Institutional Voids, Investment Purposes, and Foreign Subsidiaries of Multinational Enterprises

This dissertation is motivated by two sets of research questions: (a) Whether, how, and when host-country market and institutional conditions have implications for the performance of foreign subsidiaries? And (b) Whether, how, and when investment purposes/motives for which foreign subsidiaries are established relate to the extent to which the subsidiaries/their parents overcome the hazards of or capitalize on the opportunities from operating in locations of high institutional voids? The first essay examines how the decision to enter African markets relates to the exit probability of MNE subsidiaries. Using a longitudinal, paired-sample design of Japanese foreign subsidiaries operating in Africa and OECD countries, it finds that entry to Africa increases the hazard rate of subsidiaries, but that subsidiaries entering with more diverse investment purposes and greater market-seeking orientation have a better likelihood of survival. Consistent with the institutional-based theory of corporate diversification, the research findings introduce purpose diversity and market-seeking orientation as potential mechanisms to mitigate the hazards of institutional voids/instability. Also, by considering the phenomenon of within-subsidiary diversity (of purposes) and its interaction with institutional conditions, the essay advances the notion of subsidiary scope and its implications. The second essay examines the relationship between country-level income distribution and the exit of foreign subsidiaries using longitudinal data from 6,699 Japanese market-seeking subsidiaries operating in 47 countries. It finds a strong empirical evidence of a curvilinear relationship between the nature of host-country income distribution and the probability of subsidiary exit. Whereas extreme levels of income distribution (i.e., highly egalitarian or highly dispersed) correspond to higher risk of subsidiary exit, intermediate levels of income distribution are associated with a decrease in exit probability. Further, this relationship is moderated by the level of host-country institutional development. The third essay draws on the modified one-tier bargaining model characterizing Chinese inward FDI in developing countries to advance a theory of political connections and their implications on MNE competitive advantage in developing countries. It develops a typology of political connections based on the approach to political action (transactional and relational) and the level of participation (individual and collective). It argues that the collective-relational approach to political connections makes for superior competitive advantage, as the collective aspect facilitates access to and mobilization of resources and the relational aspect helps build favourable legitimacy. Further, it considers relevant organizational and institutional boundary conditions. The theoretical arguments integrate perspectives from the resource-based view and resource dependence theory and provide explanation to the rising prominence of Chinese MNEs in the developing world. On the whole, this dissertation makes contributions to a better understanding of institutional voids and their economic and strategic implications. As well, it generates useful theoretical and empirical insights regarding the investment purposes/motives of multinational enterprises operating in locations of high institutional voids

Air Pollution Control and Sustainable Development

This book brings together the latest research findings on the state of air pollution control and its impact on economic growth in different countries. The book has substantial content and rich discussion. It is suitable for students and researchers at different levels to learn the status of air pollution, governance policies and their effects, and the relationship between pollution control and economic growth in countries around the world

Language Switching using Augmentative and Alternative Communication: An Investigation of Spanish-English Bilingual Children with and without Language Impairments

Children with severe speech and language impairments may rely on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for a variety of communicative functions. Despite the availability of bilingual AAC devices that allow the user to communicate in more than one language and alternate between languages, little research has addressed assessment and intervention concerns for bilingual children who use AAC. This study investigated the ability of bilingual children with and without language impairments to discriminate between languages using a bilingual AAC app during a cued language switching task. Participants included 58 English-Spanish bilingual children ages 4;0 – 6;11 (23 with language impairments). Children received standardized language assessments in English and Spanish as well as assessment of nonverbal IQ and processing speed. All participants completed an experimental language switching task in which they were asked to locate images of vocabulary words in Spanish and English using a Spanish and English speech-generating device (SGD). Parents of child participants completed a demographic information form and participated in an interview about their child’s language environments. Results of a series of hierarchical linear regressions indicated that when controlling for age, processing speed significantly predicted children’s ability on the experimental language switching task. Nonparametric tests showed no evidence of increased response times on trials where participants were required to switch between languages compared to trials where they did not switch. Further analysis indicated that language dominance, nonverbal IQ, and language abilities were not significant predictors of bilingual language switching ability using AAC. Results from this study indicated that in addition to age, processing speed ability may be an important predictor of children’s ability to language switch using AAC. This study contributes to the understanding of how young bilingual children conceptualize and discriminate between language systems. This research paves the way for further assessment and intervention studies to investigate how best to support bilingual children with language impairments and developmental disabilities who may benefit from AAC

The development of an English Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) measure for very young children, to be completed by proxy

Background and Aims: There is an increasing awareness that, in order to monitor health outcomes both mortality and morbidity need to be assessed. A common metric used to measure morbidity and functional limitation is the quality adjusted life year or QALY, which incorporates time spent in a health condition and Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) into the measure. This is of increasing importance in Low Income Countries (LIC) where programmes have been adopted and implemented to address the high burden of child mortality. The ‘first 1000 days’ is one such initiative which has been adopted by the WHO to improve nutritional support, health care and social support for both the mother and child. One of the aims is to improve quality of life during this vulnerable period. As there is currently no appropriate measure of HRQoL in this age group, we set out to develop a valid and reliable, HRQoL instrument for children from 1 month to 3 years old, amenable to the elicitation of preference weights. Methods: The new HRQoL instrument, HRQoL-6D-IT, was based firstly on a mapping review of HRQoL measures for children. The next stage involved eliciting options through cognitive review from caregivers of very young children regarding HRQoL dimensions included in the EQ-5D-Y an existing validated HRQoL measure for older children. The care-givers were requested to identify items to be considered for inclusion, the wording and layout of the new measure. The item pool generated from the literature reviews and cognitive interviews were then assessed through a Delphi study with experts in the field. These items were further reduced through subsequent testing of items and retesting of a preliminary measure. The final items on the HRQoL-6D-IT included: movement, play, pain, relationships, communication and eating and, apart from pain, the descriptors referenced the behaviour of the child to age appropriate behaviour. The HRQoL-6D-IT was then tested for validity and reliability in a group of acutely-ill (AI), chronically-ill (CI) and typically developing (TD) children in two provinces in South Africa: Western and Eastern Cape. Results: The methodology used to identify candidate items was rigorous and yielded items which were developed to be observable with dimension descriptors referring to ‘age appropriate behaviour’. Caregivers were able to reliably report on HRQoL of their very young children from age 1-36 months. The content validity had been established during the development of the instrument. Concurrent validity of the different items (dimensions) was tested between the HRQoL-6D-IT and relevant items from the ASQ, FLACC and NIPS pain scale and Diet History

Integrating Recognition and Decision Making to Close the Interaction Loop for Autonomous Systems

Intelligent systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in daily life. Mobile devices are providing machine-generated support to users, robots are coming out of their cages in manufacturing to interact with co-workers, and cars with various degrees of self-driving capabilities operate amongst pedestrians and the driver. However, these interactive intelligent systems\u27 effectiveness depends on their understanding and recognition of human activities and goals, as well as their responses to people in a timely manner. The average person does not follow instructions step-by-step or act in a formulaic manner, but instead varies the order of actions and timing when performing a given task. People explore their surroundings, make mistakes, and may interrupt an activity to handle more urgent matters. The decisions that an autonomous intelligent system makes should account for such noise and variance regardless of the form of interaction, which includes adapting action choices and possibly its own goals.While most people take these aspects of interaction for granted, they are complex and involve many specific tasks that have primarily been studied independently within artificial intelligence. This results in open-loop interactive experiences where the user must perform a fixed input command or the intelligent system performs a hard-coded output response---one of the components of the interaction cannot adapt with respect to the other for longer-term back-and-forth interactions. This dissertation explores how developments in plan recognition, activity recognition, intent recognition, and autonomous planning can work together to develop more adaptive interactive experiences between autonomous intelligent systems and the people around them. In particular, we consider a unifying perspective of recognition algorithms that provides sufficient information to dynamically produce short-term automated planning problems, and we present ways to run these algorithms faster for the real-time needs of interaction. This exploration leads to the introduction of the Planning and Recognition Together Close the Interaction Loop (PReTCIL) framework that serves as a first step towards identifying how we can address the problem of closing the interaction loop, in addition to new questions that need to be considered

Statistical Graph Quality Analysis of Utah State University Master of Science Thesis Reports

Graphical software packages have become increasingly popular in our modern world, but there are concerns within the statistical visualization field about the default settings provided by these packages, which can make it challenging to create good quality graphs that align with standard graph principles. In this thesis, we investigate whether the quality of graphs from Utah State University (USU) Plan A Master of Science (MS) thesis reports from the years 1930 to 2019 was affected by the rise of graphical software packages. We collected all data stored on the USU Digital Commons website since November 2021 to determine the specific group of graphs we wanted to investigate and developed a sampling process to obtain a sample size of 90 graphs evenly distributed over the time range. To accurately judge graph quality, we compiled and condensed good graphic standards from the statistical literature and developed our own set of graph quality criteria, grouped within four distinct categories: Labeling, Clear Understanding, Meaningful, and Scaling and Gridlines. We constructed a scoring system to rate the quality of graphs against these criteria and explored the results by constructing several visualizations and performing various statistical analyses. Our analysis assessed whether the rise of graphical software packages impacted the quality of graphs within the USU Plan A MS thesis reports

A COMPARISON BETWEEN MOTIVATIONS AND PERSONALITY TRAITS IN RELIGIOUS TOURISTS AND CRUISE SHIP TOURISTS

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the motivations and the personality traits that characterize tourists who choose religious travels versus cruises. Participating in the research were 683 Italian tourists (345 males and 338 females, age range 18–63 years); 483 who went to a pilgrimage travel and 200 who chose a cruise ship in the Mediterranean Sea. Both groups of tourists completed the Travel Motivation Scale and the Big Five Questionnaire. Results show that different motivations and personality traits characterize the different types of tourists and, further, that motivations for traveling are predicted by specific —some similar, other divergent— personality trait

Development and application of a genetic algorithm-informational modeling approach to exploatory statistical modeling of lizard-habitat relationships

Anolis carolinensis, an arboreal lizard common to the southeasternUnited States, has been studied often in lab settings, but infrequently in its natural habitats with respect to the ecology of this species. The current study conducted exploratory statistical modeling of associations between 18 habitat features and the occurrence of A. carolinensis in study plots at the northern distributional limits of this species in eastern Tennessee.Statistical hypothesis-testing procedures and stepwise computer algorithms are commonly used by ecologists to analyze observational (nonexperimental)multivariate data, such as the data analyzed in this study.However, such procedures and algorithms are frequently, but inappropriately, used to find the single supposedly \u27best statistical models and/or support interpretations of the importance or causal nature of variables in the model. Thus, such analyses provide only a narrow scientific view of the multivariate data and the many potentially useful models.The present study developed a genetic algorithm-information modeling (GAIM) approach to a) reduce certain computational and statistical limitations imposed by stepwise algorithms and hypothesis testing procedures, respectively, and b) conduct a wider exploration of any observational multivariate data set. The GAIM approach utilizes a genetic algorithm, which bases its searching power on biological and evolutionary concepts, and the informational approach to statistics, which bases its ability to rank and evaluate models on statistical likelihood and information theory. It is suggested that researchers use an approach that provides a wider view of the data (e.g., finds many models that fit the datawell instead of just one or a few models), such as the GAIM approach, to more fully explore observational multivariate data. The set of well-fitting models obtained from a GAIM analysis can then be used to propose combinations of variables or factors that could be investigated by experiments in order to test causal hypotheses and/or produce predictivemodels.One hundred sixty-six plots were placed in four different habitats along the Little Tennessee River where A. carolinensis occurs. Plots were surveyed for the presence/absence of this species in summer and winter seasons and habitat variables, both in and adjacent to the plots, were measured. Logistic regression modeling using the GAIM approach was conducted separately on the summer and winter data sets. For the summer data, the most frequent variables in the final set of GA models were(including the intercept): distance to potential overwintering rock, summercanopy categorization, distance to habitat edge, herb/shrub/vine cover,swimmer sunlight index, ambient temperature, and standardized distance along the habitat edge from the west boundary of habitat.For the winter data, the most frequent variables in the final set of models were (including the intercept): ambient temperature, presence of live overstory evergreen tree trunks, presence of overwintering rock,standardized distance along the habitat edge from the west boundary of habitat, distance to potential overwintering rock, and canopy cover categorization. In each data set, the variables which most frequently occurred in the final model set were also the ones which most frequently assessed statistically significant parameter estimates.The summer models suggest that further research on A. carolinensis might focus on a) sunlight and thermal factors and b) habitat features related to certain spatial scales beyond the skimmer home range scale.Future research might also examine responses of this species to winter habitat features such as a) shelter and potential basking sites, b) sunlight availability and temperature, and c) spatial features beyond the typical winter home range size. Methods using experimental control, or at least partial control, over field variables are needed to determine the specific responses of this species to key habitat features and the causal mechanisms underlying those responses. In addition, more studies are needed whichtake approaches based on biophysical and physiological ecology, especially if they can be linked to reproductive output, population ecology, and habitat use on local and regional scales

A Study of Tax Authority Information Assistance in Malaysia: Determinants of Its Usage and Impacts on Tax Compliance

This study examines the use of tax authority information assistance among Malaysian self-lodgers. Specifically, it examines the elements associated with its usage and its significance for tax compliance. Data was collected using a mixed-methods approach. The survey data was analysed using SPSS while interviews were manually analysed. The results suggested and threat coping appraisals as significant in motivating the use of information assistance. Additionally, the use of information assistance is associated with administrative compliance