Corporate Governance, Firm Risk, And Corporate Social Responsibility: Evidence From Korean Firms

Given that the prior studies on the relationship between corporate governance structures and firm performance are silent on firms’ social responsible roles, this study introduces an integrated model by combining corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate governance structures. This model is used to investigate how CSR moderates the relationship between corporate governance and firm risk in a sample of 640 firm-by-year cases for 215 firms listed on the Korean Stock Exchange between 2005 and 2010. The results show that foreign ownership and board size have a significant and negative relationship with firm risk, whereas management ownership and outside director ratio have no significant effect on firm risk. The results demonstrate that CSR partially moderates the relationship between governance structures (especially management ownership and board size) and firm risk. These findings suggest that Korean firms with concentrated ownership structures can leverage CSR activities as invisible assets to achieve more efficient governance structure model.

Managerial Coaching Behavior and Employee Outcomes: A Structural Equation Modeling Analysis

During the last two decades, managerial coaching has become increasingly popular in organizations. Despite its popularity, there is a paucity of empirical evidence in the study of managerial coaching outcomes. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between perceived managerial coaching behavior and employee self-reported affective and performance-related outcomes based on perceptions of selected organization employees. Three theories, path-goal leadership, career motivation, and organization support, were used to frame the hypothesized conceptual model of managerial coaching outcomes for the current study. The systematic review of relevant literature identified satisfaction with work, role ambiguity, satisfaction with manager, career commitment, job performance, and organization commitment for the potential outcomes of managerial coaching. A 36-item survey including seven existing instruments was utilized to collect data. An estimation of the readability level for the survey was Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level 7.1. The survey was sent electronically to all employees in the selected government organization. The sample included 431 respondents representing a population of 1,399 employees. Descriptive statistics, principal component analysis, Cronbach‘s alpha estimates for reliability, correlation analysis, two-step modeling techniques for structural equation modeling, and Sobel tests were the analysis methods used in the study. The results of the analyses indicated that the hypothesized conceptual model was adequately supported by the empirical data of the study sample (χ2/df = 3.53; CFI = .91; IFI = .91; RMSEA = .08). The further investigations suggested that managerial coaching had a direct impact on employee satisfaction with work and role clarity and an indirect impact on satisfaction with work, career commitment, job performance, and organization commitment. Role clarity, as a direct outcome of managerial coaching, influenced job performance—such mediation was consistent with the hypothesized model for the study. The hypothesized model had clear and comprehensive illustrations of how managerial coaching affects work and organization-related variables, satisfaction with work, role clarity, career commitment, job performance, and organization commitment. This study provides empirical support to the proposed benefits of managerial coaching in organizations, and enhances the selected theories by offering additional empirical support to them

An Experimental Study on the Measurement of Fuel to Air Ratio Using Flame Chemiluminescence

This study is aiming at establishing the relationship between the optical signal of flame and an equivalent ratio of flame. In this experiment, flame optical signal in a furnace is measured using photodiode. The combustion system which is composed of metal fiber burner and vertical furnace and flame chemiluminescence is measured at various experimental conditions. In this study, the flame chemiluminescence of laminar premixed flame is measured by using commercially available photodiode. It is experimentally investigated the relationship between equivalent ratio and photodiode signal. In addition, The strategy of combustion control method is proposed by using the optical signal and fuel pressure. The results showed that certain relationship between optical data of photodiode and equivalence ratio exists and this leads to the successful application of this system for instantaneous measurement of equivalence ration of the combustion system

Regular Time-series Generation using SGM

Score-based generative models (SGMs) are generative models that are in the spotlight these days. Time-series frequently occurs in our daily life, e.g., stock data, climate data, and so on. Especially, time-series forecasting and classification are popular research topics in the field of machine learning. SGMs are also known for outperforming other generative models. As a result, we apply SGMs to synthesize time-series data by learning conditional score functions. We propose a conditional score network for the time-series generation domain. Furthermore, we also derive the loss function between the score matching and the denoising score matching in the time-series generation domain. Finally, we achieve state-of-the-art results on real-world datasets in terms of sampling diversity and quality.Comment: 9 pages, appendix 3 pages, under revie

Coexistence of plant species under harsh environmental conditions: an evaluation of niche differentiation and stochasticity along salt marsh creeks

Abstract Background Ecologists have achieved much progress in the study of mechanisms that maintain species coexistence and diversity. In this paper, we reviewed a wide range of past research related to these topics, focusing on five theoretical bodies: (1) coexistence by niche differentiation, (2) coexistence without niche differentiation, (3) coexistence along environmental stress gradients, (4) coexistence under non-equilibrium versus equilibrium conditions, and (5) modern perspectives. Results From the review, we identified that there are few models that can be generally and confidently applicable to different ecological systems. This problem arises mainly because most theories have not been substantiated by enough empirical research based on field data to test various coexistence hypotheses at different spatial scales. We also found that little is still known about the mechanisms of species coexistence under harsh environmental conditions. This is because most previous models treat disturbance as a key factor shaping community structure, but they do not explicitly deal with stressful systems with non-lethal conditions. We evaluated the mainstream ideas of niche differentiation and stochasticity for the coexistence of plant species across salt marsh creeks in southwestern Denmark. The results showed that diversity indices, such as Shannon–Wiener diversity, richness, and evenness, decreased with increasing surface elevation and increased with increasing niche overlap and niche breadth. The two niche parameters linearly decreased with increasing elevation. These findings imply a substantial influence of an equalizing mechanism that reduces differences in relative fitness among species in the highly stressful environments of the marsh. We propose that species evenness increases under very harsh conditions if the associated stress is not lethal. Finally, we present a conceptual model of patterns related to the level of environmental stress and niche characteristics along a microhabitat gradient (i.e., surface elevation). Conclusions The ecology of stressful systems with non-lethal conditions will be increasingly important as ongoing global-scale climate change extends the period of chronic stresses that are not necessarily fatal to inhabiting plants. We recommend that more ecologists continue this line of research