Empirical Issues Research Articles

Plan Z: Reassessing Security-Based Accounts of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine

The debate on the origins of the Russia-Ukraine War is at an impasse. Many prominent realist scholars argue that Russia’s government chose to invade Ukraine as a last resort to reverse Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic integration, which it viewed as a major or “existential” national security threat. Critics of this contend that Ukrainian accession did not seriously threaten Russian security, and that Putin launched the invasion in the hope of achieving one or more nonsecurity objectives. This article surveys the current debate, before evaluating one of Moscow’s key stated security concerns. It then identifies four empirical issues on which security and nonsecurity accounts make substantially different predictions. It concludes that in each case, the available evidence is difficult to reconcile with a primarily security-seeking interpretation of the Russian government’s war aims.

Healthy Eating Policy and Public Reason in a Complex World: Normative and Empirical Issues

Who gets to decide what it means to live a healthy lifestyle, and how important a healthy lifestyle is to a good life? As more governments make preventing obesity and diet-related illness a priority, it has become more important to consider the ethics and acceptability of their efforts. When it comes to laws and policies that promote healthy eating—such as special taxes on sugary drinks or programs to encourage consumption of fruits and vegetables—critics argue that these policies are paternalistic, and that they limit individual autonomy over food choices. In our book Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy: A Public Reason Approach (Barnhill and Bonotti 2022), we argue that both paternalistic justifications for healthy eating efforts and anti-paternalistic arguments against them can be grounded in perfectionist views that overly prioritize some values over others. We therefore propose a more inclusive, public reason approach to healthy eating policy that will be appealing to those who take pluralism and cultural diversity seriously, by providing a framework through which different kinds of values, including but not limited to autonomy and health, can be factored into the public justification for healthy eating efforts. Additionally, the book adopts a ‘farm to fork’ approach to the ethics of healthy eating efforts: it engages with theories and debates in political philosophy, considers the implications of different theoretical positions for healthy eating efforts, and then develops a framework for assessing policies that can be used by researchers and policymakers. As well as offering a novel normative analysis of healthy eating policy, we also provide a theoretical framework that will be applicable beyond healthy eating policy to a wide range of public policy scenarios. We are extremely grateful to the contributors to this symposium for their thoughtful commentaries on our book. In this article, we provide a critical reflection on the issues they raise with regard to some key aspects of our analysis.

The unrelenting entrepreneur: Taking stock of research on entrepreneurial persistence and related constructs

Entrepreneurial persistence is crucial for venture success and entrepreneurs’ personal growth. Yet, the extant research on entrepreneurial persistence has largely remained disconnected. The current disjointed profusion of constructs and theories which we believe has made progress on understanding this important construct slower than is ideal. To address those issues, we conducted a systematic review and made explicit the nomological network of antecedents and consequences of entrepreneurial persistence and the related constructs of perseverance and tenacity. Our review identified potential theoretical and empirical issues of the current entrepreneurial persistence research and outlined areas and opportunities for future research.

A systematic literature review of studies on women at the top of firm hierarchies: critique, gap analysis and future research directions

PurposeThis study aims to holistically explore the academic literature on female leaders to identify the key topics and dynamics of the field.Design/methodology/approachThe authors systematically review 532 papers to explore the research on female leaders; based on objective and replicable criteria, the authors identify relevant papers and thus ensure the quality of the analysis. The bibliometric analysis and visualization support us in recognizing trends in this topic.FindingsThis study outlines the state of the art over the past decade by synthesizing theoretical contexts and critically discussing the main streams of research on sustainability, firm outcomes and barriers preventing women from reaching the upper echelons. The authors also explore empirical issues and highlight areas that entail new paths for future scholars.Practical implicationsThe research provides novel evidence of the attempt internationally to increase female participation at the top of the firm hierarchy by analyzing firm outcomes, sustainability and the constraints faced by women in achieving these careers.Social implicationsThe results show that the participation of women in leadership roles is not (only) a matter of compliance with current regulations. Through their ability to monitor key social and environmental issues from a long-term perspective and their attention to the internal control systems, companies more effectively pursue their financial and nonfinancial aims.Originality/valueUsing bibliographic and narrative analyses, this study reviews the literature on women at the top of the firm hierarchy with a focus on business research. The authors extend prior studies by investigating a larger pool of firm roles to provide a comprehensive understanding of this widely discussed topic.

Rationalizing ‘identity’ through Virginia Woolf’s Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse

The 1927 publication of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (2007) was a landmark for both the author and the development of the novel in England. Since Woolf's death in 1941, To The Lighthouse (2007) has risen in importance as a focus of criticism concerning issues of gender, empire, and class. This paper will not be focused on the narrative techniques used by Woolf as the ‘stream of consciousness’ has been covered excessively by many scholars. It rather repositions the novel within the critical framework laid out by Toni Morrison in two of her critical works, Playing in the Dark (1992) and The Origin of Others (2017), to extend Edward Said’s argument on hegemony as discussed in his Orientalism (2003) to rationalize Woolf’s own understanding of identity within a 21st century racial framework. The discussion of Morrison’s critical text invites, as I argue in the paper, re-positioning the the link between Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe into a new perspective, beyond the representation of Briscoe as simply an ‘Orient’. Morrison’s critical framework presents a more concise understanding of identity within the creative framework of literary texts to reflect a subjective conviction of the author in question.

Empirical issues concerning studies of firm entry

Abstract We discuss that entry can be considered from various levels of analysis: entrepreneur-level, firm-level, and also at higher levels of aggregation, such as the industry-level and country-level. We also formulate a list of six challenges for econometric studies of firm entry, highlighting the data sources, typical empirical setups, potential sources of bias, and appropriate econometric techniques. While progress can be made with sophisticated econometric estimators, a pressing need for entry studies concerns detailed data on the gestation process, entry modes, and the value of resource endowments and knowledge endowments.

Road safety and road infrastructure expenditure: A bivariate analysis

A considerable body of earlier literature has analysed the determinants of road safety outcomes at the aggregate level. A sub-set of that literature has sought to assess the effect of road expenditure, both investment and maintenance spending, on road safety. The results have been inconclusive and, in part, counterintuitive. To clarify that relationship, this paper undertakes a bivariate analysis using European panel data. Three main results emerge. First, there is only limited evidence of longer-term relationships (common stochastic trends) among different measures of the variables. Second, causality tests on stationary variables suggest that the direction of causality depends on how the variables are measured. Third, unrestricted Vector Autoregression (VAR) analyses suggest that there is a positive relationship from some measures of road safety outcomes to road infrastructure investment, and that an increase in one real measure of road infrastructure investment reduces fatalities permanently, if with a lag. While not modelling the true and complex data generating processes, these bivariate analyses help address the salient empirical issues emerging from earlier literature, and the results provide a detailed description of the relationship between road safety and infrastructure expenditure.

Preface: 2nd International Conference on Financial Technology and Market Management (FTMM 2023)

The 2023 2nd International Conference on Financial Technology and Market Management (FTMM 2023) have been conducted during May 27-28, 2023 in Tianjin, China. This conference aims to bring together leading academic scientists, researchers, and scholars to exchange and share their experiences and research results on all aspects of economics, business, and marketing management. It also provides a premier interdisciplinary platform for researchers, practitioners, and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, and concerns as well as practical challenges encountered and solutions adopted in the fields of economics, business, and marketing management.
 More than 70 participants from China, Japan, Malaysia, France, and some other countries attended FTMM 2023. About 30 presentations including 6 plenary talks were presented. The presentations are grouped into 9 areas of particular interest: (1): Economic and monetary crisis, (2): Taxes and regulation, (3): Emerging markets issues, (4): Corporate finance and governance, (5): Asset pricing, investment, and portfolio management, (6): Financial markets, (7): Risk management and quantitative finance, (8) Econometric modeling and empirical issues, (9): Mathematical Finance.
 With best regards,
 Conference Organizing Chair
 Tianjin, China

The impact of the European social fund on youth education and employment

The effectiveness of the European Union's Cohesion Policy in reducing regional socio-economic gaps remains an open empirical issue, while evidence as to how the policy is affected by specific territorial factors and which social groups benefit most from it remains sparse. This article seeks to address this gap by disentangling the impact of the European Social Fund (ESF) on youth education and employment prospects. Drawing on macro-level data for the European NUTS-2 regions, we assess the impact that this fund has on different education-specific youth population shares and employment rates. In the case of education, we find that the receipt of funding is associated with a human capital polarization of regional populations. Specifically, we identify a positive impact of the ESF on population shares with lower-secondary and tertiary education, and a simultaneous negative impact on the share of those with upper-secondary education. In the case of employment, we find a positive response for youth of all education levels. A heterogeneity analysis indicates that both the education and employment responses of the youth population to the receipt of the ESF are strongly influenced by local specialization in high-skilled activities.

Controversies around Neuroeconomics: Empirical, Methodological and Philosophical Issues

À la fin des années 1990, plusieurs tendances convergentes en économie, psychologie et neuroscience ont préparé le terrain pour la naissance d’un nouveau champ scientifique qualifié de « neuroéconomie ». Comme pour toute discipline émergente – pensons par exemple à l’économie mathématique, l’économétrie ou l’économie expérimentale en d’autres temps – la neuroéconomie est plutôt controversée en économie. Elle soulève un grand nombre de questions d’ordre empirique, méthodologique et philosophiques donnant lieu à des débats et controverses que l’article identifie et discute à travers trois questions majeures relatives aux connaissances produites : Sont-elles fiables ? Sont-elles scientifiquement légitimes ? Sont-elles utiles pour les économistes ? Sans prétendre à l’exhaustivité, ce cadre analytique permet de comprendre l’essence des principales critiques adressées à la neuroéconomie. Dans le même temps, l’article éclaire la nature des réponses susceptibles d’être apportées à ces critiques au vu des progrès conceptuels et empiriques qu’a connus ce champ de recherche depuis son émergence et à la lumière du tournant apparu dans l’agenda de la neuroéconomie au cours de la dernière décennie. JEL Codes : A12, B41, C51, C81, C9, D03, D87.

Agency and Structure in Urban and Regional Planning: An Illustrative Overview and Future Research Agenda

There is extensive literature on the agency of actors in urban and regional planning which draws on a wide range of theoretical lenses and concepts. One of the recurring themes is the relationship between agency and structure—the mutual interdependence between individual actions and collective institutions, rules, and norms. This article provides a narrative overview of the wide range of literature on agency and structure in relation to spatial planning clustered around six interrelated themes: institutions, discretion, pragmatism, networks, leadership, and emotions. It identifies new avenues for research, paying particular attention to empirical, scalar, and methodological issues.

Between analytical mood and clause-initial particles – on the diagnostics of subordination for (emergent) complementizers

SummaryThe article addresses empirical and methodological issues that are of central concern for an assessment of uninflected function words doing services in clause-combining and/or in indicating the speaker’s stance toward illocutionary force or propositional content. Such units have been variably treated: either just as ‘particles’, as subordinating conjunctions or complementizers, or as auxiliaries of ‘analytic moods’ (marking directive or optative illocutionary force). Whatever they are called, all these units scope over clauses and manipulate their reality status. A discrimination of these types of units is difficult or hardly possible, first of all, because core notions (especially ‘(analytic) mood’ and ‘complementizer’) are ill-defined and their consequent cross-linguistic application suggests an almost arbitrary exchangeability: since the notional contrasts behind them are basically identical, clear criteria based on form and paradigmatic organization are warranted. Jointly, one needs to specify the format of the relevant units in terms of clines between morphemes and words, and between words and constructions, first of all for North Slavicbyand South Slavicda.Concomitantly, the delimitation of discourse coherence from syntactic subordination poses notorious problems. First, embedding is a property on a gradient, mainly because symptomatic shifts of egocentricals need not (and often do not) occur simultaneously. Second, there is an enormous grey zone of clausal complements vs adjuncts leaving ample space for indeterminacy. Both intensional and extensional approaches to determining clausal complements have their inherent and empirical weaknesses, and one wonders whether these might be recompensated by combining both types of approaches.The article gives a complex account of general theoretical and empirical pitfalls, with illustrations from a comprehensive body of data across Slavic on a typological background. The article also shows a principled divide between volition- and cognition-based clause connectives (and of their constructions), for which it points out inner-Slavic areal clines.

Is urbanization sustainable? A longitudinal study of developing nations, 1990-2015

ABSTRACT Sustainability scholars have long asked whether urbanization fosters sustainable development. To stimulate progress on this question for the cross-national quantitative literature, we draw on theories from modernization and political economy and address two empirical issues: the lack of a comprehensive metric on sustainable development as well as a need to differentiate between the multiple dimensions of urbanization. Covering the years 1990–2015, first in models with listwise deletion (n = 88) and then using full information maximum likelihood (n = 156), we regress change in the Sustainable Development Index (SDI) and its component parts on changes in the basic percentage urban variable as well as on independent measures for country-level density, urban primacy, the size of urban agglomerations, and slum prevalence, controlling for unit fixed effects. For developing nations, results from these models indicate that the multiple dimensions of urbanization exert countervailing pressures on the social and environmental components of sustainable development. These results highlight competing claims from urban-ecological theories of modernization and political economy.

Legacy systems to cloud migration: A review from the architectural perspective

Legacy systems are business-critical systems that hold the organization’s core business functions developed in a traditional way using monolith architecture and usually deployed on-premises. Through time, this system is exposed to improvement changes, increasing its size and number of functionalities, thus increasing its complexity, and maintaining it becomes a disadvantage to the organization. Migration to the cloud environment becomes the primary option to improve legacy application agility, maintainability, and flexibility. However, to take advantage of the cloud environment, monolith legacy application needs to be rearchitected as microservice architecture to fully benefit from cloud advantages. This paper aims to understand the motivation for cloud migration, investigate existing cloud migration frameworks, identify the target architecture for the cloud, and establish any empirical quality issues in cloud migration from the implementation point of view. To achieve those objectives, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of 47 selected studies from the most relevant scientific digital libraries covering pre-migration, migration, and post-migration stages. The SLR outcome provided us with the primary motivation for the cloud migration, existing cloud migration frameworks, targeted migration architecture patterns, and migration challenges. The results also highlight areas where more research is needed and suggest future research in this field. Furthermore, our analysis shows that current migration approaches lack quality consideration, thus contributing to post-migration quality concerns.

Misrelating values and empirical matters in conservation: A problem and solutions

We uncover a largely unnoticed and unaddressed problem in conservation research: arguments built within studies are sometimes defective in more fundamental and specific ways than appreciated, because they misrelate values and empirical matters. We call this the unraveled rope problem because just as strands of rope must be properly and intricately wound with each other so the rope supports its load, empirical aspects and value aspects of an argument must be related intricately and properly if the argument is to objectively support its conclusion. By characterizing this problem with precision, our study differs from but complements existing studies of value issues in conservation science, in two ways. First, it focuses on key relationships between empirical issues and value issues, relations that have sometimes been obscured by focusing on these issues more independently of each other. Second, it focuses on these relationships within arguments and deploys a method of argument analysis and evaluation honed in other fields but under-utilized in conservation science. By combining our study's novel features, we detail six families of argument defect that exemplify the unraveled rope problem within existing literature. These defects sometimes manifest within basic research stages, rather than just in more applied downstream stages where roles for values are already obvious to many. As scientific reasoning and communication become increasingly important for addressing society's greatest environmental challenges, overcoming the unraveled rope problem will be essential to the success and integrity of conservation research. Therefore, we also outline potential solutions, preventative measures, and useful further work for conservation researchers.

Advancements of phonetics in the 21st century: Theoretical and empirical issues in the phonetics of sound change

It has long been understood that speakers produce and listeners perceive non-random, systematic phonetic variants that serve as the raw material for sound change. This understanding underlies much of the current research on the phonetic underpinnings of change, which includes study of (i) general phonetic principles underlying variation, (ii) specific phonetic ‘preconditions’ and biases arguably linked to specific patterns of phonological instability and change, and (iii) the production and perception of variation by speaker-listeners in situations of actual ongoing change and by interacting agents in computational simulations of change. This paper shows how findings from these three broad areas of study have led to 21st century theoretical and empirical advancements in our understanding of phonetic change. Big-picture questions about the nature of change are approached through consideration of a series of smaller, more tractable questions (e.g., about the nature of, and relation between, innovative speaking and innovative listening for both stable patterns of variation and ongoing change). The paper’s goals are to show, for these questions, their theoretical grounding, empirical challenges, preliminary answers and, in turn, the new theoretical directions emerging from those answers.

Ethical Climates Across National Contexts: A Meta-Analytical Investigation

Ethical climates remain one of the most popular ways to assess the ethical orientations of companies. There has been a plethora of studies examining the relationship between ethical climates and critical outcomes, which was triggered by Victor and Cullen's seminal work published 35 years ago. After such a long period of strong research activity in this topic area, it is time to take stock of the accumulated empirical evidence. This meta-analytic review incorporates the considerations of alternative conceptualizations of ethical climates and integrates an international comparative perspective on the consequences of ethical climates. Given the state of the field, it is imperative to assess the tenability of the various relationships of ethical climate types across national contexts. As such, we first provide an update on how ethical climates are related to key organizational outcomes and assess how country-level factors affect the consequences of ethical climates. We present our findings along theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues, discuss the implications of our findings for extant research and provide suggestions for future research for each of the three avenues.

Cold War Social Science: Transnational Entanglements by Mark Solovey and Christian Dayé, eds.

<i>Cold War Social Science: Transnational Entanglements</i> by Mark Solovey and Christian Dayé, eds.

Preface: 2022 International Conference on Financial Technology and Market Management (FTMM 2022)

The 2022 International Conference on Financial Technology and Market Management (FTMM 2022) have been conducted during November 26-27, 2022 in Tianjin, China. This conference aims to bring together leading academic scientists, researchers and scholars to exchange and share their experiences and research results on all aspects of economics, business and marketing management. It also provides a premier interdisciplinary platform for researchers, practitioners and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, and concerns as well as practical challenges encountered and solutions adopted in the fields of economics, business and marketing management.&#x0D; More than 80 persons from China, Japan, Malaysia, France, and some other countries participated in this conference. About 30 presentations including 6 plenary talks were presented. The presentations are grouped into 9 areas of particular interest: (1): Economic and monetary crisis, (2): Taxes and regulation, (3): Emerging markets issues, (4): Corporate finance and governance, (5): Asset pricing, investment, and portfolio management, (6): Financial markets, (7): Risk management and quantitative finance, (8) Econometric modeling and empirical issues, (9): Mathematical Finance.&#x0D; With best regards,&#x0D; Conference Organizing Chair&#x0D; Tianjin, China

Limes to Remediate Marine Oil Spill via Green and Ecofriendly In Situ Salt Formation

An absolute remedy to oil spill is still much solicited owing to empirical issues like (i) viability of the strategy right on the marine surface, (ii) operational ease of the entire process, and (iii) cost of the entire execution, which are difficult to resolve via solo operation. Current work demonstrates a hassle-free, green, and eco-friendly strategy to fix these issues simultaneously. Herein, spontaneous salt formation between carboxylic acids and primary amines, is employed against oil spill. Lime juice, a natural source of citric acid, is used directly with primary amines to congeal petrol/crude oil and spilled-over seawater (at room temperature) without any external stimulus/solvent. The chemistry behind such gelation is probed comprehensively using established physicochemical methods. A realistic model is fabricated by crude oil spilled over marine water and its removal via selective gelation. The recovery of precious oil from accumulated gel is achieved through simple pressure filtration. The feasibility and implications of this strategy is comprehensively analyzed, and an executable blueprint for real-field operation is developed.