Based on evidence from press articles covering 39 corporate fraud cases that went public during the period 1992-2005, the objective of this article is to examine the role of managers' behavior in the commitment of the fraud. This study integrates the fraud triangle (FT) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to gain a better understanding of fraud cases. The results of the analysis suggest that personality traits appear to be a major fraud-risk factor. The analysis was further validated through (...) a quantitative analysis of keywords which confirmed that keywords associated with the attitudes/rationalizations component of the integrated theory were predominately found in fraud firms as opposed to a sample of control firms. The results of the study suggest that auditors should evaluate the ethics of management through the components of the TPB: the assessment of attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control and moral obligation. Therefore, it is potentially important that the professional standards that are related to fraud detection strengthen the emphasis on managers' behavior that may be associated with unethical behavior. (shrink)

We examine enforcement action in China’s emerging markets by focusing on the agents that impose this action and the role played by supervisory boards. Using newly available databases, we find that supervisory boards play an active role when Chinese listed companies face enforcement action. Listed firms with larger supervisory boards are more likely to have more severe sanctions imposed upon them by the China Security Regulatory Commission, and listed companies that face more severe enforcement actions have more supervisory board meetings. (...) Our findings are of interest, as supervisory boards in China are generally perceived to be dysfunctional. This study contributes to the existing literature in three ways. First, we shed light on the effects of supervisory boards whose role in a fraud setting has not yet been examined. Second, the study has important policy implications for governance reform. Finally, our analyses provide the most up-to-date picture of fraud and governance issues in China’s ever-growing markets. (shrink)

Using listed firms in China over the period 2010–2018, we investigate the association between directors’ network and quality of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure from the lens of resource-based view. We find a significantly positive effect of directors’ network centrality on the CSR disclosure quality, and the effect is more pronounced when the firm (1) invests less in advertising; (2) is followed by less analysts; (3) is less financially constrained; and (4) has no assurance of sustainability report. Furthermore, we document (...) that independent directors’ network centrality is positively associated with CSR disclosure quality. Our findings have important implication for practitioners, policy makers, and regulators. (shrink)

This paper investigates the principles that one must add to Boolean algebra to capture reasoning not only about intersection, union, and complementation of sets, but also about the relative size of sets. We completely axiomatize such reasoning under the Cantorian definition of relative size in terms of injections.

The relationship between professional ethical reflection and corresponding moral behavior is an important theme of moral psychology in recent years. Following Schönegger and Wagner’s research in German-speaking countries, through a replication-extension of the original US-based research carried out by Schwitzgebel and Rust, we aim at examining their results in the Chinese context. The previous researchers have shown that ethical reflection generally has no positive effect on moral behavior. A cross validation of this result was conducted in Chinese mainland, and three (...) issues concerning Confucian virtues were added. Through reaching out to 4482 professors and collecting 368 responses altogether, we attempted to explore whether professional ethical reflection can influence normative attitude and the moral attitude-behavior consistency. Unfortunately, the results failed to show a statistically significant difference between ethicists and other professors on most of the moral issues, with the exception of paying academic membership fees and vegetarianism, wherein ethicists do express more stringent normative attitudes, and their moral attitude and self-reported behavior are statistically consistent. Notably, Chinese professors mainly expressed morally neutral attitudes toward the issue of eating meat, and they tended to believe that ethical reflection contributes to more and better moral behaviors. (shrink)

We explore corporate environmental accountability by examining how carbon emissions affect voluntary climate-related information disclosure based on TCFD principles. Using computerized textual analysis to measure such climate-related disclosure, our results show that firms with higher levels of carbon emissions disclose more climate-related information. This relation is stronger in firms belonging to carbon-intensive industries, such as energy, materials, and utilities. We also examine this relationship at the category level for Governance, Strategy, Risk Management, and Metrics and Targets, finding that carbon emissions (...) drive disclosure in all categories except in Governance. Overall, our findings indicate that high carbon emitting firms appear to discharge their corporate accountability by increasing climate-related disclosure, consistent with legitimizing their potentially unethical actions and submitting to stakeholder and societal pressure. (shrink)

Theoretical evidence suggests that corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) should produce long-lasting negative influences on firm performance. Yet, little empirical evidence exists in the literature to support this time-embedded research frame. This research was conducted by collecting a large set of firm data and by employing a series of vector autoregressive models to map out the longitudinal dynamic relationships between CSI and firm value under high versus low levels of two external factors, environmental dynamism and competition intensity, and one internal factor, (...) firm capability. The results show that CSI’s negative influences endure in scenarios such as high dynamism, high competition intensity, and low capability, but it has only a short-term impact on low-dynamism markets and does not produce significant effects on firm value under low-competition or high-capability conditions. These findings yield useful implications for CSI, resource-based theory, and environment theories as well as for managerial effectiveness of coping with social negativities. (shrink)

Emotion is widely agreed to have two dimensions, valence and arousal. Few studies have explored the effect of emotion on conflict adaptation by considering both of these, which could have dissociate influence. The present study aimed to fill the gap as to whether emotional valence and arousal would exert dissociable influence on conflict adaptation. In the experiments, we included positive, neutral, and negative conditions, with comparable arousal between positive and negative conditions. Both positive and negative conditions have higher arousal than (...) neutral ones. In Experiment 1, by using a two-colour-word Flanker task, we found that conflict adaptation was enhanced in both positive and negative contexts compared to a neutral context. Furthermore, this effect still existed when controlling stimulus–response repetitions in Experiment 2, which used a four-colour-word Flanker task. The findings suggest emotional arousal enhances conflict adaptation, regardless of emotional valence. Thus, future studies should consider emotional arousal when studying the effect of emotion on conflict adaptation. Moreover, the unique role of the emotional context in conflict-driven cognitive control is emphasised. (shrink)

This study uses the institutional perspective to examine the interaction effects between the subnational institutional context and firm-level parameters on corporate environmental behaviors, based on a unique cross-sectional data set of private firms compiled from three different sources in China. Our results suggest that both enforcement stringency of environmental regulations at the provincial-level and private firms’ foreign ownership negatively affect compensation fees, which are levies charged for firms’ emissions. Enforcement stringency also moderates the firm-level relationship between foreign ownership and compensation (...) fees, but such a cross-level moderating effect holds only for private firms with non-HMT investments. (shrink)

This study adds to the theory of family business management by exploring the effects of family ownership on the corporate misconduct of small firms in the United States. The empirical findings indicate that small family-owned firms are less likely to commit misconduct than small non-family-owned firms. We interpret this finding as family firms aiming to achieve the trans-generational succession of moral capital. Further investigation shows a nonlinear family-ownership–misconduct relationship. A negative relationship between them only appears in mature firms. We further (...) show that for relatively mature firms, only family firms with older owners are less likely to commit corporate misconduct. (shrink)

This paper studies connections between two alternatives to the standard probability calculus for representing and reasoning about uncertainty: imprecise probability andcomparative probability. The goal is to identify complete logics for reasoning about uncertainty in a comparative probabilistic language whose semantics is given in terms of imprecise probability. Comparative probability operators are interpreted as quantifying over a set of probability measures. Modal and dynamic operators are added for reasoning about epistemic possibility and updating sets of probability measures.

This study examines the relationship between family control and young entrepreneurial firm’s bribing behavior around the globe. Relying on over 2,000 young firms from the World Bank Environment Survey, we find that family control helps to reduce a firm’s bribery behavior, but further investigation shows that this effect only exists in countries with weaker macro-governance environment. In countries with more established and transparent governance mechanism, family control does not seem to make any difference. We interpret our findings as the business (...) family’s preservation of socioemotional wealth. (shrink)

In "A Problem in Possible-World Semantics," David Kaplan presented a consistent and intelligible modal principle that cannot be validated by any possible world frame (in the terminology of modal logic, any neighborhood frame). However, Kaplan's problem is tempered by the fact that his principle is stated in a language with propositional quantification, so possible world semantics for the basic modal language without propositional quantifiers is not directly affected, and the fact that on careful inspection his principle does not target the (...) world part of possible world semantics—the atomicity of the algebra of propositions—but rather the idea of propositional quantification over a complete Boolean algebra of propositions. By contrast, in this paper we present a simple and intelligible modal principle, without propositional quantifiers, that cannot be validated by any possible world frame precisely because of their assumption of atomicity (i.e., the principle also cannot be validated by any atomic Boolean algebra expansion). It follows from a theorem of David Lewis that our logic is as simple as possible in terms of modal nesting depth (two). We prove the consistency of the logic using a generalization of possible world semantics known as possibility semantics. We also prove the completeness of the logic (and two other relevant logics) with respect to possibility semantics. Finally, we observe that the logic we identify naturally arises in the study of Peano Arithmetic. (shrink)

Given a Polish groupG, let$E(G)$be the right coset equivalence relation$G^{\omega }/c(G)$, where$c(G)$is the group of all convergent sequences inG. The connected component of the identity of a Polish groupGis denoted by$G_0$.Let$G,H$be locally compact abelian Polish groups. If$E(G)\leq _B E(H)$, then there is a continuous homomorphism$S:G_0\rightarrow H_0$such that$\ker (S)$is non-archimedean. The converse is also true whenGis connected and compact.For$n\in {\mathbb {N}}^+$, the partially ordered set$P(\omega )/\mbox {Fin}$can be embedded into Borel equivalence relations between$E({\mathbb {R}}^n)$and$E({\mathbb {T}}^n)$.

We prove that there is no sw-complete c.e. real, negatively answering a question in [6].

Nowadays, depression is the world’s major health concern and economic burden worldwide. However, due to the limitations of current methods for depression diagnosis, a pervasive and objective approach is essential. In the present study, a psychophysiological database, containing 213 subjects, was constructed. The electroencephalogram signals of all participants under resting state and sound stimulation were collected using a pervasive prefrontal-lobe three-electrode EEG system at Fp1, Fp2, and Fpz electrode sites. After denoising using the Finite Impulse Response filter combining the Kalman (...) derivation formula, Discrete Wavelet Transformation, and an Adaptive Predictor Filter, a total of 270 linear and nonlinear features were extracted. Then, the minimal-redundancy-maximal-relevance feature selection technique reduced the dimensionality of the feature space. Four classification methods distinguished the depressed participants from normal controls. The classifiers’ performances were evaluated using 10-fold cross-validation. The results showed thatK-Nearest Neighbor had the highest accuracy of 79.27%. The result also suggested that the absolute power of the theta wave might be a valid characteristic for discriminating depression. This study proves the feasibility of a pervasive three-electrode EEG acquisition system for depression diagnosis. (shrink)

This paper sheds light on the incongruent findings concerning the relationship between family involvement and firms’ corporate social responsibility. While prior studies have mainly taken the perspective of families’ socioemotional wealth preservation, we approach this relationship from the perspective of behavioral agency theory, highlighting the important role played by CEOs’ family memberships. Specifically, we posit that family firms are more likely to invest in CSR when their CEOs are members of the controlling families. Furthermore, we examine how family firms can (...) employ long-term incentives to encourage non-family CEOs to act in the interests of the controlling families to preserve SEW and thus enhancing family firms’ CSR performance. We tested our hypotheses using hand-collected data of family firms included in the S&P 500 index, in the period of 2003–2010. The empirical findings support our hypotheses that family firms with family members as the CEOs have better CSR performance and family firms tend to provide a high level of long-term incentives to non-family than family CEOs. In addition, long-term incentives strongly motivate CEOs to improve firms’ CSR performance, regardless of their family memberships. (shrink)

Background: Prenatal and postnatal mental disorders can exert severe adverse influences on mothers, fetuses, and children. However, the effect of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic on the mental health of pregnant and postpartum women remains unclear.Methods: Relevant studies that were published from January 1, 2019 to September 19, 2020 were identified through the systematic search of the PubMed, EMBASE, and Web of Science databases. Quality assessment of included studies, random-effects meta-analysis, sensitivity analysis, and planned subgroup analysis were performed.Results: A total (...) of 23 studies conducted with 20,569 participants during the COVID-19 pandemic and with 3,677 pregnant women before the COVID-19 pandemic were included. The prevalence rates of anxiety, depression, psychological distress, and insomnia among pregnant women during the COVID-19 pandemic were 37%, 31%, 70%, and 49%, respectively. The prevalence of postpartum depression was 22%. Multigravida women and women in the first and third trimesters of pregnancy were more vulnerable than other pregnant women. The assessment of the associations between the COVID-19 pandemic and mental health problems revealed that the pooled relative risks of anxiety and depression in pregnant women were 1.65 and 1.08, respectively.Conclusions: The prevalence rates of mental disorders among pregnant and postpartum women during the COVID-19 pandemic were high. Timely and tailored interventions should be applied to mitigate mental problems among this population of women, especially multigravida women and women in the first and third trimesters of pregnancy. (shrink)

We investigate Borel reducibility between equivalence relations $E(X;p)=X^{\mathbb{N}}/\ell_{p}(X)'s$ where X is a separable Banach space. We show that this reducibility is related to the so called Hölder(α) embeddability between Banach spaces. By using the notions of type and cotype of Banach spaces, we present many results on reducibility and unreducibility between E(L r ; p)'s and E(c 0 ; p)'s for r, p ∈ [1, +∞). We also answer a problem presented by Kanovei in the affirmative by showing that $\mathrm{C}\left({\mathrm{\mathbb{R}}}^{+}\right)/{\mathrm{C}}_{0}\left({\mathrm{\mathbb{R}}}^{+}\ri ght)$ (...) is Borel bireducible to $\mathbb{R}^{\mathbb{N}}/c_{0}$. (shrink)

Prior research has documented the continued existence of an expectation gap, defined as the divergence between the public’s and the profession’s conceptions of auditor’s duties, despite the auditing profession’s attempt to adopt standards and practices to close this gap. In this paper, we consider one potential explanation for the persistence of the expectation gap: the role of media bias in shaping public opinion and views. We analyze press articles covering 40 U.S. corporate fraud cases discovered between 1992 and 2011. We (...) compare the auditor’s duties, described by the auditing standards, with the description of the fraud cases as found in the press articles. We draw upon prior research to identify three sources of the expectation gap: deficient performance, deficient standards, and unreasonable expectations. The results of our analysis provide evidence that the performance gap can be reduced by strengthening auditor’s willingness and ability to apply existing auditing standards concerning fraud detection; the standards gap can be narrowed by improving existing auditing standards; and unreasonable expectations, however, involve elements beyond the profession’s sphere of control. As a result, the expectation gap is unlikely to disappear given the media’s tendency to bias, with an overemphasis of unreasonable expectations in their coverage of frauds and press articles tending to reinforce the view that the auditor should take more responsibility for detecting fraud, irrespective of whether this is feasible at a reasonable cost. In addition to the primary role of the press in perpetuating the expectation gap, a second reason for continuation of the expectation gap is that the rational auditor will have difficulty in assessing subjective components of fraudulent behavior. (shrink)

In common with much of the Western world, agrarianism—valuing farmers and agricultural activity as intrinsically worthwhile, noble, and contributing to the strength of the national character—runs through Australian culture and politics. Agrarian sentiments and attitudes have been identified through empirical research and by inference from analysis of political debate, policy content, and studies of media and popular culture. Empirical studies have, however, been largely confined to the US, with little in the way of recent re-evaluations of, or developments from, early (...) work. This paper reports on research that seeks quantitative empirical evidence for the existence of agrarianism in the Australian community and seeks to identify its core characteristics. Using a purpose-designed sub-set of items within a large, omnibus-style survey of regional and rural Australia, we demonstrate that agrarianism exists as a scientifically quantifiable concept identifiable through responses to four key propositions: that Australians should support policies aimed at improving the position of the agricultural industries; that working in agriculture and associated industries brings out the best in people; that agricultural producers make a major contribution to environmental protection and biodiversity conservation; and that the development of agriculture in Australia contributed to the development of the national character. We found very little variation in the degree to which different demographic groupings agree with agrarianism. Older people, farmers, and non-Indigenous Australian-born respondents were among those who were statistically significantly more likely to agree with the defining propositions of agrarianism, but their scores were only very slightly higher than those of other sub-populations in the sample. (shrink)

The present study constructed a moderated mediation model to examine whether borderline pathological celebrity worship may be associated with higher levels of impulsive buying intent. The mediating role of empathy and the moderating role of gender were also examined. A total of 1,319 participants recruited from a college through the campus network. The results indicated that borderline pathological celebrity worship could positively predict individuals’ impulsive buying intent; the predictive effect of borderline pathological celebrity worship on impulsive buying intent could be (...) mediated by empathy; and gender moderated the predictive effect of borderline pathological celebrity worship on impulsive buying intent. Specifically, relatively higher levels of borderline pathological celebrity worship were found to be associated with higher impulsive buying intent among men. However, this was relatively less significant among women.ConclusionThe results contribute to previous findings by demonstrating that borderline pathological celebrity worship could affect impulsive buying intent. Moreover, the mediating role of empathy and the moderating role of gender were also revealed. (shrink)

AimTo investigate the status of positive mental characters and humanistic care ability among Chinese nursing students, and confirm the association between positive mental characters and humanistic care ability.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was conducted. Nine hundred eighty-one Chinese nursing students were recruited from hospitals and community healthcare services in Changsha, Hunan, China. Three different self-reported questionnaires were applied: The Demographic Characteristics Questionnaire, Humanistic care ability of Nursing Undergraduates Assessment Scale and Positive Mental Characters Scale for Chinese College Students. Pearson correlation analysis and (...) multiple liner regression analysis were performed to analyze the association between positive mental character and humanistic care ability for Chinese nursing students.ResultsThe mean scores of nursing students' humanistic care ability and positive mental character were 125.94 ± 21.19, 233.18 ± 38.59, respectively. The Pearson correlation results showed that positive mental character was significantly associated with humanistic care ability. Multiple liner regression analysis indicated that positive mental characters, four dimensions of courage, humanity, justice and transcendence in positive mental character, care from classmates were found to be independent predictors of humanistic care ability.ConclusionPositive mental characters are important considerations in the development, implementation and evaluation of humanistic care ability interventions. (shrink)

ObjectivesTo simulate hemodynamic changes after extraluminal compression in pulsatile tinnitus patients with a prominent transverse-sigmoid sinus junction.MethodsOne patient-specific case was reconstructed based on computed tomography venography images of a PT patient. The compression degree served as a new index in this study. Cases with 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, and 90% of the compression degree of the control subject were constructed. Steady-state computational fluid dynamics were assessed. The wall pressure distribution, wall maximum pressure and flow pattern of (...) the PTSJ were calculated to evaluate hemodynamic differences among all cases.ResultsWith increasing compression, the wall pressure at the compression point and downstream of the PTSJ decreased but increased upstream. When the compression degree exceeded 70%, the upstream pressure increased significantly. Above 50% compression, the blood flow pattern downstream of the sigmoid sinus tended to spiral, especially after 80% compression. Beyond 60% compression, the blood flow pattern under the compression axis became more medial.ConclusionMechanical compression of PTSJ changes wall pressure and blood flow patterns. The degree of compression should be carefully observed to avoid possible complications or reoccurrence. (shrink)

Myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein antibody-associated disease is an immune-mediated demyelinating disease of the central nervous system that is present in both adults and children. The most common clinical manifestations are optic neuritis, myelitis, acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, and brainstem syndrome. Cerebral cortical encephalitis is a rare clinical phenotype of myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein antibody-associated disease, which usually begins with seizures, headaches, and fever, and may be misdiagnosed as viral encephalitis in the early stages. Herein, we report two typical MOG antibody -positive patients presenting (...) with CCE, both of whom presented with headache, fever, seizures, and who recovered completely after immunotherapy. In addition, we performed a systematic review of the present literature from the perspectives of population characteristics, clinical symptoms, MRI abnormalities, treatments, and prognosis. Among the patients reported in 25 articles, 33 met our inclusion criteria, with the age of onset ranging from 4 to 52 years. Most of the patients had seizures, headache, fever, and unilateral cortical lesions on brain MRI. For acute CCE, 30 patients were treated with high-dose intravenous methylprednisolone, and the symptoms of most patients were completely relieved after immunotherapy. This study reported our experience and lessons learned in the diagnosis and treatment of MOG-Ab-positive CCE and provides a systematic review of the literature to analyse this rare clinical phenotype. (shrink)

This study explored the relationship between teacher job stress and job burnout using a sample of 558 primary and secondary school teachers, who were administered with a teacher job stress scale, teacher job burnout scale, work–family conflict questionnaire, and general self-efficacy scale. The results showed that: job stress had a significant predictive effect on work–family conflict and job burnout; work–family conflict played a mediating role in the relationship between job stress and job burnout; self-efficacy was found to play a moderating (...) role in work–family conflict and job burnout. However, this indirect effect was stronger for teachers with high self-efficacy, which means that the protective effects of self-efficacy were limited. These findings add to research on the relationship between teacher job stress and job burnout, and provide ideas for teachers to balance work–family relationships and reduce job burnout. (shrink)

In “History of the Lie: Prolegomena,” Derrida criticizes Arendt’s commitment to the “great resiliency” of factual truth against all lies in her essay “Truth and Politics,” claiming that she reintroduces a teleological account of history that clashes with her anti-totalitarian and anti-systematic thinking. By focussing on her understanding of truth-telling as action, this article shows that Arendt does not turn truth into a permanently stable ground for politics. Instead, Arendt’s theory of self-deception constitutes a lie capable of ending all truth. (...) Set in opposition to the nihilism of self-deception, Arendt understands truth-telling as an exemplary act that preserves the possibility of truthfulness and future actions. (shrink)

We prove that every Turing degree a bounding some non-GL₂ degree is recursively enumerable in and above (r.e.a.) some 1-generic degree.

Weakly Aggregative Modal Logic (WAML) is a collection of disguised polyadic modal logics with n-ary modalities whose arguments are all the same. WAML has some interesting applications on epistemic logic and logic of games, so we study some basic model theoretical aspects of WAML in this paper. Specifically, we give a van Benthem-Rosen characterization theorem of WAML based on an intuitive notion of bisimulation and show that each basic WAML system Kn lacks Craig Interpolation.