This paper investigates the relationship between bank debt and earnings management in private SMEs in a bank-oriented economy. In this study, we leverage a sample of 4866 Italian private SMEs from ...2005 to 2012 and propose a new metric to isolate the annual increase in bank debt. The results of our OLS regression suggest that, even though bank monitoring is an effective mechanism to constrain firms’ earnings management, firms engage in higher income-increasing earnings management, as proxied by discretionary accruals, in the fiscal year prior to a new bank loan application. The results are robust to different econometric specifications and are not affected by endogeneity.
This data article describes a dataset of data breaches in US listed firms over a ten-year period. Data breaches represent major events that pose serious challenges to organisations. The number of ...incidents has been on the increase over the last decade and this has attracted the interest of the media, consumers and regulators. While there is a well-established literature on cybersecurity in Computer Science and Information Systems journals, studies exploring the economic and business impacts of data breaches represent a relatively recent phenomenon. There is a nascent but fast-growing literature in accounting, finance and economics that focuses on the financial impacts of data breaches and this dataset provides a useful resource for future studies in this space. By providing data on the company identifier, the type of breach, the dates of breach disclosure, and relates these dates to the company's fiscal year, the dataset can be merged quickly with existing accounting and finance datasets. The dataset includes data on 506 incidents over a ten-year period thereby enabling cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses.
The world’s extant building stock accounts for a significant portion of worldwide energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. In 2020, buildings and construction accounted for 36% of global ...final energy consumption and 37% of energy related CO2 emissions. The EU estimates that up to 75% of the EU’s existing building stock has poor energy performance, 85–95% of which will still be in use in 2050. To meet the goals of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change will require a transformation of construction processes and deep renovation of the extant building stock. It is widely recognized that ICTs can play an important role in construction, renovation and maintenance as well as supporting the financing of deep renovation. Technologies such as sensors, big data analytics and machine learning, BIM, digital twinning, simulation, robots, cobots and UAVs, and additive manufacturing are transforming the deep renovation process, improving sustainability performance, and developing new services and markets. This open access book defines a deep renovation digital ecosystem for the 21st century, providing a state-of-the art review of current literature, suggesting avenues for new research, and offering perspectives from business, technology and industry domains. This is an open access book.
The Future of Work Lynn, Theo; Rosati, Pierangelo; Conway, Edel ...
2023
eBook
Odprti dostop
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of new forms of working and new working arrangements largely enabled by technology. The Future of Work is a projection of how work, working, workers and ...the workplace will evolve in the years ahead from the perspective of different actors in society, influenced by technological, socio-economic, political, and demographic changes. This open access book is a timely exploration of some of the challenges and prospects for the future of work from two main perspectives: how work is changing and how to prepare for work in the future. An evidence-based assessment of these topics offers some critical perspectives that challenge old assumptions and opens up emerging trends and possibilities for work in the future. As part of the Palgrave Studies in Digital Business & Enabling Technologies series, this book is an essential resource for academics of Business, Human Resource Management, Organisational Psychology and Industrial Relations, as well as practitioners and policy makers.
Globalisation, technological advances, liberalisation of financial markets, and changing consumer behaviour are transforming banking profoundly. Under the EU Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), ...incumbent banks must open up their data, processes, and business functionalities to customers and third parties including rivals. It is critical to understand consumer behaviour post-PSD2, and the potential impact of PSD2 on the functioning of the retail banking and financial services market. In this preliminary study of 244 consumers from six European countries, we explore the role of social influence, facilitating conditions, perceived risk, and effort and performance expectancy in order to unravel the determinants of consumers’ acceptance of account information services (AIS) as provisioned under PSD2, which provide consolidated bank account information for consumers with multiple bank accounts across multiple banking institutions. Our findings suggest that the competing influences of (a) positive perceptions such as social influence, facilitating conditions, and performance expectancy, and (b) negative perceptions related to risk, sway consumers’ intentions to adopt AIS.
While information technology is playing a significant transformative role in virtually every industry, within the agriculture sector, family-operated farming enterprises have been slow to adopt IT ...solutions to manage their operations. This study adopts a sequential mixed-methods research design to examine the pre- and post-adoption phases of farmers’ use of a mobile digital platform for farm management. Our findings show that farmers’ initial acceptance of a mobile digital platform for farm management is shaped by social influence, which mediates the impact of performance and effort expectancy. Post-adoption continued use of the digital platform is influenced directly by performance and effort expectancy and indirectly by trust beliefs and social influence. Perceived work impediment indirectly influences post-adoption acceptance via effort expectancy. Our study untangles the direct and indirect influences of positive and negative perceptions on farmers’ acceptance of a new innovative AgriTech digital platform in these different phases.
High performance computing (HPC) is widely recognized as a key enabling technology for advancing scientific progress, industrial competitiveness, national and regional security, and the quality of ...human life. Notwithstanding this contribution, the large upfront investment and technical expertise required has limited the adoption of HPC to large organizations, government bodies, and third level institutions. Recent advances in cloud computing and telecommunications have the potential to overcome the historical issues associated with HPC through increased flexibility and efficiency, and reduced capital and operational expenditure. This study seeks to advance the literature on technology adoption and assimilation in the under-examined HPC context through a mixed methods approach. Firstly, the determinants of cloud computing adoption for HPC are examined through a survey of 121 HPC decision makers worldwide. Secondly, a modified Delphi method was conducted with 13 experts to identify and prioritize critical issues in the adoption of cloud computing for HPC. Results from the quantitative phase suggest that only organizational and human factors significantly influence cloud computing adoption decisions for HPC. While security was not identified as a significant influencer in adoption decisions, qualitative research findings suggest that data privacy and security issues are an immediate and long-term concern.
This study examines public policy advocacy by pediatricians and other health professionals in the hashtag community: #putkids1st. The study explores 4321 tweets that feature the hashtag, generated by ...1231 unique users largely drawn from the American Association of Pediatricians and its members. The data are used to explore the structural dynamics of the hashtag community, the role of homophily, and to test a source-message framework to predict and recommendations to help improve engagement and retransmission of professional health advocacy messages.
Commercial buildings are a significant consumer of energy worldwide. Logistics facilities, and specifically warehouses, are a common building type which remain under-researched in the demand-side ...energy forecasting literature. Warehouses have an idiosyncratic profile when compared to other commercial and industrial buildings with a significant reliance on a small number of energy systems. As such, warehouse owners and operators are increasingly entering energy performance contracts with energy service companies (ESCOs) to minimise environmental impact, reduce costs, and improve competitiveness. ESCOs and warehouse owners and operators require accurate forecasts of their energy consumption so that precautionary and mitigation measures can be taken. This paper explores the performance of three machine learning models (Support Vector Regression (SVR), Random Forest, and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost)), three deep learning models (Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU)), and a classical time series model, Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) for predicting daily energy consumption. The dataset comprises 8040 records generated over an 11-month period from January to November 2020 from a non-refrigerated logistics facility located in Ireland. The grid search method was used to identify the best configurations for each model. The proposed XGBoost models outperformed other models for both very short-term load forecasting (VSTLF) and short-term load forecasting (STLF); the ARIMA model performed the worst.
PDF
