Children's ideas about the bank and shop profit: Developmental stages and the influence of cognitive contrasts and conflict

Ninety-six Hong Kong boys, aged 6 to 13, were given a questionnaire dealing with the operation of the bank and shop transactions. The developmental progression in the understanding of the bank, though more complex in the Hong Kong sample, was essentially similar to that of a Scottish sample reported by Jahoda (1981). A full understanding of the bank emerged at age 10, while that of shop profit emerged at age 6, both showing a precocity over the Scottish sample. The study also considered the roles of cognitive differentiation and conflict, and experimentally tested for any new understanding that might result from the experience of cognitive contrasts and conflict. The experience was found to produce a significant improvement in the understanding of the bank among 10 to 13 year old boys, and of shop profit among 8 to 10 year old boys.     

The effect of trust on international joint venture performance in China

The role of trust between the parent companies of international joint ventures (IJVs) is re-examined, and it is suggested that trust between parents is not only a major predictor of the achievement of financial and non-financial goals by IJVs as reported in the literature, but also moderates the relationship between IJV performance and certain contextual factors.Based on the responses of senior executives of IJVs and their parent companies in China, it is confirmed that trust influences IJV performance. The moderating effects of trust on the relationships between IJV performance and local reliance and the experience of executives were confirmed for the senior executive sample, but the moderating effect of cultural distance was not consistent between the firm-level and country-level measures. There was no significant result regarding these moderating relationships for the parent sample, except local reliance.     

Food Poverty,Vulnerability, and Food Consumption Inequality Among Smallholder Households in Ghana: A Gender-Based Perspective

We examined gender-based household welfare differences in Ghana among smallholder households. We measured disparities in welfare outcomes (food poverty, vulnerability, and food consumption inequality) across male and female household heads and identified the set of covariates influencing them. The study utilizes a dataset from a farm household survey undertaken in Northern Ghana from October to December 2018. A multistage sampling approach was adopted in selecting 900 farm households. The Oaxaca–Blinder mean and Recentered Inference Function decomposition techniques highlighted the sources of gender differentials in household welfare outcomes. The findings indicate a significant gap in food consumption expenditure per capita and household dietary diversity scores between male- and female- headed households, and these gaps are as high as 28.2% and 18.1%, respectively. However, there are no statistically significant differences in vulnerability to food poverty between male- and female-headed households. The Lorenz curves confirm inequality in gendered households’ food consumption expenditure and dietary diversity scores. This study highlights the existence of systemic female-headed household vulnerability to food poverty in Ghana. This study provides significant evidence of the need for policymakers to address food systems’ structural deficiencies and inequalities with gender in mind.

     

Guess who’s coming to dinner: the case of IC reporting in Italy

Journal of Management and Governance - In the last 2 decades, intellectual capital (IC) reporting has been promoted with the idea that it can lead to internal (managerial) and external...     

Siblings in lockdown: International evidence for birth order effects on child adjustment in the Covid19 pandemic

Supportive family relationships may mitigate the impact of the Covid19 pandemic on young children's adjustment, but existing work is limited by its focus on within-country variation and parental influences. Addressing these gaps, and drawing on reported buffering effects of older siblings on child mental health (Lawson and Mace, 2010), the current international study examined whether child adjustment problems were, on average, elevated by the pandemic and whether this buffering effect of older siblings would be maintained. In the first wave of the Covid19 pandemic (April to July 2020), 2516 parents of 3- to 8-year-old children living in Australia, China, Italy, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States of America—six countries with contrasting governmental responses to the pandemic—completed an online survey about family experiences and relationships and child adjustment, as indexed by ratings on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ: R. Goodman, 1997). As expected, child SDQ total difficulty scores were elevated in all sites except Sweden (which notably did not enforce mass school closures). Compared to children without siblings, children with one or more older siblings showed fewer adjustment problems. Children from lone-parent households displayed more adjustment problems, as did those whose parents reported increased sibling conflict. Finally, child adjustment problems were negatively associated with family socio-economic status, but positively related to the indices of Covid-19 family disruption and government stringency. We discuss these findings in relation to existing work on asymmetric effects of older versus younger siblings, and siblings as sources of support.     

Electricity Time‐of‐Use Tariff with Stochastic Demand

In this article, we study the electricity time‐of‐use (TOU) tariff for an electricity company with stochastic demand. The electricity company offers the flat rate (FR) and TOU tariffs to customers. Under the FR tariff, the customer pays a flat price for electricity consumption in both the peak and non‐peak periods. Under the TOU tariff, the customer pays a high price for electricity consumption in the peak period and a low price for electricity consumption in the non‐peak period. The electricity company uses two technologies, namely the base‐load and peak‐load technologies, to generate electricity. We derive the optimal capacity investment and pricing decisions for the electricity company. Furthermore, we use real data from a case study to validate the results and derive insights for implementing the TOU tariff. We show that in almost all the cases, the electricity company needs less capacity for both technologies under the TOU tariff than under the FR tariff, even though the expected demand in the non‐peak period increases. In addition, except for some extreme cases, there is essentially no signicant reduction in the total demand of the two periods, although the TOU tariff can reduce the demand in the peak period. Under the price‐cap regulation, the customer may pay a lower price on average under the TOU tariff than under the FR tariff. We conduct an extensive numerical study to assess the impacts of the model parameters on the optimal solutions and the robustness of the analytical results, and generate managerial implications of the research findings.