<p>By adopting selectively two classical models of consumer behavior, Theory of Rational Action and Technology Acceptance Model, and combining with two other factors, the paper proposed a model of six factors including Attitude, Perceived Risk, Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, Subjective Norm and Web Quality to assess determinants of university students’ online shopping behavior in Hanoi, Vietnam. The model was assessed through Explanatory Factor Analysis, regression analysis and independent sample test based on data collected from 289 university students in Hanoi, Vietnam. The results showed that Perceived Usefulness plays the most important role in determining students’ online shopping behavior, followed by Web Quality and Attitude. There is also a difference in online shopping behavior between the third-year and first-year students, and between the third-year and second-year students. From these results, the paper drew out implications to support E-commerce enterprises to attract more university students to shop online, and strengthen the development of E-commerce in Vietnam.</p>\n\n<p> </p>

This study investigates the impact of the business cycle on the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) for the Eswatini Kingdom over the period 1970 – 2014. To this end, we employ the nonlinear autoregressive distributive lag (NARDL) model to capture the long-run and short-run cointegration effects between economic activity and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over different phases of the business cycle. Our findings reveal that economic activity only degrades the environment during upswing of the economic cycle whilst this relationship is insignificant during downswing of the cycle. We specifically compute a value of $3.57 worth of output been gained at the cost of a metric unit of emissions during economic expansionary phases. Altogether, these results insinuate much needed government intervention in the market for emissions via environmental tax reforms (ETR) which should be designed with countercyclical bias towards upswing the business cycle.

The study deals with student expectations associated with their placement in the labour market. In total, 437 students of the third and fourth grades of grammar schools and secondary schools teaching business and technical fields of study were interviewed as well as 257 potential employers of these students. The objective was to identify whether students appreciate the link between education and salary, whether salary expectations of students are realistic, and last but not least, whether such expectations differ in terms of gender. It was established that students appreciate the link between the level of education and the amount of gross salary, but only if they were employed. If they started their own business, they expect their income to be higher than if they were employed, regardless of their highest completed education. It was interesting to find out that students cannot see any links between future salary and what type of secondary school they study (technical schools, business schools or grammar schools). The key finding of the essay is the fact established using Friedman´s ANOVA and Kendall´s coefficient of concordance, i.e., that the salary expectations of students are higher than the realistic offer of employers, both in terms of salary after secondary school and that after university. There are statistically significant differences between boys and girls - boys expect a higher initial gross salary, both after secondary school and university. Salary expectations are the same concerning gender only in the event they would choose to start their own business.

The performance of initial public offerings (IPOs) can be viewed at least into two different periods; initial aftermarket and long-term aftermarket. This study is initiated to examine the influence of of firms on initial aftermarket and long-term aftermarket performance. It is crucial to study on the influence of of firms in both periods as the investors, regardless of investment horizons, are looking for capital appreciation so that they can continuously secure good returns in the aftermarket. The are defined as the potential of issuing firms to positively survive in periods after their listing in stock market. The are measured by the allocation of received during the issuance of newly issued shares to activities which are expected to increase of a firm; e.g., spending on capital expenditure and asset acquisition. The information of growth opportunities of firms can be gathered from firm prospectus, particularly in the use of proceeds section. The of firms are proposed to serve as a signaling tool that transmits information on potential of firms to potential investors. This study proposes that higher amount of IPO allocated to and investment activities will attract higher numbers of potential investors to subscribe for the firms’ shares. A higher demand and subscription from investors will boost up price of the shares, thus lead to higher aftermarket returns. Employing 403 IPOs listed in Bursa Malaysia from January 2000 to December 2014, this study documents a positive significant relationship between and performance of IPOs in both periods: initial aftermarket and long-term aftermarket.

The aim of this study is to capture and scrutinize the nature of managers’ unwell-being through an original integrative research model in order to find out how this unwell-being is structured when the four prominent unwell-being factors, namely absenteeism, job alienation, job dissatisfaction, and presenteeism are accounted for. To enable generalizations at the national level, we contacted mid-level managers of the 500 largest businesses of Turkey. A professional consulting firm used our developed questionnaires to collect data from these managers. The two-phase research process pointed out that the model was realistic; there were indeed interactions among all the mentioned unwell-being factors. Further investigations revealed that the three of these factors (presenteeism, job alienation, and absenteeism) had strong and positive connections; whereas the fourth, job dissatisfaction, could pose very weak and negative interactions with the others. We believe that the integrative approach used is the unique contribution of this study as there are theoretical and practical gaps regarding the unwell-being research that consider an aggregation of multiple factors simultaneously.

As oil exports remain the main source of income for the Russian economy, the ongoing plunging of global oil prices is causing severe adverse supply shock and cost-push inflation in the country. The recent attempts at stabilisation policies by the policymakers have not been very successful in stabilising both national output and inflation. This has brought about concern over the relevance of policymaker interventions in the Russian economy. We investigate this matter by applying Asai’s (1999) model. Our empirical results indicated that the trade-off between output and inflation in the short run in Russia is inversely associated with the mean rate of inflation, which supports the new Keynesian view. As such, stabilisation policies, particularly monetary policies adopted by policymakers, are extremely crucial in moderating the short-run trade-off between output and inflation with respect to the recent financial crisis.

This paper explores activities of the banking companies in the new regulatory environment of the European banking system. For this purpose, the dynamic panel data models are estimated by utilizing the system GMM estimator. The research sample consists of 35 publicly listed groups of banks operating in the period from 2000 to 2016, selected by size of assets. The chosen banking companies are unquestionably market makers on the bank-centric economy of the EU. Hence, the research is in line with other current empirical works regarding the post-Basel III Standard adjustment of the banking industry as a whole. The model results show that the required increase in capital position affects the lack of bank credit activity towards the non-financial sector. The banks can maintain the higher regulatory capital ratio and self-finance the required growth by increasing the volume of share capital. Asymmetric information about the bank's net worth discourage public investors to get into the shareholders position, which results in further bank lending constraints and reduced profitability. Potential growth of the revenue from non-credit risk operations cannot compensate for the negative pressure on the real value of the banking firm. From the policy-making perspective, the paper concludes that the resolution of structural problems of non-performing credit assets under new regulatory conditions should contribute to restoring the confidence of the investment public towards the self-financing capacity of the banking industry as well as bring the banking system back to the traditional client-oriented business model.

This study presents evidence of motherhood wage penalties in regular jobs in Japan. Limited previous studies examine the existence of motherhood wage penalties working permanently. This paper, therefore, investigates the causes of mothers’ lower wages in comparison to nonmothers in regular jobs. Japanese female workers are offered the choice between and career paths, and which path they choose is likely to affect the magnitude of the wage gap between mothers and nonmothers. This research estimates wage equations that consider observed and individual characteristics using unbalanced panel dataset from the Japan Household Panel Survey (the JHPS/KHPS 2004-2015) under a fixed-effect method. The empirical estimates confirm there is indeed a wage penalty for Japanese working mothers who work in full-time employment. The result shows that the presence of children is related to penalties in wages of 5.4% per child. Besides, the penalty associated with the presence of one child is consistently higher than that of two children. This study divides regular working women into two categories, large versus small enterprises and estimates the motherhood wage gap for each separately to find what factors contribute to the existence of this wage gap. Interestingly, the result shows the wage penalty for motherhood is high in large companies and not evident at all in small companies. This finding reinforces the hypothesis that the motherhood wage penalties in regular jobs in Japan may be due to unobserved individual heterogeneity that there are different career tracks chosen by mothers and nonmothers. High wage penalties in large companies are generated from a comparison between mothers on general career paths and childless women who are in company-specific skills. Meanwhile, there is no evidence of wage penalties in small companies because female workers tend to have the same traditional pattern. Overall, the finding of high motherhood penalties in regular employment bears a close relationship to labor market practice in Japan that relies heavily upon on-the-job-training (OJT) in company-specific-skills, couples with wages that rise with tenure of employment. However, it pertains only to employees who have chosen integrated career tracks.