study first identifies travelers affected by air pollution through analyzing their reviews. It then employs propensity score matching technique to detect a matching group of travelers with identical characteristics who did not report air-pollution-related issues in reviews. By estimating their respective likelihoods of revisiting, our results indicate that travelers who encountered air pollution during their trips are 92.857% less likely to revisit a specific city and 93.421% less likely to revisit China. Our study enriches the tourism literature by quantifying the adverse impact of air pollution on a country’s inbound tourism using big data.

An Efficient and Precise Remote Sensing Optical Image Matching Technique Using Binary-Based Feature Points

Matching local feature points is an important but crucial step for various optical image processing applications, such as image registration, image mosaicking, and structure-from-motion (SfM). Three significant issues associated with this subject have been the focus for years, including the robustness of the image features detected, the number of matches obtained, and the efficiency of the data processing. This paper proposes a systematic algorithm that incorporates the synthetic-colored enhanced accelerated binary robust invariant scalar keypoints (SC-EABRISK) method and the affine transformation with bounding box (ATBB) procedure to address these three issues. The SC-EABRISK approach selects the most representative feature points from an image and rearranges their descriptors by adding color information for more precise image matching. The ATBB procedure, meanwhile, is an outreach that implements geometric mapping to retrieve more matches from the feature points ignored during SC-EABRISK processing. The experimental results obtained using benchmark imagery datasets, close-range photos (CRPs), and aerial and satellite images indicate that the developed algorithm can perform up to 20 times faster than the previous EABRISK method, achieve thousands of matches, and improve the matching precision by more than 90%. Consequently, SC-EABRISK with the ATBB algorithm can address image matching efficiently and precisely.