Search

We investigate the impact of asymmetric information on the investment decisions of firms and analyze the effect of asymmetric information on the over-investment and under-investment of firms. Further, we examine the effect of leverage on the investment behavior of firms and check this association in the presence of asymmetric information. We extract data from DataStream of 280 non-financial firms listed at Pakistan Stock Exchange over the period of 2000 to 2018. We apply the Fixed Effect Model to analyze the data and System Generalized Method of Moments to check the robustness of the results. We find that asymmetric information negatively affects the investment decisions of firms. Due to asymmetric information investment decreases rapidly as compared to increase in investment. Further, leverage is an important determinant of investment decisions and the presence of asymmetric information increases the adverse effect of leverage on the investment of firms.

The increasing importance of integrated fulfillment concepts revitalizes bricks-and-mortar stores and puts them at the center of retail operations. So-called omnichannel (OC) concepts leverage stores to offer seamless and enhanced operations for offline and online shoppers. Stores are used to fulfill online orders, offer shorter lead times to customers, and extend the assortment across channels. The role of the store and the underlying store operations are thus impacted by profound changes. This transformation has not yet been assessed comprehensively from a practical or an Operations Research (OR) lens. This paper identifies cross-cutting store-related planning issues and develops a planning framework for OC operations. We apply industry interviews and a systematic literature analysis to derive five planning issues. Research gaps are revealed by matching the pertinent OR literature with managerial needs. The planning issues network design of fulfillment locations, assignment of customer orders, and assortment and inventory planning have been discussed in several store-related OC publications. Demand forecasting and inventory replenishment have received less coverage, and offer significant research opportunities.

Beyond merely satisfying customers, companies are increasingly striving to build deeper and more meaningful customer relationships characterized by strong customer-company identification. However, whereas previous research has solely focused on symbolic drivers of identification, it remains unclear whether, when, and how managers can build on core functional company characteristics (i.e., quality, innovativeness, and price) to establish customer–company identification. The present study addresses these questions by developing a theoretical framework based on theoretical notions of social identity theory and the cue diagnosticity framework. Evidence from two field studies and one experimental study shows that functional company characteristics are not effective in creating customer–company identification per se, but that their influence depends on whether they match with a self-definitional need that is important to the customer (i.e., self-continuity, self-distinctiveness, or self-enhancement). The findings also reveal the underlying mechanism of this contingency by showing that a self-definitional need fosters customer–company identification because it strengthens the symbolic value of a matching functional characteristic. By identifying specific characteristic–need matches, this research offers novel insights into how managers can leverage functional company characteristics in their targeting and communication efforts to establish meaningful long-term relationships with customers.

Despite the proactive efforts of many firms to combat gender bias within their organizations, societal prejudices still disadvantage women leaders and the firms who employ them. This external gender bias shapes outside stakeholder evaluations of women leaders’ efforts in various ways, and firms need strategies to cope with this external gender bias. We examine the conditions that might alleviate this burden of external bias and what women leaders and top executives can do to leverage these conditions—from a strategic positioning perspective—that will effectively allow female leaders to differentiate their work. To do this, we synthesize and build upon evidence that the external gender bias against women leaders diminishes when they lead in areas that are unconventional, rather than mainstream. We then propose a two-step process based on (1) identifying the likely threat of external gender bias, which is stronger in some industry contexts than others, and (2) leveraging unconventionality to circumvent male prototypical comparisons, thereby reducing the hazards of external gender bias.

Refereed/Peer-reviewed Foreign institutional actors (INAs) can act as a liaison between firms and authorities and other power players to navigate bureaucratic structures, both as resource and legitimacy providers in the host market. Building on institutional theory, this study draws from broader organizational sociological literature, to explore the structural position of INAs in a host country context, and engages with fundamental questions of legitimacy, status, and power. It responds to repeated calls that more studies in international business research are needed on the impact of institutional differences, how to obtain legitimacy, and enhance the home country support networks. To understand INAs' position, specifically within the social structure of a bureaucratic host environment, our study uses in-depth interviews with elite actors from the support networks. Japan is chosen for this study as a host market, because it is the European Union's second largest trading partner in Asia, has a strong central bureaucracy, and historically and currently remains a challenging market for Westerners due to complex market entry barriers. The findings provide a new theoretically derived empirical model demonstrating the positional leverage of these INAs, to “open-doors” into a complex environment and offer a nuanced understanding of their formal and informal structural positions of power. The findings also demonstrate a significant overlap between organizational legitimacy and the exemplary status of these INAs in the bureaucratic environment, which enhances and empowers their leverage to reach authorities, press, and other important actors in the market.

As valuable assets of corporations, governments and not-for-profit organizations, brands have attracted considerable research attention. We know a lot about how brands create knowledge in their target consumers’ minds, which leads to an attitude towards or relationship with the brand that translates into a number of favorable outcomes. The resultant brand equity is often associated with improved performance of the organization in reaching its objectives such as increasing market value. We know less about the dynamic nature of brand equity and, in particular, how it may interact with turbulence in the external environment in which the brand competes, both positively and negatively. We examine three key dimensions of brand equity—brands’ access to their target markets, perceived differentiation, and level of brand engagement with their target consumers—that influence the effect environmental turbulence has on diminishing equity or providing future opportunities for brand equity growth. Borrowing from the strategy literature, we suggest ways in which agile and resilient firms can use brand equity to resist environmental turbulence, recover from any damage that may result from it, and reinvent themselves to leverage opportunities created by a radically altered external environment. We close with a set of propositions intended to guide managers in anticipating and responding to environmental turbulence and inform and shape future research in this area.

This study investigates how retailers can leverage their brand to shape customers’ satisfaction with service encounters. It develops and tests hypotheses about how brand, store, and consumer factors moderate customer responses to experience clues during retail service encounters. Six meta-regression analyses synthesize and compare results from 842 satisfaction equations describing customers’ encounters with a global retailer operating 400 stores in 32 countries. The results show how customers weigh their perceptions of service encounters differently depending on brand, store, and consumer factors. In markets where customers believe the retailer has high holistic brand quality, they place less weight on experience clues within the store. In markets where customers believe the retailer’s service brand promise, they place more weight on in-store experience clues. In markets where the retailer promises utilitarian value, customers weigh functional experience clues more heavily. In markets with an online purchasing channel, the effect of experience clues common to offline and online store environments is magnified, and unique clues are diminished. In addition, customers heavily weigh experience clues that fit their goals. In general, retail success factors include high brand quality (which makes customers more forgiving), a service brand promise that is mirrored in the store image (which makes customers attend to the experience clues aligned with them), and the careful monitoring and managing of retail touchpoints (to customize experience clues to each market). In this way, retailers can use customer-based strategies to effectively design and manage their global retail brand in different markets.

In the contemporary business reality, marked by unemployment and loose labor markets, workplace abuse is likely to climb as organizations and managers wield increased leverage in the employment relationship. We explore the organizational phenomenon of worker abuse and examine workplace blog accounts from abused workers to uncover shared insights from abused workers. Based on these findings we offer research-based suggestions, implications for practice, and resources for organizations, managers, and workers. Specifically, we advance an A.B.U.S.E. Mitigation Model as a holistic management system for identifying and dealing with workplace abuse.

Covid-19 has drawn renewed focus to the importance of resilience, both among practitioners and in academia, as companies struggle to cope with the rapid swings, changing patterns, and disruptions in supply and demand. This article identifies and delineates a way forward for companies to support resilience, particularly by companies recognizing the wider communities they are nested in and resources that exist there. To identify such productive resources, known as ‘capitals’, we provide a novel and actionable Integrated Capitals Framework. This framework integrates ten existing frameworks drawn from both practice and academia, and is comprised of nine different forms of capital: financial, physical, social, natural, human, cultural, public, political, and, crucially, health. Businesses can leverage and contribute to these resources to support resilience. We provide insights into how businesses can use this framework in practice, providing a way for companies to achieve resilience through this useful, yet underutilized, path.

Based on the Upper Echelon Theory, this paper examined the relationship of CEO education and experience with the dynamic capital structure (DCS) using the target leverage and speed of adjustment (SOA) models. This study applied the system generalised method of moments (SYS-GMM) to the target leverage model and Ordinary Least Squares bootstrapped standard errors to the speed of adjustment model. Using the 100 Indonesian firms, two notable findings were obtained. First, the target leverage model with the inclusion of CEO characteristics yielded a 22% of the SOA towards target leverage. Both variables showed a positive relationship with the target leverage. Second, the result revealed that the improvement of CEO education and experience by one standard deviation led to an increase in the SOA by 3.37% and 0.17%. Thus, the results were consistent with the theory whereby the education and experience of the CEOs were potential determinants the DCS.

The SDGs are a universal agenda to address the world’s most pressing societal, environmental and economic challenges. The supply of timely, relevant and reliable data is essential in guiding policies and decisions for successful implementation of the SDGs. Yet official statistics cannot provide all of the data needed to populate the SDG indicator framework. Citizen science offers a novel solution and an untapped opportunity to complement traditional sources of data, such as household surveys, for monitoring progress towards the SDGs, while at the same time mobilizing action and raising awareness for their achievement. This paper presents the potential offered by one specific citizen science tool, Picture Pile, to complement and enhance official statistics to monitor several SDGs and targets. Designed to be a generic and flexible tool, Picture Pile is a web-based and mobile application for ingesting imagery from satellites, orthophotos, unmanned aerial vehicles or geotagged photographs that can then be rapidly classified by volunteers. The results show that Picture Pile could contribute to the monitoring of fifteen SDG indicators under goals 1, 2, 11, 13, 14 and 15 based on the Picture Pile campaigns undertaken to date. Picture Pile could also be modified to support other SDGs and indicators in the areas of ecosystem health, eutrophication and built-up areas, among others. In order to leverage this particular tool for SDG monitoring, its potential must be showcased through the development of use cases in collaboration with governments, NSOs and relevant custodian agencies. Additionally, mutual trust needs to be built among key stakeholders to agree on common goals that would facilitate the use of Picture Pile or other citizen science tools and data for SDG monitoring and impact.

The COVID-19 pandemic has surfaced many ethical challenges for nurse leaders who need the courage, ability, and support to make the right decisions. This paper discusses 3 ethical challenges: workforce shortages, staff assignments, and moral distress. It also offers strategies to leverage our code of ethics to navigate these situations.

There is broad understanding and appreciation that quality and safety are indispensable parts of the business enterprise of delivering care. However, because health care organizations have resource constraints and competing priorities, leaders and managers must create, demonstrate, and articulate a business case for continuing to prioritize investments in quality and safety. To accomplish this, one must leverage financial principles with compelling story-telling. Success creates a virtuous cycle whereby ongoing investments in robust structures increase returns (value defined as improvements in quality and safety outcomes), and cost savings are reinvested to continue to improve delivery of high-quality care.

The identity of sustainable entrepreneurs progresses and is primed by certain identity dimensions, including society, community, or competition as their frames of references, their social motivation, and their self-evaluation. Because sustainable entrepreneurs aim to achieve the goals of generating profit and create social and/or ecological value at the same time, they experience two types of tensions: one that concerns social and ecological and the other with an extension of economic aspects. To leverage these, we find identity shifts dependent on the tension sustainable entrepreneurs’ experience, activating a certain combination of identity dimension. Building on 29 case studies with European sustainable entrepreneurs, the study investigates the dynamic role of entrepreneurial identity, thereby informing about fluid hybrid identity conflict management strategies. This adds to theory on entrepreneurial identity that has widely found multiple, yet coherent entrepreneurial identities and conflict management strategies.

Despite the surge of literature on customer engagement (CE) in social media, few studies shed light on how to leverage CE to improve firms’ operational efficiency. This research proposes a fresh framework using social media data to improve demand forecasting accuracy, resulting in a cost-efficient inventory control strategy. Drawing upon the resource mobilization perspective in particular, this research quantifies the construct of CE from the view of input–output efficiency evaluation using the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model, and then leverages CE to forecast consumer online demand and reconfigure inventory management strategy. Using a 71-week data set from a social commerce start-up in China, this research shows that this new framework dramatically increases demand forecasting accuracy and reduces operational costs in inventory management. This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the value of social media data in improving operational efficiency, particularly regarding inventory management.

Objective The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity for surgical residency programs to rethink their methods of evaluating and recruiting candidates. However, the past year has not been seamless, with a soaring number of applications, reports of programs and applicants having difficulty evaluating each other, and an increasingly uneven distribution of interviews among applicants. Consequently, many have called for national changes to the residency application process to address these longstanding concerns. Results Here, we review the evolving literature and advocate for the permanent adoption of visiting rotations, virtual interviews with a universal release date and data-driven attendance limits, and opportunities for in-person applicant visits. Conclusions We believe these changes leverage the strengths of each format, allow for satisfactory bidirectional evaluation, and promote principles of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

This study investigates the effects of social trust on corporate leverage in China with the data of listed companies and Chinese General Social Survey. Results reveal that social trust has a positive impact on corporate leverage, and this result remains robust when terrain is used as an instrumental variable. Social trust also further affects corporate leverage in central cities with high gross domestic product per capita, indicating that the impacts of social trust depend on local development as well. Social trust has similar impacts on long- and short-term leverage, but it does not affect commercial credit leverage like how it affects bank credit leverage. The possible channels are through the corporate responsibility to shareholder and local financial development. Another impact of social trust on leverage is through that of liabilities. Furthermore, improving local formal institutions may change the effects of social trust. Our results remain unchanged after robustness checks.

Islands have the potential to be precursors in the transition to clean energy, by adopting new technologies and applying innovative solutions that can serve as showcases at an international level. This paper is a contribution towards understating the importance of community engagement on energy transition processes. It covers multiple aspects of a green transition process, including technical, environmental, social, and economic issues. Starting by a participatory diagnosis process, the community of a small island located in Portugal (Culatra Island, Algarve), was challenged to lead the transition process and define different pillars of energy transition. The process brought together local authorities, academia, citizens and companies. Using practical examples, it is shown how the community is succeeding in tailoring new technological solutions for a green transition, according with the specific needs of the island, as expressed by the islanders themselves, including batteries, electric vehicles, retrofitting of homes, or heat pumps, which, when combined, could lay the foundations for the creation of a Renewable Energy Community and leverage socioeconomic benefits. info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

One of the most common complaints of food supply chains (FSCs) is that of exploitative middlemen and retail chains that dominate markets to disenfranchise farmers, small retailers and consumers. Scholarship on agro-food geographies has paid close attention to some of the issues and institutions in FSCs, attending to the role of capital and variations in the spatial practices of their functioning. It has been less attentive to the implications of newer, emerging forms taken by interventions along the food supply chain by emerging distribution-led food businesses that leverage data technologies to streamline and expand their influence. Based on qualitative research conducted of seven food-based Business to Business (B2B) e-commerce firms in Bengaluru, India, this research brings together scholarship on agro-food geographies, digital technologies and embeddedness in economic activity to unpack the rise of modern FSCs in India, paying special attention to the introduction of data technologies in their functioning. We argue that digital and physical market spaces rest on each other, digital technologies being firmly emplaced in their functioning through active processes of network and territorial embedding by B2B firms. This results in a respatialisation of the relational and material elements of these chains. We also critically interrogate wider transformations that this new set of actors precipitate. These include: 1. the reshaping of power relationships and consequently agro-food geographies through a consolidation of capital around distribution rather than retail 2. the role of data technologies in shaping practices and narratives in FSCs and 3. implications of these shifts for allied infrastructures.

We examine the dynamic relation between firm leverage buildups and real economic activity using U.S. establishment-, firm-, and region-level data. We find that buildups in firm leverage are predictably associated with boom-bust growth cycles: employment grows in the short run but declines in the medium run. While firm leverage buildups are correlated with firm-level expansions, they continue to predict negative future employment growth if we control for firm-level expansions. Buildups in firm leverage predict a tightening of future firm-level financing constraints, and they only predict negative future employment growth if the level of firm leverage is sufficiently high, suggesting that the dynamic relation between firm leverage buildups and employment growth operates through a financial fragility channel. Our results have aggregate implications: regions with larger buildups in firm leverage experience stronger regional boom-bust growth cycles, and they perform significantly worse during national recessions.

National audience; This paper studies an economy where demand spillovers make firms’ production decisions strategic complements. Firms choose their operating leverage trading off higher fixed costs for lower variable costs. Operating leverage governs firms’ exposures to an aggregate labor productivity shock. In equilibrium, firms exhibit excessive operating leverage as they do not internalize that an economy with higher aggregate operating leverage is more likely to fall into a recession following a negative productivity shock. Welfare losses coming from firms’ failure to coordinate production are amplified by suboptimal risk-taking, which magnifies the impact of productivity shocks onto aggregate output.

In the past decade, the social and behavioral sciences underwent a methodological revolution, offering practical prescriptions for improving the replicability and reproducibility of research results. One key to reforming science is a simple and scalable practice: pre-registration. Pre-registration constitutes pre-specifying an analysis plan prior to data collection. A growing chorus of articles discusses the prescriptive, field-wide benefits of pre-registration. To increase adoption, however, scientists need to know who currently pre-registers and understand perceived barriers to doing so. Thus, we weigh costs and benefits of pre-registration. Our survey of researchers reveals generational differences in who pre-registers and uncertainty regarding how pre-registration benefits individual researchers. We leverage these data to directly address researchers’ uncertainty by clarifying why pre-registration improves the research process itself. Finally, we discuss how to pre-register and compare available resources. The present work examines the who, why, and how of pre-registration in order to weigh the costs and benefits of pre-registration to researchers and motivate continued adoption. The pre-registration for our "Researcher Survey" was uploaded on 2019-11-27 but not formally registered until 2021-03-26, per a generous reviewer's suggestion in order to increase searchability. The uploaded documents identify when each document was uploaded.

Knowledge is widely considered a key ingredient for effective and sustainable water governance. In the Colorado River basin, collaborative programs have been established over the past 50 years to inform decision-making in the basin on a range of concerns from water quality to endangered species recovery and ecosystem restoration. We embrace a knowledge governance perspective to examine the institutional arrangements underpinning the production and use of knowledge in the basin’s collaborative programs. Through a review of programmatic documents and targeted interviews with program participants, we find a recurrent emphasis on science-based decision-making to address specific resource challenges across the programs. Our unpacking of the institutional design of the knowledge governance processes highlights two key challenges: (1) the institutional design has created a federal agency–advisory committee–technical committee triad structure that limits the saliency and legitimacy of diverse interests, as well as credibility of diverse ways of knowing and formalized learning processes and (2) a focus on the river in discrete, fragmented units that hinders a broader view of the river as a system and neglects cross-programmatic learning. These findings question if certain institutional design elements may serve to limit the ability of these programs to address new challenges facing the basin. We outline some potential steps to address these challenges with the aim of building more impactful, collaborative knowledge systems that leverage learning to not only lend saliency, credibility, and legitimacy to broad, inclusive, and diverse ways of knowing but also promote adaptiveness in a rapidly evolving socio-environmental system.

Summary Expanding urbanization affects food biodiversity and broader agrobiodiversity, which are essential nutrition and ecosystem resources for sustainable development but are threatened globally. The increasingly influential nexus of urbanization-agrobiodiversity interactions has not been systematically researched. Here we design an interdisciplinary perspective to identify and understand the bidirectional interactions of agrobiodiversity in four major linkages: urban and peri-urban land use, urban food supply chains, urban food access, and urban food retailing. Agrobiodiversity is evident to varying degrees amid urbanization globally, rather than the previously assumed blanket incompatibility or unspecified partial compatibility. A proposed conceptual framework is used to hypothesize how these linkages create configurations of combined conditions that support agrobiodiversity amid expanding urbanization. These key conditions contain leverage points of the urbanization-agrobiodiversity nexus for policies to address nutrition insecurity and vital environmental functions. We conclude that the urbanization-agrobiodiversity nexus is a crucial new focus of interdisciplinary research to strengthen sustainable development and food systems.

Perceived control—the belief in our ability to successfully influence the environment—significantly shapes how we make decisions and interact with our environment. Because of its intrinsically rewarding nature, the opportunity to exert control tends to bias individuals towards behaviors that endow an enhanced perception of control. Here, we leverage recent behavioral and neuroimaging work to highlight three particular attributes of control (i.e. affective, motivational and protective), which contribute to how perceived control shapes decision making via the corticostriatal circuits and impacts wellbeing. We then consider how impairments in perceived control could represent a transdiagnostic feature across psychopathologies.

Understanding the high likelihood of a dissatisfied customer leaving, customer satisfaction modeling has received significant attention by marketers and academic research. The major challenge in customer satisfaction modeling is the low response rate of surveys and the potential loss of valuable insights from non-respondents. We introduce a modeling framework that allows marketers to leverage existing information about non-respondents for predicting customer satisfaction at a specific time. We design a novel procedure to discover data-driven attributes that effectively represent the interactions of customers. Then, we propose a time-aware model to predict customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction and the time of events. We also design a learn-to-rank model to leverage non-respondents data for building a more accurate customer satisfaction model. A real-world dataset from an insurance company shows that the proposed framework accurately identifies satisfied or dissatisfied customers at a specific time and achieves a significantly better performance compared to extant methods.

The COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed health care systems and exposed major gaps in preparedness and response plans. The crisis challenged nurse leaders to develop and implement novel care delivery plans while preventing disease transmission to patients and staff. COVID-19 required nurse leaders to make decisions in an environment of conflicting data and directives. The authors share essential nurse leader competencies vital to the development and support of thriving nurse leaders. As crises persist and future challenges arise, nurse leaders can leverage these essential competencies to successfully drive engagement, lead ahead of consensus, and define the shadows of limited, incomplete, and conflicting data.

Social media has made a noteworthy impact in health care both in public health efforts as well as transforming how physicians connect and exchange ideas. Learning how to navigate and leverage social media across multiple platforms is becoming increasingly difficult with more platforms and features constantly being introduced. Different physicians working in the same field will have different purposes behind getting on social media, but each physician plays a different role within this social media ecosystem. This article aims to identify the common benefits of health care social media use as well as navigate the unfortunate pitfalls of social media use.

This paper develops a text-based downside risk measure using corporate annual reports and assesses its ability to forecast future corporate policies. The forward-looking measure dynamically captures adverse firm conditions evolving from economic fundamentals. When the measure is below its sample average, leverage, investment, R&D, employment, and dividends consistently fall. When the measure rises, firms increase cash holdings. The proposed measure also delivers robust and persistent forecasts based on in-sample and out-of-sample LASSO regressions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a promising and increasingly available technology for managerial decision-making. With the adoption of AI-enabled software, organizations can leverage various benefits of the technology, but they also have to consider the intended and unintended consequences of using the technology for managerial roles. It is still unclear whether managers will benefit from enhancing their abilities with AI-enabled software or become powerless puppets that do more than announce AI-enabled software results. Our research has revealed distinct ways in which organizations can use AI-enabled decision-making solutions: as tools or novelties, for decision augmentation or automation, and as either a voluntary or a mandatory option. In this article, we discuss the implications of each of these combinations on the relevant managers. We consider outcomes related to managerial job design and derive practical advice for organizational designers and managers who work with AI. Our outcomes provide guidance on how to deal with the conflict-riddled relationship between managers and technology with regard to capabilities, responsibilities, and acceptance of AI-enabled software.

Quality clinical placements have become increasingly challenging to locate, supervise, and learn from. The purpose of this article is twofold: (1) to describe the process used to develop virtual simulations for a family assessment course using H5P technology; and (2) to describe how gamification was used to leverage student creativity as scenario creators and actors. Anecdotally, the use of H5P technology and students as simulation co-creators has improved the learning experience in a first-year family assessment course.

A common approach in scientific research and policy is a commitment to develop projects or legislation trying to improve problems experienced by low-income and rural communities; however, lack of interaction with community members during the process tends to produce unsatisfactory results. We visited disadvantaged communities in the San Joaquin Valley of California and interviewed local stakeholders (community members and leaders, policy advocates, attorneys, and educators). Then we analyzed a corpus related to disadvantaged communities from a pool of California-related publications containing 154,000 scientific papers, 2.6 million newspaper articles, and 11,000 state legislation bills from 2017 to 2020 to estimate the frequency and quality of disadvantaged community representation. Here we present our findings describing the biases and gaps of knowledge by scientific papers, California newspaper articles, and legislation bills with respect to disadvantaged communities in California, and we suggest opportunities for scientists, media communicators, and policymakers to amplify the voices of these stakeholders. In all corpus categories, disadvantaged communities are underrepresented: about one in four Californians live in disadvantaged communities, but only one in 2000 news articles and scientific papers cover them. The concerns and priorities of disadvantaged communities do not match the public perspective of them depicted by the corpus. Developing effective policies requires addressing place-specific nuances and co-occurrence of structural inequities in partnership with local stakeholders. Holistic coverage in newspapers and community-based approaches are necessary platforms to increase awareness and sensibility about disadvantaged communities, helping tailor policy solutions, and building the political leverage needed to implement them.

Long-acting injectable (LAI) drug products enable the controlled release of a drug over an extended duration of time to improve the therapeutic effect, safety profile, or administration of an injectable product. The development of generic [505(j)] and differentiated [505(b)(2)] LAI products helps to provide patients and healthcare providers with more treatment options and to reduce overall healthcare costs, including those associated with drug product administration and patient compliance. In this review, we analyze the landscape of LAI products and identify the most common technical challenges that potential generic product entrants face. We focus on five formulation technologies that account for ~90% of approved LAI products, including those eligible for generic product registration over the next five years, to illustrate technology-specific challenges. We then review efforts from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to promote more generic product competition and emphasize the importance of collaboration among government, industry, and academia to advance the knowledge and capabilities of the scientific community. Regulatory bodies, industry, and academia are encouraged to anticipate challenges with emerging innovative LAI technologies and to leverage the experiences built on established technologies to foster generic product development.

Microbial communities and their functions are shaped by complex networks of interactions among microbes and with their environment. While the critical roles microbial communities play in numerous environments have become increasingly appreciated, we have a very limited understanding of their interactions and how these interactions combine to generate community-level behaviors. This knowledge gap hinders our ability to predict community responses to perturbations and to design interventions that manipulate these communities to our benefit. Dynamic models are promising tools to address these questions. We review existing modeling techniques to construct dynamic models of microbial communities at different scales and suggest ways to leverage multiple types of models and data to facilitate our understanding and engineering of microbial communities.

We identify four market-shaping strategies and their related activities that enable a focal market actor to work towards specific market outcomes. The conceptual framework provides firms with a tool for choosing specific market-shaping strategies depending on their market-shaping intention (offensive/defensive) and perception of a market's stability (stable/unstable). Accordingly, and in line with market-shaping literature, the four market-shaping strategies enable a firm to widen, reduce, maintain, or disrupt a market. Whereas previous market-strategy conceptualizations emphasized firm-level outcomes, the four identified market-shaping strategies focus on market outcomes and encompass a more comprehensive understanding of the impact of a firm's strategic actions on a market. Thereby, this study offers new perspectives on the implementation of market strategies in the context of markets as complex adaptive systems. By exemplifying the four market-shaping strategies using four industry cases, we illustrate how market-shaping strategies can appear in practice and demonstrate how firms can strategically leverage and steer market processes to their advantage. Funding: Riksbankens Jubileumsfond [P180588:1]

Banks’ funding sources have changed significantly during the last two decades. The share of non-core funding (NCF) was high before the 2008 crisis but declined substantially after the crisis. We propose a general equilibrium model where NCF provides insurance against idiosyncratic risks faced by banks. Insurance makes leverage and investment more attractive, but it also increases the vulnerability of the banking sector to crises. We show that learning about the likelihood of a crisis could have been important for generating the observed dynamics of NCF and leverage, which in turn affected the dynamics of the macro-economy.

Introduction Current literature does not describe behaviors or the overarching opinion of pharmacy students on the use of different types of social media for personal and professional purposes. The objectives of this study were to identify predominant beliefs among pharmacy students regarding use of social media for professional and personal purposes, characterize pharmacy students' opinions on the effects of social media on their professional career, and determine pharmacy students' perceptions of using social media as tools for learning and discovery. Methods A self-administered questionnaire was administered to pharmacy students at Auburn University (N = 450) and Lipscomb University (N = 212). Linear regression was performed to predict students' perceptions of the importance of social media to their future professional life. Results The leading platforms commonly used by students for personal reasons were Facebook (92.5%), Instagram (70.5%), and Snapchat (70.5%). The most popular platforms used for professional reasons included LinkedIn (40.4%), Facebook (35.4%), and YouTube (29.2%). About 50% of respondents perceived social media to be important to their future professional life as pharmacists. Most students used YouTube and Wikipedia while studying or learning. The regression model predicting students' perceptions of the importance of social media to their future professional life was significant. Conclusions Pharmacy students most commonly use Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat for personal reasons, and LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube for professional reasons. Educators may leverage YouTube and wikis to support the education of pharmacy students. Pharmacy students appear to be more aware and active with security settings than previously reported.

This study investigated the impact of corporate sector variables on energy supply and demand in OECD countries. In the first stage of the investigation, a panel nonlinear model was employed to assess the effects of financial corporation debt to equity (FCDE), non-financial corporation debt to surplus (NFCDS), and banking system leverage on the contribution of renewable energy to primary energy. In the second stage, the influences of these independent variables on geo biomass, hydro, solar, and wind energy consumption were investigated. The findings demonstrate that FCDE and NFCDS are the firm-specific factors that influence renewable energy supply in the long run. The significant relationship between financial firm leverage and renewable energy highlights the fact that leverage is one of the main obstacles to further investment in renewable energy. Moreover, while banking system leverage has no impact on renewable energy’s contribution to primary energy, it has a discernible influence on solar and geo biomass energy consumption. Solar is the only renewable energy variable that is influenced by financial corporations and banking system leverage.

Promotional messages, including scarcity messages and other consumer existence messages, are frequently employed by online travel marketers to drive consumer purchase intention. By using a scenario-based experimental design study, the authors investigate the effects of scarcity message types – limited quantity scarcity (LQS) and limited time scarcity (LTS) – on willingness to purchase, and explore the mediating role of perceived consumer competition and the moderating role of social cue messages on scarcity messaging and purchase intention. The findings suggest that presenting social cue messages enhances perceived consumer competition and consequently purchase intention when an LQS message is presented. However, presenting social cue messages have no such impact on perceived consumer competition and purchase intention when an LTS message is presented. This research provides online travel practitioners with guidance on how and when to leverage promotional messages to drive consumer purchase intention.

Considering the increasing number of food recall incidents in the restaurant industry, it is crucial to examine the impact of food recall on consumers' negative word-of-mouth (N-WOM) intentions. This study examined the effects of the food recall announcement on consumers’ N-WOM intentions, focusing specifically on crisis level and two brand-related forms of leverage, brand equity and branding strategy. A 2 (crisis level: low/high) x 2 (brand equity: low/high) x 2 (branding strategy: corporate branding/house of brands) scenario-based research design was employed using a self-administered online survey. The food recall announcement was found to be effective in reducing N-WOM intentions only for loyal consumers when the crisis level was high. Further, the use of the corporate branding strategy was effective in reducing N-WOM intentions compared to the house-of- branding strategy. These findings provide useful guidelines to practitioners on how to effectively announce food recalls.

This paper documents the emergence of a large bank loan market in the absence of contracting institutions: the trusted assistant loan market in 19th century China. These loans were legally unenforceable, one-shot loans to poor scholars that funded the costs of assuming lucrative administrative appointments offering ample opportunities for corruption. The trusted assistant loan’s distinguishing feature was a legally unenforceable stipulation that the borrower incorporate an agent of the creditor into his administrative cadre. We model the enforcement of these loans through expertise leverage and test the model’s predictions using data from officials’ diaries and a bank loan book. JEL classifications:G21, O16, D86

Digital technologies have a crucial role in facilitating transitions toward a sustainable future. Yet there remain challenges to overcome and pitfalls to avoid. This Voices asks: how do we leverage the digital transformation to successfully support a sustainability transition?

Most people want to feel happy; however, some evidence suggests that the more people value happiness, the less happy they are. To make sense of this paradox, we leverage existing models of goal pursuit to identify core components of the process of pursuing happiness, highlighting how each of these components may go awry. Then, we introduce two fundamental traits that put pressure on the core components of the process and in turn further influence the outcome of pursuing happiness. Together, this nuanced approach to the pursuit of happiness across levels of analysis helps us organize existing literature and make better predictions about when, why, and for whom the pursuit of happiness may backfire and when it is likely to succeed.

When business-to-business (B2B) brands extend into the consumer market, considering that end consumers are generally unfamiliar with B2B brands, managers often tend to expend extensive efforts in advertising the brand extension. However, insights into how B2B brands can leverage their industry background when extending into the B2C market are still lacking. In this study, we investigated whether, when, and how highlighting the industry background of a B2B brand in the advertisements of its B2C products influence brand extension evaluation. Our results indicate that presenting information on the B2B brand’s industry background may facilitate consumers’ evaluation of its extended B2C product. This positive impact is enhanced when the advertisement has competence appeal and alleviated when it has warmth appeal. The interaction between industry background and advertising appeal is mediated by consumers’ perceptions of brand personality appeal clarity. Our study provides insights into how B2B brand managers can leverage brands to drive an effective brand extension into B2C market.

Purpose Little is known about the views of U.S. youth on COVID-19 or their use of face coverings. Closing this gap could facilitate messaging to promote COVID-19 risk mitigation behaviors. Methods In July 2020, a five-question text message survey was sent to 1,087 youth aged 14–24 years. Questions assessed youths' perceptions regarding the likelihood of contracting COVID-19, the potential impact of contracting COVID-19 on their lives, the possibility of spreading COVID-19 to others, and their use of face coverings around others with whom they do not live. Coding was conducted to assign responses to discrete categories and to identify common themes. Results Of 1,087 eligible participants, 797 (73.3%) were included in analyses. Of these participants, 27.3% believed they would likely contract COVID-19 in the next few months, 90.3% believed contracting COVID-19 would have a moderate or significant impact on their lives, 86.0% were moderately or very concerned about spreading COVID-19, and 89.2% reported wearing face coverings all or most of the time. Factors affecting face covering use included the desire to avoid contracting and spreading COVID-19, peer influence, and policy mandates. Conclusions Youths' perceptions regarding the risk of contracting COVID-19 varied, but most believed their lives would be adversely impacted if this occurred. Most youth were concerned about spreading COVID-19 and wore face coverings, but many made exceptions to face covering use when around close contacts. Public health campaigns may be most effective if they leverage positive peer influence and appeal to youths' desire not to spread COVID-19 to others.

Traditionally, loyalty programs have rewarded members following their purchases. However, current versions of these programs feature extended scopes of benefits, including technology-facilitated complementary service features that span multiple purchase stages. Using a multimethod approach, this research explores the potential of loyalty programs to become meaningful “travel companions” along the customer’s journey. First, a qualitative focus group study finds the different roles of loyalty programs: purchase process facilitation (prepurchase stage), value enhancement (purchase stage), and reassurance (postpurchase stage). Then, a survey of members of a grocery retailer’s loyalty program shows the relative importance of stage-specific interactions with service features. Managers can apply these insights for designing their loyalty program to leverage its full benefits and help members co-create value with technological support.

Virtual teams, through their ability to bridge space over time, are an important component of globally dispersed enterprises. Inclusion consists of a team’s mission, effort, and practice to sustain a diverse workplace and leverage the influence of diversity to realize a rival business advantage. This study examined the role of inclusive non-spatial proximity and knowledge sharing in fostering innovation performance of virtual teams. Survey responses were received from 143 subjects with working experience in virtual teams of the top-2000 global enterprises in Taiwan and China that possess high rankings in the integration of international cooperation. The model was assessed and validated using partial least squares regression. According to the empirical results, organizational proximity influences technical innovation through knowledge contribution. Furthermore, cognitive proximity influences technical innovation through knowledge absorption. Finally, the relationships between cognitive proximity and knowledge absorption and between institutional proximity and knowledge contribution were shown to have industrial differences.

Background To shape priorities for health and health care outcomes, it is essential for nurse leaders to be influential. The application and impact of influence are readily recognized, but not its characteristics. Purpose The purpose of this project was to conduct a concept analysis of influence relative to nurse leaders. Methods The Walker and Avant method of concept analysis was utilized. Findings Attributes of influence include advocacy, communications skills, competency, confidence, credibility, and engagement. Antecedents of influence are authority, collaboration, integrity, and mentorship. Consequences of influence are action, change, commitment, compliance, decision-making, motivation, and resistance. Discussion By drawing upon a systematic understanding of the concept of influence, nurse leaders are urged to develop and leverage the attributes of influence to drive and achieve collective good for the future of health and health care in society.

Peer review is a mechanism that premier journals should pro-actively leverage to promote high-quality scholarly work regardless of whether that work is accepted or rejected. To do so, this article highlights the expectation–confirmation gap in peer reviewing and offers a set of guiding principles and a template for pro-active reviewing to help reviewers deliver high-quality feedback. In doing so, this article hopes to inspire greater constructive and developmental reviews as opposed to destructive and judgmental reviews in premier journals.

This paper contributes to the current debate about the “knowledge sharing-protecting” tension in R&D collaborations by introducing a new angle for analyzing this paradox. Considering the role of internal knowledge sources of the firm, the paper introduces and empirically analyses the interplay between three knowledge governance mechanisms (selective, contingent, and orchestrated openness) and the different technological fields of the firm (core, related non-core, and distant non-core technologies). Based on a unique first-hand large-scale project-level dataset from a Global 100 firm across a 10-year span, this research finds that R&D collaborations selectively conducted in firm’s related non-core technological fields promise the best innovation performance. Further, by orchestrating its projects across core and non-core technological fields in the same knowledge portfolio, the firm can leverage a network of inter-connected projects when collaborating with external partners. As such, the firm can strategically “distribute” collaboration risks across multiple projects, while optimize its access to external knowledge that it intends to get. Finally, contrary to the common assumption, this study does not find any discriminating factors against market-based partners in their contribution to innovation in both core and non-core technologies.