Search

This study performed a comparative analysis of changes in the operating status of initial surviving disaster‐stricken businesses and non‐disaster‐stricken businesses in Lushan County, China, after a devastating earthquake on 20 April 2013. It used a logistic regression model to explore the key factors associated with 'post‐disaster continued business operation' in the long term. Field data were collected from 1,078 businesses and questionnaire data from 263 small businesses between 2013 and 2017. The results indicate that a higher proportion of initial surviving disaster‐stricken businesses than non‐disaster‐stricken businesses managed to remain operational in each observation period. The continued operation of disaster‐stricken businesses after the earthquake was positively associated with the owner's age, previous disaster experience, pre‐disaster financial conditions, closure duration, and borrowing money from family or friends. A negative association was found with the size of the business. The findings serve as a vital reference for strategies to promote post‐disaster continued business operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The study objective was to evaluate the impact of a population-level intervention (the IA Agreement) on the of one-year risk for long-term sickness absence spells (LSAS) among young and middle aged workers in Norway.Methods: Using an observational design, we conducted a quasi-experimental study to analyse registry data on individual LSAS for all employed individuals in 2000 (n = 298,690) and 2005 (n = 352,618), born in Norway between 1976 and 1967. The intervention of interest was the tripartite agreement for a more inclusive working life (the IA Agreement). We estimated difference in pre-post differences (DID) in LSAS between individuals working in IA companies with the intervention and companies without, in 2000 and 2005. We used logistic regression models and present odds ratios (DID OR) with accompanying 95% CI. We stratified analyses by sex, industry and company size.Results: We found no significant change in the overall risk of long-term sickness absence spells after implementing the intervention among young and middle aged workers. Stratified by sex, the intervention resulted in a slight decrease in LSAS risk among female workers (DID OR 0.93 (0.91-0.96)) while the intervention showed no impact among male workers (DID OR 1.01 (0.97-1.06)). We found that companies signing the IA Agreement were large (≥50 employees) and often within the manufacturing and health and social sectors. In large manufacturing companies, we found a reduction in LSAS, among workers both in companies with and without the intervention, resulting in no statistically significant impact of the IA intervention. In large health and social companies, we found an increase in LSAS among workers both in companies with and without the intervention. The increase was smaller among the workers in companies offering the IA intervention compared with workers in companies without, resulting in a positive impact of the IA intervention in the health and social industry. This impact was statistically significant only among female workers.Conclusions: The results indicate that the impact of the IA Agreement on the risk of long-term sickness absence spells varies considerably depending on sex and industry. These findings suggest that reducing LSAS may warrant industry-specific interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real time production monitoring systems (PMSs) is an alternative to manual data collection and captures most of the required production data without human intervention. The general objective of the current study is to analyse PMSs and to offer particular solutions for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The subtasks to be solved in the case of each particular PMS include determining relevant parameters, designing PMS and development of the data analysis and prognosis model for short term and long term planning. The selection of suitable PMS components and relevant parameters and the development of lathe cutting unit measuring system are described in the case study. Defendec Inc. and National Instruments Corporation wireless components were adopted to implement a part of the PMS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a model in a competitive market where traders choose between a small and a large firm to acquire costly private information, but they also obtain free public information by observing equilibrium share prices. Our major finding is the existence of a noisy rational expectation competitive equilibrium, in which there are more informed traders of the large firm than those of the small firm. As a result, share prices of the large firm are more informative than those of the small firm. Our empirical study supports the analytical results. By using a bivariate vector autoregressive regression, we are able to conduct a variance decomposition of share prices for different size portfolios. We find that prices of large-size portfolios are more informative because non-value-related price shocks are less important in driving price changes of large-size portfolios than in the case of small-size portfolios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]