Corporate sensitivity to sovereign credit distress : the mitigating effects of financial flexibility

Acknowledgements We are indebted to the Editor, Associate Editor, and anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions.Peer reviewe

Vice-chancellor narcissism and university performance

Universities hold a prominent role in knowledge creation through research and education. In this study, we examine the effects of VC narcissism on university performance. We measure VC narcissism based on the size of the signature, in line with a methodological approach which has been widely used in the recent literature and repeatedly validated in laboratory experiments. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment of VC changes and employ a Difference-in-Difference research design, which alleviates concerns related to endogeneity and identification bias. We show that the appointment of a highly narcissistic VC leads to an overall deterioration in research and teaching performance and concomitantly league table performance. We further identify excessive financial risk taking and empire-building as possible mechanisms explaining the main results and provide evidence on the moderating role of university governance. Our findings are consistent with the view that narcissism is one of the most prominent traits of destructive leadership; they also have practical implications for leadership recruitment and the monitoring of leadership practices in the higher education sector. The results of this study extend prior research in several ways. Extant literature on executive leadership and narcissism yields inconclusive findings; this literature has mainly focused on for-profit organisations and has not considered universities. In addition, prior research in higher education on the determinants of university performance has not yet examined the role of leadership personality traits

A fuzzy approach for prioritizing selection criteria

As the jobs market becomes more competitive, more students are trying to seek admission to overseas institutions for higher education. In the design of a personalized recommendation, identifying the appropriate selection criteria and providing a structured way to prioritizing them is crucial. The objective of this paper is to use the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process to facilitate the recommendation process.In the past, rarely have the survey questions been deliberately phrased to minimize the possible vagueness in the questions.This paper proposes an enhanced way of phrasing the questions such that the respondents would find the questions more easily understandable.It is argued that better understanding of the questions will minimize the ambiguity inherent in the questions, which would then enhance the consistency and reliability of the answers

Credit ratings and capital structure: New evidence from overconfident CFOs

In this paper, we examine the impact of credit rating changes on the financing decisions of overconfident CFOs. We find that CFO overconfidence significantly increases the sensitivity of net debt issuances to the rating changes, particularly when firms have no access to low-risk debt. Specifically, we establish that speculative-grade firms with overconfident CFOs reduce net debt issuance following rating changes (i.e. upgrades and downgrades). Our results hold after controlling for CEO bias. Furthermore, we document that CEO overconfidence has explanatory power on firm financing policies as it generates the potential multiplier effect on debt conservatism, as well as on investment return. Findings of our paper are robust to model specifications and to the endogeneity bias

A comparative life-cycle assessment of photovoltaic electricity generation in Singapore by multicrystalline silicon technologies

10.1016/j.solmat.2017.08.040SOLAR ENERGY MATERIALS AND SOLAR CELLS174157-16