The Endogeneity Quagmire Empirical Evidence from Telecommunication Industry of Pakistan

Purpose: The current research aims to analyze the particular quagmire of endogeneity by considering panel data with the renowned challenge of limited periods. Design/Methodology/Approach: More specifically, the empirical methodology is applied to a novel sector of Telecommunications in Pakistan by analyzing the possible relationship between Operational Risk and a Telecommunication company’s financial performance. The efficacy of the results is further tested by additional tests of GMM. Operational risk in the study is proxied with three variables. Performance is measured in terms of Returns with respect to Equity holders and Total Assets. From the point of view of management, Asset utilization is also used as a proxy for financial performance. Findings: Results show a presence of a significant and a negative relationship between operational risk and management performance and returns, thereby emphasizing the importance of operational risk management for enhanced performance in light of the theory of performance frontiers introduced by Schmenner and Swink in 1998. Implications/Originality/Value: The results suggest that the focus on operational risk management should be revitalized if the firms seek improved performance and a sustainable competitive advantage.

Designing the physical environment for inpatient palliative care: a narrative review

BackgroundIt is essential that the physical environments in which inpatient palliative care is provided support the needs of patients and the facilitate the multidimensional delivery of palliative care. This review aims to identify the features and characteristics of inpatient palliative care environments that enhance or detract from the patient experience; and identify opportunities for progress within this field.MethodThree databases were searched: MEDLINE (1946–2020), PsycINFO (1806–2020) and CINAHL (1937–2020). Articles were screened by title and abstract with included studies read in full for data extraction. Data synthesis involved thematic analysis informed by the findings of the included literature. Inclusion criteria were studies with empirical methodology examining adult palliative care in the hospital, hospice or nursing home environment. Studies that examined palliative care delivered within the emergency department, ICU or within the home were excluded, as were those related to paediatric palliative care.ResultsFour main themes were identified: the provision of privacy, facilitating interactions with family, facilitating comfort through homeliness and connections to nature.ConclusionsThe board acceptance of single rooms as the preeminent design solution for supporting privacy, dignity and family interaction, alongside current conceptions of homeliness that typically focus on matters of interior design, are limiting possibilities for further design innovation within palliative care settings. Research that investigates a broader set of design strategies through which the built environment can support care, alongside enhanced interdisciplinary collaboration, could positively contribute to patient and family experiences of inpatient palliative care.

As Principais Dificuldades enfrentadas por Professores durante a Pandemia para Avaliação dos Estudantes dos Anos Iniciais na Escola Municipal Dr. Severino Alves de Sá / The Main Difficulties Faced by Teachers during the Pandemic for the Evaluation of Students in the Early Years at the Dr. Severino Alves de Sá Municipal School

A avaliação é algo recorrente na rotina das instituições de ensino, sendo uma ferramenta de grande importância para diagnótiscos e desenvolvimento dos alunos e ela sempre será questionada e discutida, na tentativa de buscar a melhor forma. Por ser de grande importância, o tema foi amplamente estudado para o embasamento teórico da pesquisa. Sendo assim, a pesquisa tem caráter bibliográfico e também de metodologia empírica, pois a coleta de dados aconteceu com 10 profissionais da escola campo de estágio, Escola Municipal Doutor Severino Alves de Sá, na cidade de Salgueiro-PE, através de um questionário, contendo 10 perguntas. O estudo tem natureza quantitativa e qualitativa. O questionário foi idealizado para conhecer as dificuldades e as perspectivas das docentes dos anos iniciais e os resultados foram transformados em percentual para uma melhor análise dos dados. Um dos dados obtidos com o questionário é que 90% dos professores sentem dificuldades de avaliar o aluno de forma remota e outro dado alarmante é que na escola campo, devido a pandemia, os alunos regrediram no processo de aprendizagem, devido a ausência de responsáveis para o acompanhamento, a carência de acesso a meios tecnológicos, e a ausência do contato entre professor e aluno. Percebe-se que para atingir resultados positivos com os alunos, a escola necessita de uma maior participação dos pais na vida escolar de seus filhos.---Assessment is something recurrent in the routine of educational institutions, being a very important tool for diagnosis and student development, and it will always be questioned and discussed, in an attempt to find the best way. Because it is of great importance, the topic has been extensively studied for the theoretical basis of the research. Thus, the research has a bibliographic character and also an empirical methodology, as the data collection took place with 10 professionals from the internship field school, Doutor Severino Alves de Sá Municipal School, in the city of Salgueiro-PE, through a questionnaire containing 10 questions. The study is quantitative and qualitative in nature. The questionnaire was designed to understand the difficulties and perspectives of teachers in the early years and the results were transformed into percentages for a better data analysis. One of the data obtained from the questionnaire is that 90% of teachers have difficulties in evaluating the student remotely and another alarming fact is that in the field school, due to the pandemic, students regressed in the learning process, due to the absence of guardians for monitoring, lack of access to technological means, and lack of contact between teacher and student. It is noticed that to achieve positive results with students, the school needs greater participation by parents in their children's school life

Impact of the level of bank liquidity on the relationship between concentration and bank efficiency: the case of the WAEMU

In this article, we investigate the impact of bank liquidity level on the relationship between bank concentration and efficiency using a panel dataset of 60 banks across 7 WAEMU countries over the period 2005-2016. Our empirical methodology is based on the 2SLS IV estimator and non-linear analysis. Our results show that the concentration of the banking sector and the bank liquidity are negatively correlated with cost efficiency in the WAEMU. This is consistent with the Quiet Life Hypothesis which established that concentrated market incites suboptimal behaviors damaging to the banking profitability. However, the effects of concentration on cost efficiency are reduced for banks with lower levels of excess liquidity. This result shows that the holding of excess liquidity reinforces the effects of the Quiet Life Hypothesis.

How to Measure Flamenco Performer Value? A Cultural Economic Approach

This article designs an empirical methodology to measure the perceived value of the performers, specifically using the significant example of flamenco performer. The methodology is based on an Ordered Logit Model whose dependent variable is the valuation of the flamenco performer by spectators, which complements the research carried out by Heredia-Carroza (2019). The results show that virtuosity, feelings, Roma origin of the performer are significant and they have a positive effect in the valuation of it. Also, spectator’s features as time consuming and number of albums acquired have a positive effect in the performer valuation. Finally, the results have a greater importance as they provide recording companies, an instrument that reduces uncertainty about the characteristics of the performer and it can also be used as a decision-making instrument for future signings of performers in record companies based on the spectators’ perceptions. This methodology could be replicated for the study of other musical genres.

Iterative Coordination and Innovation: Prioritizing Value over Novelty

An innovating organization faces the challenge of how to prioritize distinct goals of novelty and value, both of which underlie innovation. Popular practitioner frameworks like Agile management suggest that organizations can adopt an iterative approach of frequent meetings to prioritize between these goals, a practice we refer to as iterative coordination. Despite iterative coordination’s widespread use in innovation management, its effects on novelty and value in innovation remain unknown. With the information technology firm Google, we embed a field experiment within a hackathon software development competition to identify the effect of iterative coordination on innovation. We find that iterative coordination causes firms to implicitly prioritize value in innovation: Although iteratively coordinating firms develop more valuable products, these products are simultaneously less novel. Furthermore, by tracking software code, we find that iteratively coordinating firms favor integration at the cost of knowledge-creating specialization. A follow-on laboratory study documents that increasing the frequency and opportunities to reprioritize goals in iterative coordination meetings reinforces value and integration, while reducing novelty and specialization. This article offers three key contributions: highlighting how processes to prioritize among multiple performance goals may implicitly favor certain outcomes; introducing a new empirical methodology of software code version tracking for measuring the innovation process; and leveraging the emergent phenomenon of hackathons to study new methods of organizing.

A comparison between VAR processes jointly modeling GDP and Unemployment rate in France and Germany

Investigating the relationship between Gross Domestic Product and unemployment is one of the most important challenges in macroeconomics. In this paper, we compare French and German economies in terms of the dynamic linkage between these variables. In particular, we use an empirical methodology to investigate how much the relationship between Gross Domestic Product and unemployment growth rates are dynamically different in the two major European economies over the period 2003–2019. To this aim, a Vector Autoregressive model is specified for each country to jointly model the growth rate of the two variables. Then a new statistical test is proposed to assess the distance between the two estimated models. Results indicate that the dynamic linkage between Gross Domestic Product and unemployment is very similar in the two countries. This empirical evidence does not imply identical product and labor markets in France and Germany, but it ensures that in these markets there are common dynamics. This could favor the process of economic convergence between the two countries.

Effects of knowledge spillovers between competitors on patent quality: what patent citations reveal about a global duopoly

This paper analyses the effects on patent quality of a type of spillovers arising from the disclosure of patent information by firms engaged in competition in a global duopoly. Both firms are involved in producing new technologies and they do not cooperate on joint patents. In this context, we explored whether the disclosure of crucial knowledge in the patents of one of the firms affects the patent quality of its respective competitor. The empirical methodology relies on forward citations as an indicator of quality, and backward citations to the competitor as a measure of spillovers. We estimated several count models with a sample of 7750 patent families (divided into subsamples) owned by two large companies, Airbus and Boeing. Our econometric findings show that, for technologies in which the two firms account for the majority of the global patents, neither of the firms in the duopoly was able to harness spillovers from the rival to improve the quality of its patents. However, knowledge from the competitor becomes relevant, at least for one of the focal firms, in explaining patent quality of other technologies in which the two firms do not exert a dominant position.

Preaching on the revised common lectionary for the feast of Christ the King: Joy for intuitive thinking types, nightmare for sensing feeling types?

This qualitative study was positioned within an emerging scientific field concerned with the interaction between biblical text and the psychological profile of the preacher. The theoretical framework was provided by the sensing, intuition, feeling and thinking (SIFT) approach to biblical hermeneutics, an approach rooted in reader-perspective hermeneutical theory and in Jungian psychological type theory that explores the distinctive readings of sensing perception and intuitive perception, and the distinctive readings of thinking evaluation and feeling evaluation. The empirical methodology was provided by developing a research tradition concerned with applying the SIFT approach to biblical text. In the present study, a group of 17 Anglican clergy were invited to work in psychological type-alike groups to explore two of the biblical passages identified by Year B of the Revised Common Lectionary for the Feast of Christ the King. Dividing into three workshops, according to their preferences for sensing and intuition, the clergy explored Psalm 93. Dividing into three workshops, according to their preferences for thinking and feeling, the clergy explored John 18:33–37. The rich data gathered from these workshops supported the hypothesis that biblical interpretation and preaching may be shaped by the reader’s psychological type preference and suggested that the passages of scripture proposed for the Feast of Christ the King may be a joy for intuitive thinking types, but a nightmare for sensing feeling types.Contribution: Situated within the reader perspective approach to biblical hermeneutics, the SIFT method is concerned with identifying the influence of the psychological type of the reader in shaping the interpretation of text. Employing this method, the present study contributes to the fields of homiletics and hermeneutics by demonstrating how some readers (sensing types) may struggle more than others (intuitive types) to interpret the scripture readings proposed by the lectionary for the Feast of Christ the King.

Potential for Collaboration: Differences Between Evolutionary Anthropology and Evolutionary Psychology as Scientific Disciplines

In a review of evolutionary analysis of human behavior, Alden Smith (2000) argues that evolutionary anthropology and evolutionary psychology should not be considered competing disciplines. If evolutionary anthropology and psychology were to become more collaborative, it would aid our understanding of human nature – regardless of the different assumptions and empirical methodology used by the two disciplines. The recent 10th anniversary of “The WEIRDEST people in the world” (Henrich et al, 2010) presents a good opportunity to assess the current state of the evolutionary social sciences. While scholars (e.g., Barrett, 2020) have provided thoughts on the future direction of the evolutionary social sciences, none have explicitly evaluated the degree to which the various subdisciplines within the evolutionary social sciences have moved toward greater collaboration over the past decade. The current study uses content analysis to systematically examine if the disciplines of evolutionary anthropology and psychology are becoming more collaborative by reporting the frequency of coauthored peer-reviewed papers published in Evolution and Human Behavior (EHB), the type of data, and the empirical methodology used in these papers. A total of 737 articles published in EHB between 2009 and 2020 were coded, and no evidence of increased frequency of anthropologist and psychologist collaborations was found. While evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists did not report different types of data or topics of interest, the methods for hypothesis testing were different. I discuss limitations for the current content analysis and review suggested future steps for unification.