Important Channel Research Articles

Dynamic Mechanism of Destination Brand Diffusion: Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation

In recent years, social media has emerged as an important channel for the dissemination of destination branding. Despite the fact that the dissemination of information through social media enables a broader audience to become acquainted with destinations, the dissemination process of trending events exhibits variances. Consequently, the precise impact of the underlying mechanisms that govern the spread of information on the efficacy of disseminating destination brand trending events remains ambiguous. In an endeavor to bridge this gap, an improved SEIR model was developed in this research to investigate the dynamic dissemination mechanisms and influencing factors of destination trending events within social media. The model was applied to simulate the diffusion mechanism of destinations’ trending events. The results show that during the dissemination process of destination trending events on social media, the proportion of users affected at different stages influences the ultimate effectiveness of information propagation. In light of these insights, this research proposes a social media trending event dissemination strategy to aid in enhancing the propagation efficiency of destination brands through existing resources.

Weather, credit, and economic fluctuations: Evidence from China

We constructed an Extreme Weather Index to measure extreme weather risks in China. Analyzing macroeconomic data through a structural vector auto-regression model suggests that a negative weather shock leads to persistently low GDP and credit obtained by non-financial firms. In our regression analysis of a panel of firms listed in China, the negative effects of weather shocks on firm level loans were statistically and practically significant. Further analysis suggests that credit risk and expectations are two important impact channels. A high existing credit risk or low confidence among firm managers, amplifies the negative effects of extreme weather on loans.

Imbalanced media portrayal: a content analysis of precision medicine in US news of 2015–2021

IntroductionEngaging diverse participants is vital to precision medicine (PM) but has been limited by low knowledge and concerns about various issues related to PM research. News media is an important channel of information that can shape public understanding and perception of PM. However, how PM is represented in news media has not been sufficiently understood.MethodsThe study used quantitative content analysis to evaluate the portrayal of PM in US print news media between 2015 and 2021 (N = 198). Three domains of factors related to PM portrayed in news articles were coded: (1) characteristics of PM, (2) target diseases of PM and their related characteristics, and (3) non-scientific news frames.ResultsThere was considerable news coverage of the treatment benefits of PM, especially for cancer. Potential risks or concerns, non-cancer diseases, and non-treatment issues that could be important to diverse populations were less covered. News articles frequently cited scientists, patients, and government officials with different focuses on PM.DiscussionThe study highlighted the need for accurate and complete information about PM in news media for diverse participants. News media should actively explore social, ethical, and legal issues to support the engagement of diverse populations.

ESG rating and labor income share: Firm-level evidence

This study investigates the relationship between ESG (environmental, social, and governance) ratings and labor share at the firm level. Using data from Chinese A-share listed firms from 2011 to 2021, we find a significantly positive relationship between the two. Furthermore, we document that state-owned enterprises do not demonstrate a strong sense of political and social responsibility in their employee recruitment projects, while companies with high ESG ratings in East China could increase their labor share due to less stringent financial constraints. Finally, the employment-creation effect of ESG ratings is one of the important channels for improving labor share. Considering the increasing awareness of ESG concepts and the boom in ESG investing, our findings hold significant relevance for employees, directors, investors, and public policymakers.

Content creators at a crossroads between decentralized and centralized social media

Social media has become an important channel and source of income for content creators. However, the owners of centralized social media platforms may engage in practices and make decisions related to monetization, content moderation, and privacy and security, which may be detrimental to content creators’ earning potential and long-term success. As such, this article investigates the extent to which new types of social media platforms may address those three challenges due to their decentralized nature. Specifically, we analyze the potential and limitations of federated vs. blockchain-based social media platforms as platforms for content creators and provide recommendations for content creators. Given the role of user-generated content in the success of social media platforms, we also provide directions for research and development of decentralized social media to increase their relevance for content creators.

The Great Tea Road and the Formation of the Community of the Chinese Nation

The Great Tea Road is another important international commercial and cultural channel connecting China to the world that has emerged on the Eurasian continent after the decline of The Silk Roads. It is the result of the prosperity and development of economic globalization since the 16th century. The Chinese National Community is a national community of economic interdependence and cultural compatibility formed by the people of all ethnic groups in China during the long-term historical development. As an important part of The Belt and Road Initiative, The Great Tea Road is the product of the integrated development of Chinese cultural identity and national economy, the concentrated embodiment of the consciousness of Chinese National Community, and an important medium to convey the Chinese nation's concept of friendly economic and cultural exchanges with other countries and to build a community with a shared future for mankind. It is of great significance to explore the value and realization path of The Great Tea Road to the formation the sense of community for Chinese nation for the using of The Great Tea Road as a heritage site and the promotion of economic and cultural cooperation among cities in countries along the route through tea culture as a medium.

283 Decoding Mechanotransduction in Spinal Pseudoarthrosis: A Mouse Model of Spinal Fusion for Developing Mechanosensitive Osteobiologics

INTRODUCTION: Pseudoarthrosis (PA), represents a significant complication after spinal fusion. Efforts to reduce its occurrence predominantly involve the use of osteobiologics, the majority of which, are linked to various complications. It is well known that bone formation relies heavily on mechanical signaling cues. Recently, Piezo 1 has emerged as an important mechanosensitive calcium channel with a role in bone formation during development. METHODS: Normal human spine bone samples and PA tissue samples were collected intraoperatively. Samples underwent biomechanical and histologic characterization. Mice underwent spinal fusion surgery using iliac crest allograft. Weekly micro CT scans were performed over 4 weeks. Explanted mouse fusion bed (week 4) and normal spine underwent three-point bending testing. RESULTS: Human PA tissue was an elastic tissue that did not contain any mineralized bone with a mechanical stiffness of 12±4.1 N/mm. Bone had a measured stiffness of 341 ± 70 N/mm. Immunostaining showed that bone contained Piezo 1 expressing cells. PA demonstrated loss of osteocytes and loss of Piezo 1 expression. Mouse micro CT imaging of fusion bed at week 4 showed contiguous areas of fused bone. Fused mouse spine had a stiffness of 5.87 ± 2 N/mm. Normal mouse spine had a stiffness of 1.17 ± 0.47 N/mm. CONCLUSIONS: Human PA tissue is biomechanically and histologically distinct from normal bone with loss of Piezo 1 and osteocytes. Mice that underwent fusion surgery displayed radiographic and biomechanical evidence of bone fusion in a Piezo1-dependent manner, revealing a role for targeting mechanosensitive channels as a local biologic to promote arthrodesis.

Linguistic Variations Between Translated and Non-Translated English Chairman’s Statements in Corporate Annual Reports: A Multidimensional Analysis

As an important component of a company’s annual report, the chairman’s statement offers an important channel for the chairman of the company to report on the company’s performance in unquantified and textual terms. The Chairman’s statement serves as background for the shareholders, investors and wider stakeholders to have an overview of a company’s performance and activities over the course of one year. In this study, three corpora were compiled from the annual reports of listed companies based in Mainland China, Hong Kong and the United States. A corpus-based multi-dimensional analysis was conducted to investigate the linguistic characteristics between translated and non-translated English chairman’s statements. The findings indicate that the translated chairman’s statements of Mainland Chinese companies are informationally denser and more context-independent than the non-translated ones of American and Hong Kong companies. The results of a fine-grained analysis show that the translated and non-translated chairman’s statements have significant differences regards various linguistic features, indicating that cultural differences and translation might constitute important factors in affecting the textual profiling. Our study has yielded some new evidence towards a more comprehensive understanding of the linguistic differences between translated and non-translated chairman’s statements, and enriching the existing knowledge of translational language. This study also offers some practical as well as pedagogical insights into communication issues in business English and business translation.

Does Transportation Infrastructure Construction Enhance Enterprise Innovation Resilience in China?

With increasing uncertainty and ambiguity in the external business environment, the risks and challenges faced by enterprises also increase accordingly; resilience has become a necessary characteristic for the evolution and upgrading of enterprise innovation systems, and improving enterprise innovation resilience becomes the key for enterprises to establish sustainable competitive advantages and achieve sustainable development. Based on the panel data of Chinese listed companies and cities, we employ the common factor method to measure enterprise innovation resilience and explore the impact of transportation infrastructure construction on enterprise innovation resilience. The results reveal that, firstly, enterprise innovation resilience shows an overall upward trend, but there is a certain degree of temporal–spatial and industrial disparity. Secondly, transportation infrastructure construction, represented by HSR opening, can significantly improve enterprise innovation resilience. However, this effect performs the following heterogeneity: (1) Regionally, the promotion effect is more obvious in eastern regions, central cities, and non-central cities within 107 km and 764 km away from the central city. (2) For enterprises, compared to state-owned enterprises and non-high-tech industries, transportation infrastructure construction has a greater effect in non-state-owned enterprises and high-tech industries. (3) The higher the degree of centrality and closeness centrality, the more obvious the promotion effect of transportation infrastructure construction. Finally, mechanism tests show that enterprise resource acquisition and resource allocation abilities are important channels for transportation infrastructure construction, to enhance enterprise innovation resilience.

Learning path recommendation with multi-behavior user modeling and cascading deep Q networks

An online learning platform has become an important channel for learners to obtain knowledge due to its easy access and rich resources. In order to meet online learners' short-term needs with frequent changes and long-term learning goals during learning process, this paper focuses on user modeling and learning path recommendation, and we propose a new method for learning path recommendation through multi-behavior user modeling and cascading deep Q networks (cDQN-PathRec). Our model uses a knowledge graph-based multi-behavior transformer architecture for users’ state modeling, in which a learner's knowledge background, learning styles, learning settings, and learning preferences are taken into consideration. We use a cascading DQN with a two-level reward function to help an agent converge towards a balanced overall and local optima and to generate a learning path recommendation. Comprehensive experiments on two real-world online learning datasets demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed cDQN-PathRec method.

Ternary Precursor Centrifuge Rolling Bearing Fault Diagnosis Based on Adaptive Sample Length Adjustment of 1DCNN-SeNet

To address the issues of uneven sample lengths in the centrifuge machine bearings of the ternary precursor, inaccurate fault feature extraction, and insensitivity of important feature channels in rolling bearings, a rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on adaptive sample length adjustment of one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1DCNN) and squeeze-and-excitation network (SeNet) is proposed. Firstly, by controlling the cumulative variance contribution rate in the principal component analysis algorithm, adaptive adjustment of sample length is achieved, reducing data with uneven sample lengths to the same dimensionality for various classes. Then, the 1DCNN extracts local features from bearing signals through one-dimensional convolution-pooling operations, while the SeNet network introduces a channel attention mechanism which can adaptively adjust the importance between different channels. Finally, the 1DCNN-SeNet model is compared with four classic models through experimental analysis on the CWRU bearing dataset. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method exhibits high diagnostic accuracy in rolling bearings, demonstrating good adaptability and generalization capabilities.

The energy efficiency gap and barriers to investments: Evidence from a firm survey in The Netherlands

This study investigates the energy efficiency (EE) gap, referring to private agents who are not making seemingly profitable investments to reduce energy use. We deploy a questionnaire among firms in The Netherlands in which we ask them about investment behavior and barriers to investing in EE. A set of 16 barriers is constructed based on the literature. We find that most firms (70%) have made EE investments in the past five years, and that the median firm has saved 10% of its energy use. The remaining profitable EE investment opportunities still leave room for another 15% of energy savings at the median firm. We find that uncertainty about future policies ranks as the leading barrier to EE investments, followed by lock-ins in current equipment, and energy price uncertainty. Especially energy-intensive firms indicate the importance of policy uncertainty. Additionally, we find that a firm’s network can be an important channel for obtaining EE investment knowledge.

Impacts of cross‐border equity portfolio flow and central bank transparency on financial development: The role of economic freedom and international bonds

AbstractWe investigate the effects of international equity portfolio diversification and central bank independence on financial development using panel data from 49 countries from 2001 to 2016. We find that international equity portfolio diversification improves financial development. We correspondingly examine potential factors through which international equity portfolio diversification may impact financial development and find that central bank transparency provides an important channel for improving financial development. We further find that the relationship between international equity portfolio diversification and financial development is sensitive to economic freedom. Concerning sequencing, we find that foreign equity and debt flow are complementary to financial system development. Our results are robust to endogeneity using the exogenous shock of the 2008 financial crisis. This study offers new empirical evidence on the relationship between international capital and financial development.

The Banking System during Crisis Times, A Global Perspective

The study aims to highlight the impact of multiple crises on developments and changes in banking systems at the global level. As banking represents the most important channel for capital allocation, globally, the topic impacts policies as well as economies. The paper presents the linkages and developments between the dependent variable credit interest rate and macroeconomic indicators used as dependent variables: unemployment, inflation, capital adequacy ratio and bank assets to GDP. The data were collected and analyzed for a relevant period, between 2013 and 2021, representing the post-financial global crisis and pandemic crisis. The sample includes 30 countries with a combined GDP of around 60% of the global GDP. According to the research results, a balanced relationship between competitiveness, profitability, and sustainability within the financial and banking sectors can be achieved through cooperation between all 30 analyzed countries. Other relevant concerns to develop viable economic policy options should focus primarily on keeping inflation rates at a stable level by the central banks, together with the efficient allocation of funds, diversification of sources of energy, and reducing dependencies.

Do management practices matter in further education?

AbstractFurther education and sixth form colleges are key institutions for facilitating skill acquisition among 16–19 year olds in the UK. They enrol half a school cohort after completion of their lower secondary education, and this includes a disproportionate number from low‐income backgrounds. Yet little is known about what could improve performance in these institutions. We conduct the world's first management practices survey in such institutions, and match this to administrative longitudinal data on over 40,000 students. Value‐added regressions with rich controls suggest that structured management matters for educational outcomes, especially for students from low‐income backgrounds. For this group, in a hypothetical scenario where an individual is moved from a college at the 10th percentile of management practices to the 90th, this would be associated with 8% higher probability of achieving a good high school qualification, nearly half of the educational gap between those from poor and non‐poor backgrounds. Hence improving management practices may be an important channel for reducing inequalities.

A novel deep learning model to improve the recognition of students’ facial expressions in online learning environments

With the fast development of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, automatic recognition of students’ facial expressions has received increased attention. Facial expressions are a kind of external manifestation of emotional states. It is important for teachers to assess students’ emotional states and adjust teaching activities accordingly. However, existing methods for automatic facial expression recognition have the limitations of low accuracy of recognition and poor feature extraction. To address the problem, this study proposed a novel deep learning model called DenseNetX-CBAM to improve facial expression recognition by utilizing a variant of densely connected convolutional networks (DenseNet) to reduce unnecessary parameters and strengthen the reuse of expression features between networks; moreover, convolutional block attention module (CBAM) was integrated to allow the networks to focus on important special regions and important channels when representing features. The proposed model was tested using 217 video clips of 33 students in an online course. The results demonstrated promising effects of the method in improving the accuracy of facial expression recognition, which can help teachers to accurately recognize students’ emotions and provide real-time adjustment in online learning environments.

An Economic Analysis of Tuberose Marketing from Akola District, Maharashtra, India

The present study was conducted in Akola district of Maharashtra state for the period 2018-19. For the study of marketing data was collected from 10 village traders, 10 wholesalers and 10 retailers, thus overall 30 trader were selected randomly about price spread, labour charges, transportation costs, commission charges, other charges if any and also the price received by them during the year 2018-2019 based on primary data. In tuberose marketing channel, producer, wholesalers and retailer were selected for collecting the information on marketing. Producer – wholesaler – Retailer – Consumer was the important channel through which maximum quantity was sold by the cultivators. In case of tuberose, the producer’s share in consumer’s rupee was highest in channel-I i.e., 96.31 per cent. The channel-I was most profitable than channel II and channel III. The price spread was observed highest in case of channel III i.e., Rs 17.40. The major constraints faced by tuberose cultivators overall level was Low rate of flower in the market, High commission charges, Lack of organized market and transportation.

Debt relief for households in developing economies

Abstract Households in developing economies have greater access to formal credit today than at any point in history, owing to the global expansion of microfinance and recent innovations in consumer finance, such as digital lending. While this has improved the ability to smooth consumption and invest in productive activities, it has also raised concerns about over-indebtedness. Against this background, this article reviews and extends the literature on debt relief for households in developing countries. We begin by laying out a simple stylized model that illustrates the costs and benefits of debt relief and use the model to guide our review of the evidence on various relief policies, such as debt forbearance, debt forgiveness, and personal bankruptcy. We additionally present survey evidence from a population of microfinance and bank borrowers with recent exposure to debt relief. The results highlight that an important channel through which discretionary debt relief policies, which are common in developing countries, affect credit market outcomes is their impact on borrower expectations. The development of legal bankruptcy institutions that offer a rules-based avenue to discharge unsustainable debts can reduce such distortions and alleviate the credit market inefficiencies that have often accompanied debt relief initiatives in developing economies.

Diplomatic Representation and Online/Offline Interactions: EU Coordination and Digital Sociability

Abstract European Union (EU) diplomatic representation in third countries is performed by both the Member States and by the EU Delegation. This hybrid system of representation functions through EU coordination. As social media have become important channels of state representation, coordination also takes place in the domain of digital diplomacy. This article analyzes how the EU Member State embassies and the EU Delegation coordinate EU representation through online and offline interactions. It investigates the practices of coordination and maps routines of digital sociability. The United States’ capital Washington, DC provides a context of both strong bilateral relations and a history of shared EU interests. The study draws on observations on Twitter (later renamed X) between 2019 and 2021 and reflections from diplomats who engage in the coordination of EU representation, collected through an online survey and interviews. By examining the reciprocity between online and offline interactions, the study illuminates how relationships are cultivated, a sense of collective belonging is fostered, and social order is negotiated. The findings enhance our understanding of how digital diplomacy is deeply embedded within diplomatic contexts and their distinctive practices. They contribute to advancing knowledge about the interplay of digital diplomacy, multilateral representation, and the dynamics that shape diplomatic engagements.

Informal care and financial stress: Longitudinal evidence from Australia.

The number of people providing informal care has increased considerably in the last years while, at the same time, about one in four Australians have financial stress problems. This study uses rich longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey to estimate the effect of informal care on financial stress. To establish causality, we exploit a fixed effect-instrumental variable approach to address omitted variable bias and reverse causality problems. Our findings show that informal caregiving increases financial stress between 9.9 and 14.5 percentage points. This finding is robust across a battery of quasi-experimental methods. The effect of informal caregiving on financial stress is more pronounced among males, rural residents and those living in low socioeconomic areas. Our analyses further show that financial fragility and social isolation are important channels through which informal caregiving affects financial stress.