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3721 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2022

Inequality of opportunity in health among urban, rural, and migrant children: Evidence from China

Namrata Chindarkar, Maki Nakajima, and Alfred M. Wu

Journal of Social Policy

Rural-urban migrants, though facing unique social and institutional constraints, remain a largely overlooked population in research on health inequality in China. This study applies the inequality of opportunity (IOp) framework to investigate health inequality among children in China. Instead of comparing only urban and rural children, we include rural-urban migrants. Drawing upon three waves of a nation-wide survey, we find that migrant children in China remain disadvantaged in terms of health when compared to urban and rural children. The decomposition of the determinants indicates that while the direct influence of hukou, China’s household registration system, on IOp in health is low and has decreased, particularly between 2007 and 2013, one’s province of residence still matters. Parental health contributes substantially to IOp in health, which likely is an indirect effect of hukou that creates barriers for migrant parents in regard to accessing healthcare. The policy implication of these findings is that although the direct influence of hukou has decreased, when coupled with the continued lack of local government support for the welfare of migrant workers, it perpetuates health inequalities.

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Journal Articles | 2022

Project scheduling under the threat of catastrophic disruption

Joseph G. Szmerekovsky, Prahalad Venkateshan, and Peter D. Simonson

European Journal of Operational Research

We consider the case of scheduling a project under the threat of a catastrophic disruption where the likelihood and timing of the disruption are independent of the project schedule and if the disruption occurs, the project is completely canceled. In such scenarios, there is high managerial interest to know the maximum investment at risk at any time during project execution. This can be answered using the alphorn of uncertainty which maps the maximum and minimum possible project costs during project execution when activity durations and, correspondingly, cash flows are random. We prove the NP-hardness of calculating the alphorn of uncertainty and provide a mixed integer linear program for calculating it. The mixed integer linear program is shown to be able to calculate the alphorn for projects with up to 145 activities efficiently. We also show that using railway scheduling as opposed to roadrunner scheduling can significantly reduce the maximum possible investment at risk without significantly delaying the project.

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Journal Articles | 2022

How can diverse national food and land-use priorities be reconciled with global sustainability targets? Lessons from the FABLE initiative

Aline Mosnier, and Ranjan Ghosh et al.

Sustainability Science

There is an urgent need for countries to transition their national food and land-use systems toward food and nutritional security, climate stability, and environmental integrity. How can countries satisfy their demands while jointly delivering the required transformative change to achieve global sustainability targets? Here, we present a collaborative approach developed with the FABLE—Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land, and Energy—Consortium to reconcile both global and national elements for developing national food and land-use system pathways. This approach includes three key features: (1) global targets, (2) country-driven multi-objective pathways, and (3) multiple iterations of pathway refinement informed by both national and international impacts. This approach strengthens policy coherence and highlights where greater national and international ambition is needed to achieve global goals (e.g., the SDGs). We discuss how this could be used to support future climate and biodiversity negotiations and what further developments would be needed.

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Journal Articles | 2022

Internal corporate governance and cash flow manipulation

Neerav Nagar, and Mehul Raithatha

International Journal of Emerging Markets

Purpose

The authors examine whether internal corporate governance mechanisms are effective in curbing cash flow manipulation through real activities, misclassification, and timing.

Design/methodology/approach

The sample comprises of firms from an emerging market, India with data for years 2004 through 2015. The authors use the methodology given in Roychowdhury (2006).

Findings

The authors find that corporate boards in India play an active role in curbing cash flow manipulation through real activities but fail to control cash flow manipulation through misclassification and timing.

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Journal Articles | 2022

Choice of margin period of risk and netting for computing margins in central counterparty clearinghouses: a Monte Carlo investigation

Jayanth R. Varma, and Vineet Virmani

Journal of Financial Market Infrastructures

Journal Articles | 2022

Inequality of opportunity in health among urban, rural, and migrant children: Evidence from China

Namrata Chindarkar, Maki Nakajima, and Alfred M. Wu

Journal of Social Policy

Rural-urban migrants, though facing unique social and institutional constraints, remain a largely overlooked population in research on health inequality in China. This study applies the inequality of opportunity (IOp) framework to investigate health inequality among children in China. Instead of comparing only urban and rural children, we include rural-urban migrants. Drawing upon three waves of a nation-wide survey, we find that migrant children in China remain disadvantaged in terms of health when compared to urban and rural children. The decomposition of the determinants indicates that while the direct influence of hukou, China’s household registration system, on IOp in health is low and has decreased, particularly between 2007 and 2013, one’s province of residence still matters. Parental health contributes substantially to IOp in health, which likely is an indirect effect of hukou that creates barriers for migrant parents in regard to accessing healthcare. The policy implication of these findings is that although the direct influence of hukou has decreased, when coupled with the continued lack of local government support for the welfare of migrant workers, it perpetuates health inequalities.

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Journal Articles | 2022

One-click at a time: Empowering mothers for their adolescent children's educational expenditures through social media usage

Akshaya Vijayalakshmi, and Meng-Hsien (Jenny) Lin

International Journal of Consumer Studies

Mothers play a significant role in deciding their adolescents' educational expenditures. They increasingly rely on the Internet for information search and building online support networks to enhance their confidence. Thus, we use the psychological empowerment theory in this study to examine the association between social media use and educational expenditures. Through two studies, we show how a mother's use of social media (active/passive use) significantly impacts adolescent children's educational expenses via dimensions of psychological empowerment. We further demonstrate that the two dimensions of psychological empowerment differentially drive this relationship: intrapersonal (relying on the self) and Interactional (leveraging the community) empowerment. We discover that active (passive) social media use increases mother' intrapersonal (interactional) empowerment. We also find that cross-cultural differences play a role in psychological empowerment's effect on educational expenditures, where intrapersonal empowerment is vital in the United States, and interactional empowerment is more relevant in India. Our key contributions to literature are three-fold: we establish the relationship between a mother's social media use and educational expenditures for their adolescent children, identify predictors of different dimensions of psychological empowerment, and present evidence for cross-cultural differences in the empowering role of social media.

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Journal Articles | 2022

Towards dissemination, detection and combating misinformation on social media: a literature review

Kulvinder Kaur, and Samrat Gupta

Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing

Social media is becoming a hub of fake content, be it political news, product reviews, business promotion or any other sociocultural event. This study aims to provide a comprehensive review of the emerging literature to advance an understanding of misinformation on social media platforms, which is a growing concern these days

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Journal Articles | 2022

Compact living or policy inaction? Effects of urban density and lockdown on the Covid-19 outbreak in the US

Andy Hong, and Sandip Chakrabarti

Urban Studies

The coronavirus pandemic has reignited the debate over urban density. Popular media has been quick to blame density as a key contributor to rapid disease transmission, questioning whether compact cities are still a desirable planning goal. Past research on the density–pandemic connection have produced mixed results. This article offers a critical perspective on this debate by unpacking the effects of alternative measures of urban density, and examining the impacts of mandatory lockdowns and the stringency of other government restrictions on cumulative Covid-19 infection and mortality rates during the early phase of the pandemic in the US. Our results show a consistent positive effect of density on Covid-19 outcomes across urban areas during the first six months of the outbreak. However, we find modest variations in the density–pandemic relationship depending on how densities are measured. We also find relatively longer duration mandatory lockdowns to be associated with lower infection and mortality rates, and lockdown duration’s effect to be relatively more pronounced in high-density urban areas. Moreover, we find that the timing of lockdown imposition and the stringency of the government’s response additionally influence Covid-19 outcomes, and that the effects vary by urban density. We argue that the adverse impact of density on pandemics could be mitigated by adopting strict lockdowns and other stringent human mobility and interaction restriction policies in a spatially targeted manner. Our study helps to inform current and future government policies to contain the virus, and to make our cities more resilient against future shocks and threats.

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Journal Articles | 2022

The impact of dominant IT infrastructure in multi-establishment firms: The moderating role of environmental dynamism

Franck Soh, and Pankaj Setia

Journal of the Association for Information Systems

Multi-establishment firms (MEFs) rely on digitized processes enabled by advanced IT infrastructure; however, environmental dynamism is a major influence on their operations. Environmental dynamism threatens the efficacy of current operations, requiring firms to evolve their processes. Firms’ IT infrastructure may catalyze or hinder their endeavors and performance as they respond to environmental dynamics. Little previous research has examined which IT infrastructure types are high-performing and whether their effects vary across environments. We investigate the impacts of IT infrastructure, examining microlevel implementation—the constitution of technical and human assets—across the establishments of a multi-establishment firm (MEF). Specifically, we use the notion of a dominant IT infrastructure to unravel the heterogeneity of IT infrastructure across establishments. We explore dominant IT infrastructures—technology, human, or both—and assess their impacts across environmental conditions. To test our hypotheses, we used a panel dataset from 2007 to 2009 comprising 355 unique firms. Our findings reveal that the impact of establishment-level IT infrastructure types on MEF performance is contingent on environmental dynamism. A technology-dominant IT infrastructure leads to greater MEF performance in less dynamic environments, while a human-dominant IT infrastructure leads to greater MEF performance in more dynamic environments. The MEF performance is enhanced through a combination of technology- and human-dominant IT infrastructures in more dynamic environments. We conclude by discussing the theoretical insights and managerial implications of our findings.

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