pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Determinants of Hotels and Restaurants entrepreneurship: A study using GEM data
Authors: Antonio Rafael Ramos-Rodriguez, Jose Aurelio Medina-Garrido, Jose Ruiz-Navarro
Date: 2023-12-18 00:00:00

The objective of this work is to assess the influence of certain factors on the likelihood of being a Hotels and Restaurants (H&R) entrepreneur. The factors evaluated are demographic and economic variables, variables related to perceptions of the environment and personal traits, and variables measuring the individual's intellectual and social capital. The work uses logistic regression techniques to analyze a sample of 33,711 individuals in the countries participating in the GEM project in 2008. The findings show that age, gender, income, perception of opportunities, fear of failure, entrepreneurial ability, knowing other entrepreneurs and being a business angel are explanatory factors of the probability of being an H&R entrepreneur.
Global Entrepreneurship Monitor versus Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics: comparing their intellectual structures
Authors: Antonio Rafael Ramos-Rodriguez, Salustiano Martinez-Fierro, Jose Aurelio Medina-Garrido, Jose Ruiz-Navarro
Date: 2023-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

In the past 15 years, two international observatories have been intensively studying entrepreneurship using empirical studies with different methodologies: GEM and PSED. Both projects have generated a considerable volume of scientific production, and their intellectual structures are worth analyzing. The current work is an exploratory study of the knowledge base of the articles generated by each of these two observatories and published in prestigious journals. The value added of this work lies in its novel characterization of the intellectual structure of entrepreneurship according to the academic production of these two initiatives. The results may be of interest to the managers and members of these observatories, as well as to academics, researchers, sponsors and policymakers interested in entrepreneurship.
Relationship between work-family balance, employee well-being and job performance
Authors: Jose Aurelio Medina-Garrido, Jose Maria Biedma-Ferrer, Antonio Rafael Ramos-Rodriguez
Date: 2023-12-15 00:00:00

Purpose: To assess the impact of the existence of and access to different work-family policies on employee well-being and job performance. Design-methodology-approach: Hypothesis testing was performed using a structural equation model based on a PLS-SEM approach applied to a sample of 1,511 employees of the Spanish banking sector. Findings: The results obtained demonstrate that the existence and true access to different types of work-family policies such as flexible working hours (flexi-time), long leaves, and flexible work location (flexi-place) are not directly related to job performance, but indirectly so, when mediated by the well-being of employees generated by work-family policies. In a similar vein, true access to employee and family support services also has an indirect positive impact on job performance mediated by the well-being produced. In contrast, the mere existence of employee and family support services does not have any direct or indirect effect on job performance. Originality-value: This study makes a theoretical and empirical contribution to better understand the impact that of the existence of and access to work-family policies on job performance mediated by employee well-being. In this sense, we posited and tested an unpublished theoretical model where the concept of employee well-being gains special relevance at academic and organizational level due to its implications for human resource management.
Why not now? Intended timing in entrepreneurial intentions
Authors: Antonio Rafael Ramos-Rodriguez, Jose Aurelio Medina-Garrido, Jose Ruiz-Navarro
Date: 2023-12-15 00:00:00

Purpose: Understanding the formation of entrepreneurial intentions is critical, given that it is the first step in the entrepreneurial process. Although entrepreneurial intention has been extensively studied, little attention has been paid on the intended timing of future entrepreneurial projects. This paper analyses entrepreneurial intentions among final-year university students after graduation in terms of the timeframe to start a business. Potentially rapid entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs-in-waiting were compared using the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). Methodology: A variance-based structural equation modelling approach was used for the sample of 851 final-year university students with entrepreneurial intentions who participated in GUESSS project. Findings: The results obtained contribute to the understanding of how entrepreneurial intentions are formed, particularly, how intended timing plays a moderating role in the relationships of the variables of the theoretical model of TPB. This study provides empirical evidence that significant differences exist between potential rapid entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs-in-waiting. Practical implications: The findings of this study have practical implications for entrepreneurship education, and they can help policy makers develop more effective policies and programs to promote entrepreneurship. Originality: Intention-based models have traditionally examined the intent -- but not the timing -- of new venture creation. However, the time elapsed between the formation of the entrepreneurial intent and the identification of a business opportunity can vary considerably. Therefore, analysing the moderating role of intended timing could be relevant to entrepreneurial intention research.
Moderating effects of gender and family responsibilities on the relations between work-family policies and job performance
Authors: Jose Aurelio Medina-Garrido, Jose Maria Biedma-Ferrer, Antonio Rafael Ramos-Rodriguez
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00

This study analyzes the impact of work-family policies (WFP) on job performance, and the possible moderating role of gender and family responsibilities. Hypothesis testing was performed using a structural equation model based on a PLS-SEM approach applied to a sample of 1,511 employees of the Spanish banking sector. The results show that neither the existence nor the accessibility of the WFP has a direct, positive impact on performance, unlike what we expected, but both have an indirect effect via the well-being generated by these policies. We also find that neither gender nor family responsibilities have a significant moderating role on these relations, contrary to what we initially expected.
Determinants of the Propensity for Innovation among Entrepreneurs in the Tourism Industry
Authors: Miguel Angel Montanes-Del-Rio, Jose Aurelio Medina-Garrido
Date: 2023-12-05 00:00:00

Tourism's increasing share of Gross Domestic Product throughout the world, its impact on employment and its continuous growth justifies the interest it raises amongst entrepreneurs and public authorities. However, this growth coexists with intense competition; as a result of which, tourism companies must continuously innovate in order to survive and grow. This is evident in the diversification of tourism products and destinations, the improvement of business processes and the incorporation of new technologies for intermediation, amongst other examples. This paper expounds on the factors that explain the propensity for innovation amongst tourism entrepreneurs and it may help governments to promote innovation that is based on those determining factors. The hypotheses are tested using a logistic regression on 699 international tourism entrepreneurs, taken from the 2014 Global Adult Population Survey of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor project. The propensity for innovation amongst tourism entrepreneurs has a statistically significant relationship to gender, age, level of education and informal investments in previous businesses.
I Can't Go to Work Tomorrow! Work-Family Policies, Well-Being and Absenteeism
Authors: Jose Aurelio Medina-Garrido, Jose Maria Biedma-Ferrer, Jaime Sanchez-Ortiz
Date: 2023-12-05 00:00:00

Among the main causes of absenteeism are health problems, emotional problems, and inadequate work-family policies (WFP). This paper analyses the impact of the existence and accessibility of WFP on work absenteeism, by considering the mediating role of the well-being, which includes emotional as well as physical or health problems, that is generated by these policies. We differentiate between the existence of the WFP and its accessibility, as the mere existence of the WFP in an organisation is not enough. Additionally, workers must be able to access these policies easily and without retaliation of any kind. The model includes the hierarchy and the gender as moderating variables. To test the proposed hypotheses, a structural equation model based on the partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) approach is applied to a sample of employees in the service sector in Spain. On the one hand, the findings show that the existence of WFP has no direct effect on absenteeism; however, accessibility to these policies does have a direct effect on absenteeism. On the other hand, both the existence and accessibility of WFP have positive direct effects on emotional well-being. In addition, emotional well-being is positively related to physical well-being which, in turn, promotes a reduction in absenteeism. Finally, significant differences in the relationship between the existence of WFP and emotional well-being confirm the special difficulty of female managers in reconciling family life and work life.
The impact of Hong Kong's anti-ELAB movement on political related firms
Authors: Ziqi Wang
Date: 2023-11-28 00:00:00

Hong Kong's anti-ELAB movement had a significant impact on the stock market the stock price of listed companies. Using the number of protestors as the measurement of daily protesting intensity from 2019/6/6 to 2020/1/17, this paper documents that the stock price of listed companies associated with the pan-democratic parties were more negatively affected by protesting than other companies. Furthermore, this paper finds that after the implementation of the anti-mask law, protesting had a positive impact on red chips but a negative impact on companies related to pan-democracy parties. Therefore, this paper believes that after the central government and the HKSAR government adopted strict measures to stop violence and chaos, the value of the political connection of red chips became positive while the value of the connection with pan-democracy parties became negative.
Social costs of curcular economy in European Union
Authors: Shteryo Nozharov
Date: 2023-11-25 00:00:00

Two fundamental issues are incorporated in the present monograph: the issue related to the quantification of the social costs and the issue, related to the defining of the circular economy concept as a theoretical model. The analysis is based on the methodology of the new institutional economics, which fact distinguishes it from the many other circular economy analysis based on the neo-classical methodological apparatus.
Analisis de la incidencia de la inversion extranjera directa y la inversion nacional, en el crecimiento economico de Chile
Authors: Alvear Guzman Katherine, Campozano Buele Jenner, Duran Canarte Paulette, Holguin Cedeno Roger, Mejia Crespin Fernando
Date: 2023-11-13 00:00:00

The research aims to assess the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) and domestic investment on Chile's economic growth. By elucidating the relationship between FDI and domestic investment, the study contributes valuable insights for economic policy formulation and future investments. The findings hold significance in shaping Chile's international perception as an investment destination, potentially influencing its standing in the global economic landscape. Demonstrating that FDI is a significant driver of economic growth could enhance confidence among foreign investors. The project's importance lies in contributing to economic knowledge and guiding strategic decisions for sustainable economic growth in Chile. Understanding the interplay of FDI and domestic investment allows for a balanced approach, promoting stable economic development and mitigating issues like excessive reliance on foreign investment. The study highlights the theory of internationalization as a conceptual framework for understanding the motives and strategies of multinational companies investing abroad. Leveraging data from sources like the Central Bank of Chile, the research analyzes variables such as Chile's economic growth (GDP), FDI, and domestic investment. The hypothesis posits a significant long-term causal relationship between FDI, National Investment (NI), and Chile's Economic Growth (GDP). Statistical analysis using the Eviews 6 software tool confirms that attracting foreign investments and promoting internal investment are imperative for sustainable economic growth in Chile.
Sacred Ecology: The Environmental Impact of African Traditional Religions
Authors: Neha Deopa, Daniele Rinaldo
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

Do religions codify ecological principles? This paper explores theoretically and empirically the role religious beliefs play in shaping environmental interactions. We study African Traditional Religions (ATR) which place forests within a sacred sphere. We build a model of non-market interactions of the mean-field type where the actions of agents with heterogeneous religious beliefs continuously affect the spatial density of forest cover. The equilibrium extraction policy shows how individual beliefs and their distribution among the population can be a key driver of forest conservation. The model also characterizes the role of resource scarcity in both individual and population extraction decisions. We test the model predictions empirically relying on the unique case of Benin, where ATR adherence is freely reported. Using an instrumental variable strategy that exploits the variation in proximity to the Benin-Nigerian border, we find that a 1 standard deviation increase in ATR adherence has a 0.4 standard deviation positive impact on forest cover change. We study the impact of historically belonging to the ancient Kingdom of Dahomey, birthplace of the Vodun religion. Using the original boundaries as a spatial discontinuity, we find positive evidence of Dahomey affiliation on contemporary forest change. Lastly, we compare observed forest cover to counterfactual outcomes by simulating the absence of ATR beliefs across the population.
Determinants of renewable energy consumption in Madagascar: Evidence from feature selection algorithms
Authors: Franck Ramaharo, Fitiavana Randriamifidy
Date: 2023-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, regression

The aim of this note is to identify the factors influencing renewable energy consumption in Madagascar. We tested 12 features covering macroeconomic, financial, social, and environmental aspects, including economic growth, domestic investment, foreign direct investment, financial development, industrial development, inflation, income distribution, trade openness, exchange rate, tourism development, environmental quality, and urbanization. To assess their significance, we assumed a linear relationship between renewable energy consumption and these features over the 1990-2021 period. Next, we applied different machine learning feature selection algorithms classified as filter-based (relative importance for linear regression, correlation method), embedded (LASSO), and wrapper-based (best subset regression, stepwise regression, recursive feature elimination, iterative predictor weighting partial least squares, Boruta, simulated annealing, and genetic algorithms) methods. Our analysis revealed that the five most influential drivers stem from macroeconomic aspects. We found that domestic investment, foreign direct investment, and inflation positively contribute to the adoption of renewable energy sources. On the other hand, industrial development and trade openness negatively affect renewable energy consumption in Madagascar.
"The Roller Conduction Effect" from the A-share Data Evidence
Authors: Wenbo Lyu
Date: 2023-10-16 00:00:00

In the post-epidemic era, consumption recovery has obvious time and space transmission laws, and there are different valuation criteria for consumption segments. Using the A-share data of the consumption recovery stage from January to April 2022, this paper quantitatively compares the rotation effect between different consumption sectors when the valuation returns to the reasonable range. According to the new classification of "sensory-based consumption", it interprets the internal logic of digital consumption as A consumption upgrade tool and a higher valuation target, and expounds the "the roller conduction effect". The law of consumption recovery and valuation return period is explained from the perspective of time and space conduction. The study found that in the early stage of consumption recovery, the recovery of consumer confidence was slow. In this period, A-shares were mainly dominated by the stock capital game, and there was an obvious plate rotation law in the game. Being familiar with this law has strong significance, which not only helps policy makers to adjust the direction of policy guidance, but also helps financial investors to make better investment strategies. The disadvantage of this paper is that it has not yet studied the roller conduction effect of the global financial market, and more rigorous mathematical models are still needed to support the definition of stock funds, which is also the main direction of the author's future research.
Costly Persuasion by a Partially Informed Sender
Authors: Shaofei Jiang
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00

I study a model of costly Bayesian persuasion by a privately and partially informed sender who conducts a public experiment. The cost of running an experiment is the expected reduction of a weighted log-likelihood ratio function of the sender's belief. This is microfounded by a Wald sequential sampling problem where good news and bad news cost differently. I focus on equilibria satisfying the D1 criterion. The equilibrium outcome depends crucially on the relative costs of drawing good and bad news in the experiment. If good news is not too costly compared to bad news, there exists a unique separating equilibrium, and the receiver learns more information thanks to sender private information. If good news is sufficiently costlier than bad news, the single-crossing property fails. There may exist pooling and partial pooling equilibria, and in some equilibria, the receiver learns less information compared to a benchmark with an uninformed sender.
Three Variations on Money Pump, Common Prior, and Trade
Authors: Ziv Hellman, Miklos Pinter
Date: 2024-01-23 00:00:00

We consider finite information structures, and quest for the answer of the question: What is the proper definition of prior? In the single player setting we conclude that a probability distribution is a prior if it is disintegrable, because this definition excludes money pump. In the multiplayer setting our analysis does not boil down to one proper notion of common prior (the multiplayer version of prior). The appropriate notion is a choice of the modeller in this setting. We consider three variants of money pump, each "defines" a notion of common prior. Furthermore, we also consider three variants of trade, each correspond to one of the money pump variants, hence to one of the common prior variants.
Perceptually-motivated Spatial Audio Codec for Higher-Order Ambisonics Compression
Authors: Christoph Hold, Leo McCormack, Archontis Politis, Ville Pulkki
Date: 2024-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Scene-based spatial audio formats, such as Ambisonics, are playback system agnostic and may therefore be favoured for delivering immersive audio experiences to a wide range of (potentially unknown) devices. The number of channels required to deliver high spatial resolution Ambisonic audio, however, can be prohibitive for low-bandwidth applications. Therefore, this paper proposes a compression codec, which is based upon the parametric higher-order Directional Audio Coding (HO-DirAC) model. The encoder downmixes the higher-order Ambisonic (HOA) input audio into a reduced number of signals, which are accompanied by perceptually-motivated scene parameters. The downmixed audio is coded using a perceptual audio coder, whereas the parameters are grouped into perceptual bands, quantized, and downsampled. On the decoder side, low Ambisonic orders are fully recovered. Not fully recoverable HOA components are synthesized according to the parameters. The results of a listening test indicate that the proposed parametric spatial audio codec can improve the adopted perceptual audio coder, especially at low to medium-high bitrates, when applied to fifth-order HOA signals.
SCNet: Sparse Compression Network for Music Source Separation
Authors: Weinan Tong, Jiaxu Zhu, Jun Chen, Shiyin Kang, Tao Jiang, Yang Li, Zhiyong Wu, Helen Meng
Date: 2024-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Music Source Separation

Deep learning-based methods have made significant achievements in music source separation. However, obtaining good results while maintaining a low model complexity remains challenging in super wide-band music source separation. Previous works either overlook the differences in subbands or inadequately address the problem of information loss when generating subband features. In this paper, we propose SCNet, a novel frequency-domain network to explicitly split the spectrogram of the mixture into several subbands and introduce a sparsity-based encoder to model different frequency bands. We use a higher compression ratio on subbands with less information to improve the information density and focus on modeling subbands with more information. In this way, the separation performance can be significantly improved using lower computational consumption. Experiment results show that the proposed model achieves a signal to distortion ratio (SDR) of 9.0 dB on the MUSDB18-HQ dataset without using extra data, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, SCNet's CPU inference time is only 48% of HT Demucs, one of the previous state-of-the-art models.
Effective stripe artefact removal by a variational method: application to light-sheet microscopy, FIB-SEM and remote sensing images
Authors: Niklas Rottmayer, Claudia Redenbach, Florian Fahrbach
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00

Light-sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM) is used to capture volume images of biological specimens. It offers high contrast deep inside densely fluorescence labelled samples, fast acquisition speed and minimal harmful effects on the sample. However, LSFM images often show strong stripe artifacts originating from light-matter interactions. We propose a robust variational method suitable for removing stripes which outperforms existing methods and offers flexibility through two adjustable parameters. This tool is widely applicable to improve visual quality as well as facilitate downstream processing and analysis of images acquired on systems that do not provide hardware-based destriping methods. An evaluation of methods is performed on LSFM, focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM) and remote sensing data, supplemented by synthetic LSFM images. The latter is obtained by simulating the imaging process on virtual samples.