Participatory Relationships Matter: Doctoral Students Traversing the Academy

In this article, we take our thoughts for a walk through our three different doctoral journeys and experiences with the Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry Webinar Series (2020–2021). The webinars presented an example of Slow scholarship, enabling us to think deeply and differently from others and develop new ideas to take further. The online connections offered opportunities for extending learning spaces beyond traditional bounded structures. Here we explore the rich learning gained from each other's experiences of research, learning, and teaching in different higher education settings and ways in which these intersected with the webinars during the global COVID-19 pandemic. We contend that the generosity of senior academics in leadership positions who embraced global networks of communication, connected students with experts, and learned with and from their students through communal egalitarian spaces has enormous potential to support students as they traverse often demanding and challenging doctoral journeys. © The Author(s) 2022.

The effect of diversification on company value during a global health crisis: evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

PurposeThe authors study the valuation effect of corporate diversification in the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 in Europe.Design/methodology/approachApplying a cross-sectional regression model to a sample of public companies headquartered in the European Union, the authors investigate the existence of and the change in a diversification discount between 2018 and 2020. By applying the Excess Q methodology, the authors make an industry adjustment of diversified companies to measure the value effect of corporate diversification.FindingsThe authors find an economically and statistically significant diversification discount that increases from an average Excess Q of -0.05 in 2019 to -0.10 in 2020. The diversified companies' inferior fundamental financial performance in 2020 accompanies the discount. The results deviate from those of previous research, which mostly show a decrease in the diversification discount in economic crises, and thereby, shed doubt on whether diversification provides insurance against pandemic-induced adverse value effects.Originality/valueThe study distinguishes the role of corporate diversification during recessionary periods by establishing that the valuation effect of diversification depends on the nature of the crisis. The analysis incorporates criticism of previous studies concerning a biased methodology and uniform data source by applying the Excess Q methodology and using FactSet industry segment data.

Mobile banking affordances and constraints by the elderly

Purpose: The study explores the affordances and constraints perceived by older adults through their experiences using mobile banking apps. Design/methodology/approach: Twenty-five interviews via Skype were carried out with older adults aged 65 years and over between April and May 2021 (during the COVID-19 pandemic). Findings: Based on their usage experiences with mobile banking, older adults identified functional (saving time, avoiding physical risk and having control over their finances) and social affordances (supporting and bonding with family and friends), as well as non-technological (lack of useful information and patience from bank employees) and technological constraints (concerns about cybersecurity, data privacy and passwords). Originality/value: The study offers a novel approach to customer experience research in mobile banking by adopting a customer-centered perspective and applying the theoretical framework of affordances and constraints to analyze the experiences of older adults as active mobile banking users. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

COVID-19 and Pneumonia Detection using Hybrid VGG-16 model using Chest X-rays

The time frame of 2020 to present day 2022 primarily highlights the COVID-19 pandemic. The humanity is being largely affected by SARS-CoV-2(The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoronaVirus 2) because of its highly infectious characteristic which can be even fatal in severe cases. The World Health Organization (WHO), have reported over 544.3 million verified cases of COVID-19 globally till date, including over 6.3 million deaths. The reason why SARS-CoV-2 is considered to be a dangerous illness is due to this relatively high mortality and contagious rates, in addition to asymptomatic individuals also being carriers of the virus. The only way to identify susceptible populations and to attempt to control the spread would be via RT-PCR COVID testing of all individuals, which is time consuming and expensive. The challenges of this testing mechanism and the prolonging end of the pandemic are the primary motivation to bring up an effective system over a large test cases with a reduced time constraints. This paper proposes a combination of the pretrained convolutional neural network, VGG-16(Visual Geometry Group-16) and GRU(Gated Recurrent Unit) to differentiate the Pneumonia and COVID-19 attack from chest X-rays(CXRs). The proposed model employs VGG-16 to extract features from the CXR inputs, and the GRU classifies it. We experimented this model over 6939 CXR images with 3 classes (COVID-19, Pneumonia, and Normal) and the training produced encouraging macro average precision, recall, and f1-score of 0.9525, 0.9524, and 0.9524 respectively. These results indicate hybrid deep learning systems can greatly aid in the early detection of COVID-19 using CXRs and thereby reduce the widespread of the pandemic. We believe that early diagnosis can be easily and effectively done using this model. © 2022 IEEE.

Global DSGE models

We introduce our GDSGE framework and a novel global solution method, called simultaneous transition and policy function iterations (STPFIs), for solving dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. The framework encompasses many well-known incomplete markets models with highly nonlinear dynamics such as models of financial crises and models with rare disasters including the current COVID-19 pandemic. Using consistency equations, our method is most effective at solving models featuring endogenous state variables with implicit laws of motion such as wealth or consumption shares. Finally, we incorporate this method in an automated and publicly available toolbox that solves many important models in the aforementioned topics, and in many cases, more efficiently and/or accurately than their original algorithms. © 2023 Elsevier Inc.

Optimal Capacity-Constrained COVID-19 Vaccination for Heterogeneous Populations

COVID-19 and the ensuing vaccine capacity constraints have emphasized the importance of proper prioritization during vaccine rollout. This problem is complicated by heterogeneity in risk levels, contact rates, and network topology which can dramatically and unintuitively change the efficacy of vaccination and must be taken into account when allocating resources. This paper proposes a general model to capture a wide array of network heterogeneity while maintaining computational tractability and formulates vaccine prioritization as an optimal control problem. Pontryagin's Maximum Principle is used to derive properties of optimal, potentially highly dynamic, allocation policies, providing significant reductions in the set of candidate policies. Extensive numerical simulations of COVID-19 vaccination are used to corroborate these findings and further illicit optimal policy characteristics and the effects of various system, disease, and population parameters. © 2022 IEEE.

How Does Firm ESG Performance Impact Financial Constraints? An Experimental Exploration of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

This research assesses the effects of COVID-19-associated shocks on financial constraints and sustainable development goal (SDG) performance to shed light on the impact of SDGs on economic recovery. We construct a large sample of Chinese listed firms from quarterly firm-level accounting data from the China Stock Market & Accounting Research Database for the period 2019Q1-2021Q1, matched with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores, SDG performance from the WIND Database, and complemented with data on cumulative and new cases of COVID-19 from the World Health Organization. We use difference-in-differences to investigate any causal effect from COVID-19. We find that COVID-19 induces financial constraints in firms. Further, differing from the existing literature on the determinants of SDGs, we explore the supportive role of SDG performance on firm financial performance and show that ESG can better describe SDG performance and alleviate financial constraints. Moreover, both internal and external financial intermediaries improve with enhanced ESG performance in overcoming financial constraints. Our findings strongly indicate that a sustainable development strategy facilitates efficient adaptation to financial challenges and assists in overcoming external shocks.

Cette étude évalue les effets des chocs associés à la COVID-19 sur les contraintes financières et la performance des objectifs de développement durable (ODD) pour mettre en lumière l'impact des ODD sur la reprise économique. Nous rassemblons un large échantillon d'entreprises chinoises cotées en Bourse à partir de données comptables trimestrielles émanant de la base de données de recherche sur la comptabilité et sur le marché boursier chinois, du premier trimestre 2019 au premier trimestre 2021. Ces données sont appariées avec des critères environnementaux, sociaux et de gouvernance (ESG), avec la performance des ODD tirée de la base de données WIND, et sont complétées par des données issues de l'Organisation mondiale de la santé sur le nombre de cas cumulatifs et de nouveaux cas de COVID-19. Nous utilisons la méthode des différences de différences pour étudier l'effet de causalité lié à la COVID-19. Nous constatons que la COVID-19 provoque des contraintes financières au sein des entreprises. De plus, contrairement à ce qui est réalisé dans la littérature existante sur les déterminants des ODD, nous explorons le rôle d'appui que jouent les bons résultats des ODD sur la performance financière des entreprises et montrons que les critères ESG permettent de décrire de façon plus adéquate les résultats des ODD et d'alléger les contraintes financières. De plus, les intermédiaires financiers à la fois internes et externes, grâce à de meilleures performances des critères ESG, sont en gré d'améliorer leur réponse aux contraintes financières. Nos résultats fournissent des donnéees probantes selon lesquelles une stratégie de développement durable facilite une adaptation efficiente aux défis financiers et aide à surmonter les chocs externes.

Financing Constraints and Firm's Productivity Under the COVID-19 Epidemic Shock: Evidence of A-Shared Chinese Companies.

Focusing on the financing barriers to firm productivity improvement under the influence of external shocks, we empirically analyze the data of A-share listed companies from 2007-2018 to determine the impact of financing constraints on total factor productivity (TFP) in the context of COVID-19 pandemic and the paths of factor use efficiency and R&D innovation efficiency on this impact using ordinary least-squares (OLS) method. We find that financing constraints are an important factor inhibiting the TFP of firms. This inhibitory effect is more serious in small-scale firms, non-state firms, and non-energy firms. Further investigation shows that the inhibitory effect of financing constraints on firms' TFP is more pronounced when firms are located in the Yangtze River Delta city cluster, the Pearl River Delta city cluster, non-port cities, and provincial capitals. The mechanism test finds that improving the efficiency of capital use and labor use can alleviate the suppressive effect of financing constraints on TFP. The alleviating impact is more significant when capital use efficiency is improved. However, increasing the efficiency of R&D innovation further strengthens the inhibitory effect of financing constraints, and this effect is more pronounced under positive external shocks.

Nous nous concentrons sur les obstacles liés au financement qui entravent l'amélioration de la productivité des entreprises lorsqu'il y a des chocs externes, et nous analysons de façon empirique l'impact des contraintes de financement sur la productivité globale des facteurs des entreprises dans le contexte de la COVID-19, ainsi que les voies permettant l'efficacité d'utilisation des facteurs et l'efficacité de l'innovation en R&D sur cet impact. Pour ce faire, nous utilisons la méthode des moindres carrés ordinaires en nous basant sur les données de sociétés cotées en bourse de 2007 à 2018. Nous constatons que les contraintes de financement représentent un facteur important qui inhibe la productivité globale des facteurs des entreprises. Cet effet inhibiteur est plus prononcé au sein des petites entreprises, des entreprises non gouvernementales et des entreprises non énergétiques. Une autre étude révèle que l'effet inhibiteur des contraintes de financement sur la productivité globale des facteurs des entreprises est plus prononcé lorsque les entreprises sont situées dans le groupe de villes du delta du fleuve Yangtze, dans le groupe de villes du delta de la rivière des Perles, dans les villes non portuaires et dans les capitales provinciales. Le test du mécanisme révèle que l'amélioration de l'efficacité de l'utilisation du capital et de la main-d'œuvre des entreprises peut atténuer l'effet suppressif des contraintes de financement sur la productivité globale des facteurs. L'impact d'atténuation est plus important lorsque l'efficacité d'utilisation du capital est améliorée. Cependant, l'augmentation de l'efficacité de l'innovation en R&D renforce encore l'effet inhibiteur des contraintes de financement, et il est plus prononcé en cas de chocs externes positifs.