Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining: Learning Mandarin During COVID-19

This study aims to determine students' motivation towards Mandarin learning during COVID-19. Theoretically, motivation is considered a broad concept that aims to define why people decide to do something, how long they sustain the activity, and how much effort they will expend to pursue it. Considering that there is no single theory that can comprehensively cover the possible motives, this study investigates the L2 motivation with the self as its core, which is found closely related to three motivation frameworks: Socio-education theory, self-determination theory, and L2 motivational self-system. This study found that L2 learners of Mandarin were highly driven by intrinsic motivation such as knowledge, culture, language learning stimulation, and accomplishment. They were less likely to be motivated by external pressures such as the ought-to L2 self or introjected opinions and showed a highly self-decisive multilingual profile with a willingness to diversify their knowledge and skills. Finally, Mandarin learning had positively contributed to their overall well-being during COVID-19

Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud: Defensive Pessimism in Legal Education

This Article presents the results of the first empirical research project to investigate law students’ use of defensive pessimism. Previous researchers have suggested that defensive pessimism may benefit law students academically. Defensive pessimism is a strategy that involves setting low expectations and reflecting extensively on what could go wrong in connection with a future event in order to manage anxiety and improve performance. However, up until now, law students’ use of defensive pessimism has not been empirically studied. We investigated law students’ use of defensive pessimism. Contrary to the suggestions of other scholars, we did not find statistically significant relationships between defensive pessimism and law school academic performance. However, we did find positive relationships between defensive pessimism and neuroticism, and defensive pessimism and perceived stress. These results suggest that legal educators cannot rely exclusively on academic performance to identify students who are in distress. Students may be in distress in law school but that distress may not be manifested in lower academic performance. Moreover, legal educators should be mindful of the different strategies that students’ use in performance situations in order to more constructively interact with law students and better prepare students to work effectively with others who may not necessarily use the same strategies

Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining: Analysis of Negative Book Value Firms

Negative book value firms have become more prevalent in recent years, ranging from 0.41% of all Compustat firms in 1961 to 12.47% in 2016 with highest representations in the healthcare, telecommunication, and computer electronic industries. To examine why these negative book value firms are not liquidated, we investigate firms’ 1) current accounting practices, 2) future investment opportunities, and 3) narrative investment disclosures. We first document that negative book value firms adopting a more conservative accounting practice in the current period are less likely to be liquidated. Next, we find that the liquidation likelihood is lower for negative book value firms with higher levels of future intangible investments. Furthermore, we employ a machine-learning-based latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) approach to measure investment-oriented firm disclosures and find a lower liquidation likelihood for negative book value firms disclosing more future investment narratives. Our evidence is robust to including reorganization firms and extending the length of the liquidation window. Overall, our study sheds light on why negative book value firms are not liquidated by providing evidence on firms’ current accounting practices and future investment opportunities

The South and carbon dioxide: every cloud has a silver lining

Money makes the world go round. The growth of the now 370 trillion dollar derivatives market, according to a Bank of International Settlements estimate for the first half of 2006, serves to remind us that the financial sector is the compass from which both companies and countries take their direction. Yet as news about climate chaos, persistent poverty and intensifying inequality continues to percolate our pleasant lives in the West, we have to ask whether money is now causing the downfall of the world. In recent years more people have been choosing to engage in global finance to solve problems of the environment and international development. Their efforts herald a new paradigm for ethical finance, which no longer focuses on personal ethical dilemmas within existing professional frameworks but on how to use opportunities as a financial services professional to transform those frameworks so the world’s most powerful motor – money – makes the world work around barriers to a more sustainable, just and healthy future. Our paper outlines how this is happening both in professions and in academia. It identifies urgent interconnected challenges of climate change, unemployment, local enterprise and poverty reduction, and suggests that a new approach to socially responsible investing is required to create new frameworks for the innovative financing of sustainable enterprise in the global South. Investors can make money while contributing to low-carbon high-employment societies, if they help support the development of appropriate risk adjusting mechanisms. This focus on creating new financial frameworks is one of the highest embodiments of a commitment to our common humanity and ecology, which is the ground of all subsequent ethical discourse and philosophy