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This study uses data from China to investigate the impact of female executives' proportion on a firm's financial statement comparability. We find that having female executives can improve a firm's financial statement comparability, particularly in the presence of a key female executive. Furthermore, we find that female executives improve firms' corporate governance and internal control quality, which in turn enhances financial statement comparability. Importantly, this impact exists only in large firms, non‐state‐owned firms, and firms domiciled in mature markets. Overall, our study reveals this mechanism and examines the conditions under which gender‐specific characteristics can affect corporate accounting quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diagnosing water conditions timely and accurately is crucial for seasonal irrigation scheduling in crop production. The purpose of this study was to establish robust water deficit models of winter wheat in different growing seasons by combining unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) multispectral and thermal images. In 2021 and 2022, a water deficit field experiment on winter wheat was carried out in Hebei Province, China. Five-band multispectral and thermal images were obtained with a UAV at six key growth stages of winter wheat. Fourteen vegetation indices (VIs) and two thermal indices (TIs) were calculated. Simultaneously, wheat stomatal conductance and soil water content were measured. On this basis, normalized stomatal conductance (NGS) and effective water content (EWC) were calculated. TIs had the highest correlation with NGS and EWC at early growth stages, whereas ratio vegetation index (RVI), modified simple ratio index (MSR) and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) were highly correlated at later stages. Partial least squares (PLS), support vector machine (SVM) and gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) were used to predict NGS and EWC for each growth stage, with the data of 2021 as the training set and the data of 2022 as independent test set. In general, GBDT outperformed PLS and SVM, and NGS was better predicted than EWC. Including VIs and TIs effectively improved the estimation accuracy of the predictive models. The test set results of the NGS and EWC models built by GBDT achieved the best performance in flowering stage (coefficient of determination (R 2) = 0.88, root mean square error (RMSE) = 0.08, normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) = 14.7%) and filling stage (R 2 = 0.90, RMSE = 0.05, NRMSE = 15.9%), respectively. The models of the post-heading stage were better than those of the pre-heading stage for both NGS and EWC. This study provides a robust method for diagnosing water stress only using UAV remote sensing data. • Combining UAV multispectral and thermal data improved accuracy of wheat water stress models. • GBDT outperformed PLS and SVM in diagnosing wheat water stress. • Normalized stomatal conductance can be better predicted than effective water content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to evaluate the associations between chronic smoking and insulin resistance and β-cell function in Chinese men without diabetes. A total of 1,568 participants were recruited by multistage sampling. Using homeostatic model assessment (HOMA), geometric means of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) and β-cell function (HOMA-β) with 95% confidence interval (CI) were calculated by general linear model. Odds ratios (ORs) with 95% CI were estimated to evaluate the associations between smoking status and insulin resistance and β-cell deficiency under a logistic regression model. Current smokers had higher levels of 2 h glucose (6.66 versus 6.48 mmol/L) for oral glucose tolerance test and lower levels of fasting insulin (5.68 versus 6.03 mU/L) than never smokers. The adjusted means for HOMA-β (%) were 54.86 in current smokers and 58.81 in never smokers (P = 0.0257). Current smoking was associated with β-cell deficiency (OR 1.29, 95% CI 1.01-1.64) compared to never smoking. The β-cell function gradually decreased with increasing smoking intensity (P trend = 0.0026), and the differences were statistically significant when the pack-year of smoking was 20 or above. No association was observed between smoking status and HOMA-IR. Our study suggested that chronic smoking may dose-dependently suppress insulin secretion in Chinese men.