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Firm-level political risk and stock price crashes
Get PDFIn this study, we examine the relationship between firm-level political risk and stock price crash risk. Using a broad dataset of 4,230 U.S. firms, 38,097 firm-year observations from 2002 to 2019, we reveal a positive association between political risk and stock price crash risk. These findings are robust to several model specifications and endogeneity checks. By using the Brexit referendum as a quasi-natural experiment, we provide evidence of a causal relationship between political risk and crash risk. Through channel analysis, we identify that this relationship is mediated via higher idiosyncratic volatility, lower price informativeness, and higher distress risk. We also find that our results are more pronounced in intangible-intensive firms. Interestingly, we show that managers of these firms respond to political risk by engaging in bad news hoarding. Finally, strong (external or internal) corporate governance mechanisms can moderate the positive relationship between political risk and stock price crash risk
“I know I’m not going to have to heal from this”: Women university workers’ collective writing on ‘office housework’ as a space for building collective care, healing, and hope
Get PDFHow can we, as women university workers, assert collective writing as a form of resistance to embody our collective and individual struggles and convert them into words? We are a collective of five professional service and three academic women workers who came together to answer this question through writing about our performance of office housework and the gendered invisibility we experienced. We share our collective writing practices as a methodology to create connections and healing between workers divided along neoliberal and patriarchal university structures. Our work offers feminist epistemic resistance through the intentional joining of women university workers as co-producers of knowledge, following the tradition of feminist consciousness-raising groups. Our analysis problematizes the individualization of office housework. It illustrates how saying ‘no’ individualistically is often elusive, because doing so displaces the work onto colleagues with less structural power, nor enough if we are to advance the goal of collectively reimagining how this crucial, yet invisible work can be redistributed more equally amongst all workers. Our collective writing affirms the need for office housework to be recognised and revalued as important and indispensable work that sustains the functioning of our higher education institutions, especially in times of uncertainty and crisis
Agricultural economies and provisioning relationships in medieval Armenia: an archaeobotanical analysis of Ambroyi village and Arai-Bazarjugh caravanserai
Get PDFArchaeobotanical work in the Caucasus has focused on prehistoric sites, the advent of agriculture, and on large urban centres, while the Medieval and smaller, rural villages have remained understudied. This paper examines the archaeobotanical assemblages from two medieval archaeological sites associated with the Armenian village of Ambroyi (13th–14th c. ce). The Arai-Bazarjugh caravanserai (A-Bc) was a caravan inn, which hosted travellers of the Silk Road and was provisioned by local villagers. The Ambroyi village site (Avs) is a household complex 500 m to the west of the caravan inn. The paper tests if the provisioning relationship identified through the excavation and ceramics analysis of the village site and the caravanserai is representative of the provisioning of botanical material (food and fodder). The analysis suggests that the A-Bc was provisioned with Hordeum vulgare (barley) and Triticum aestivum/durum (wheat) in the form of fodder for animals and food for travellers, which was prepared in the village. A contrast is identified between the A-Bc and the Avs in the presence of arboreal crops and non-staple economic crops including Punica granatum (pomegranate), Phoenix sp. (date), Ficus sp. (fig), Gossypium sp. (cotton), Prunus cf. insititia/cerastifera (plum), and Vitis vinifera (grape) at the A-Bc and the absence of these crops at the Avs. This contrast suggests a unidirectional movement of plant material from the village site to the caravanserai, furthering our understanding of the agricultural economy of villages and caravanserais along the medieval Silk Road
How cyber security enhances trust and commitment to customer retention: the mediating role of robotic service quality
Get PDFCyber security is supportive of robotic service provision, the objective of which is to help marketers achieve their aim of providing a high level of service. Marketers need to be aware of cyber security issues and adhere to established cyber security policies. We investigate trust and commitment in relation to customer retention while assessing the mediating role of robotic service quality (RSQ). We employ a survey-based study that utilises 231 valid responses from customers in São Paulo, Brazil. To analyse the data, we used partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). The results show that trust and commitment have a positive impact on customer retention. RSQ has
a partial mediation effect on the relationship between the latent constructs of trust, commitment, and customer retention. Thus, it can be suggested that RSQ, which embeds trust and commitment,
assists in building a loyal customer base. Marketers outside the Latin American region can benefit from the results of this study since it incorporates cyber security awareness and policy within
marketing strategy implementation, ensuring that RSQ is aligned in terms of the digitalisation goals of the company
The role of action concepts in physical reasoning: insights from late childhood
No full textA fundamental component of human cognition is the ability to intuitively reason about behaviours of objects and systems in the physical world without resorting to explicit scientific knowledge. This skill was traditionally considered a symbolic process. However, in the last decades, there has been a shift towards ideas of embodiment, suggesting that accessing physical knowledge and predicting physical outcomes is grounded in bodily interactions with the environment. Infants and children, who learn mainly through their embodied experiences, serve as a model to probe the link between reasoning and physical concepts. Here, we tested school-aged children (5- to 15-year-olds) in online reasoning games that involve different physical action concepts such as supporting, launching and clearing. We assessed changes in children’s performance and strategies over development and their relationships with the different action concepts. Children reasoned more accurately in problems that involved supporting actions compared to launching or clearing actions. Moreover, when children failed, they were more strategic in subsequent attempts when problems involved support rather than launching or clearing. Children improved with age, but improvements differed across action concepts. Our findings suggest that accessing physical knowledge and predicting physical events are affected by action concepts, and those effects change over development
Infants’ developing environment: integration of computer vision and human annotation to quantify where infants go, what they touch, and what they see
No full textInfants learn through interactions with the environment. Thus, to understand infants’ early learning experiences, it is critical to quantify their natural learning input—where infants go, what they touch, and what they see. Wearable sensors can record locomotor and hand movements, but cannot recover the context that prompted the behaviors. Egocentric views from head cameras and eye trackers require annotation to process the videos and miss much of the surrounding context. Third-person video captures infant behavior in the entire scene but may misrepresent the egocentric view. Moreover, third-person video requires machine or human annotation to make sense of the behaviors, and either method alone is sorely lacking. Computer-vision is not sufficiently reliable to quantify much of infants’ complex, variable behavior, and human annotation cannot reliably quantify 3D coordinates of behavior without laborious hand digitization. Thus, we pioneered a new system of behavior detection from third-person video that capitalizes on the integrated power of computer vision and human annotation to quantify infants’ locomotor, manual, and egocentric visual interactions with the environment. Our system estimates a real infant’s interaction with a physical environment during free play by projecting a “virtual” infant in a “virtual” 3D environment with known coordinates of all furniture, objects, and surfaces. Our methods for using humanin-the-loop computer vision have broad applications for reliable quantification of locomotor, manual, and visual behaviors outside the purview of standard algorithms or human annotation alone
Abolishing the death penalty through constitutional challenge
No full textEight countries have abolished the death penalty by constitutional challenge. Applying a lens of legal formalism, the unconstitutionality of the death penalty may be understood as a legal truth deduced through the judicial application of pure legal rules. Legal realism, on the other hand, contends that judicial decisions are informed by the social and political contexts in which they are made. As this report demonstrates, non-legal factors appear to have had significant influence on the abolition of the death penalty in each of the eight countries under consideration
Introduction - Advances in cybersecurity: challenges and solutions
Get PDFThe sixteen papers in this Special Issue cover various aspects of cyber security and will appeal to those involved in cyber security research, practitioners, students contemplating a career in cyber security, and people interested in the topic but who have limited knowledge of the challenges that exist and the possible solutions that can help solve recurring cyber security problems. The emphasis and focus of the papers is threat detection and ways in which to make an organization resilient and able to withstand and counteract cyber attacks. The approaches referred to herein can help deepen an organization's cyber security defence capability, but there are also topics of interest for policy-makers and those involved with governance and compliance. The papers included in this Special Issue involve different methodological approaches and offer practical insights that will help advance the body of knowledge on cyber security
Diasporic arts: belonging, identity, resistance
No full textDiasporic art is a contested concept. Whilst some suggest that it positions certain artists as necessarily apart from the mainstream artworld and called upon to produce work that speaks to themes of displacement and loss, others see the critical potential of diasporic art to highlight the links between forms of oppression rooted in colonial histories and contemporary forms of injustice. Importantly, recent work and critical reflection considers the potential for diasporic art to offer new paradigms and ways of seeing beyond white supremacist structures
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