Search Results (49)

This study uses the CREATE^TM-AV/Kestrel simulation software to model a towed jumper scenario using standard aircraft settings to quantify paratrooper stability and risk of contact during static line airborne operations. The focus areas of this study include a review of the technical build-up, which includes aircraft, paratrooper and static line modeling, plus preliminary functional checkouts executed to verify simulation performance. This research and simulation development effort is driven by the need to meet the analysis demands required to support the US Army Personnel Airdrop with static line length studies and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Joint Airdrop Capability Syndicate (JACS) with airdrop interoperability assessments. Each project requires the use of various aircraft types, static line lengths and exit procedures. To help meet this need and establish a baseline proof of concept (POC) simulation, simulation setups were developed for a towed jumper from both the C-130J and C-17 using a 20-ft static line to support US Army Personnel Airdrop efforts. Concurrently, the JACS is requesting analysis to support interoperability testing to help qualify the T-11 parachute from an Airbus A400M Atlas aircraft, operated by NATO nations. Due to the lack of an available A400M geometry, the C-17 was used to demonstrate the POC, and plans to substitute the geometry are in order when it becomes available. The results of a nominal Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation run using a C-17 and C-130J will be reviewed with a sample of the output to help characterize performance differences for the aircraft settings selected. The US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center (DEVCOM-SC) Aerial Delivery Division (ADD) has partnered with the US Air Force Academy (USAFA) High Performance Computing Research Center (HPCRC) to enable Modeling and Simulation (M&S) capabilities that support the Warfighter and NATO airdrop interoperability efforts. Full article

This study investigates how bank mergers and acquisitions (M&As) reshape the monitoring architecture of syndicated loans and, by extension, borrowers’ financing conditions. Using a global panel of 20,299 syndicated loan contracts, originating in 43 countries between 1982 and 2020, we link LPC DealScan data to Securities Data Company M&A records to trace each loan’s lead arrangers before and after consolidation events. Fixed-effects regressions, enriched with borrower- and loan-level controls, reveal three key patterns. First, post-merger loans exhibit significantly more concentrated syndicates: the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index rises by roughly 130 points and lead arrangers retain an additional 0.8–1.1 percentage points of the loan, consistent with heightened monitoring incentives. Second, these effects are amplified when information asymmetry is acute, i.e., for opaque or unrated firms, supporting moral hazard theory predictions that lenders internalize greater risk by holding larger stakes. Third, relational capital tempers the impact of consolidation: borrowers with repeated pre-merger relationships face smaller increases in syndicate concentration, while switchers experience the most significant jumps. Robustness checks using lead arranger market share, alternative spread measures, and lag structures confirm the findings. Overall, the results suggest that bank consolidation strengthens lead arrangers’ incentives to monitor but simultaneously reduces risk-sharing among participant lenders. For borrowers, the net effect is a trade-off between potentially tighter oversight and reduced syndicate diversification, with the balance hinging on transparency and prior ties to the lender. These insights refine our understanding of how structural shifts in the banking sector cascade into corporate credit markets and should inform both antitrust assessments and borrower funding strategies. Full article

This study investigates how managers choose between alternative earnings management mechanisms among syndicated loan borrowers. Specifically, it examines the trade-off between accrual-based earnings management (AEM) and real activities manipulation (RAM) during the period leading up to syndicated loan origination. The study also explores whether lender monitoring mechanisms influence subsequent earnings management behavior. The syndicated loan market, positioned between the private and public fixed income markets, offers a distinctive context for analyzing these strategic decisions. Using a propensity score-matched sample of syndicated and bilateral loans issued between 1989 and 2005, the study finds that firms obtaining syndicated loans are more likely to engage in earnings manipulation beforehand, relying more heavily on AEM than on RAM. Further analysis reveals that monitoring mechanisms—such as lender reputation, the number of syndicate members, loan size, and loan maturity—are significantly associated with future changes in AEM but show a weaker relationship with changes in RAM. Full article

Background: During the past years, brain drain has become an international problem. A shortage of human resources in the medical field revealed its challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the large number of medical school graduates in Egypt, the reports of the World Health Organization and the Egyptian Medical Syndicate indicate a yearly decline in the number of physicians in Egypt. The aim of this study is to determine the factors affecting Egyptian physicians’ intention to leave Egypt to work in another country. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study with a self-administered questionnaire via the snowball sampling technique that focused on Egyptian physicians who graduated from Egyptian universities and were working in Egypt. The outcome measures include the migration intentions of physicians and their satisfaction with different aspects of work, their family and housing conditions, and their demographic characteristics. Results: The questionnaire was answered by 249 Egyptian physicians, 140 of whom were living in Egypt. The findings revealed that 66.4% of the sample in Egypt were considering working abroad. Work satisfaction was the main factor affecting the decisions of physicians in Egypt; the physicians with a lower satisfaction score were 20 times more likely to leave their country. Additionally, physicians who classified themselves as having a low economic status, being younger, or who were male were more likely to leave. Conclusion: Egypt may suffer major resource losses as a result of the high degree of dissatisfaction among physicians regarding their working conditions. To realize Egypt’s Vision 2030 for health and economic progress, policymakers need to address the driving factors and take probable intervention measures to reduce the drain of our physicians. Full article

Startups in the clean energy and environmental technology (CEET) sector can develop sustainable innovations, but mobilizing private finance has been difficult. As the venture capital (VC) investment model was found to be not well-suited for the CEET startups, diverse types of investors have received more attention. However, since previous studies have been dominated by a VC-centric perspective in the US and have overlooked collaborative relationships, the roles of various CEET investors have not been systematically analyzed. This study aims to analyze the diverse investors in the CEET investor network formed through co-investment syndication, using Japan as an underexplored regional context. Based on Japan’s comprehensive data from 2008 to 2022, this study examines the evolution, structure, and communities of the network. The analysis identified the development stages of the investor network: the formation stage (2008–2012), the expansion and diversification stage (2013–2017), and the stable growth stage (2018–2022). The results confirmed the strong influence of VCs, while a community analysis suggested the bridging role of governmental venture capital. The findings based on the CEET investor network contribute to expanding both the theoretical understanding and practical implications for overcoming the financing difficulties of CEET startups to address the climate change crisis. Full article

Practical challenges and special threats from scam-related fraud exist for regional and local communities in Southeast Asia during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The rise in pig-butchering operations in Southeast Asia is a major concern due to the increased use of digital technology and online financial transactions. Many of these operations are linked to organized crime syndicates operating across borders, posing challenges for law enforcement. As a first study in Vietnam, we combined the primary and secondary databases to unveil the nature of transnational scam-related fraud. Findings show that scammers are using advanced methods such as phishing, fraudulent investments, and identity theft to maximize their sophisticated tactics for achieving financial possession. There are organized crime rings operating in Vietnam and Cambodia, with Chinese groups playing a leading role behind the scenes. Social media and its various applications have become common platforms for these criminal activities. This study also calls for practical recommendations to consider specific challenges in combating these crimes, including building a strong framework with clear policies, encouraging multiple educational awareness campaigns in communities, enhancing effective cooperation among law enforcement and others, and supporting evidence-based approaches in research and application. While we recognized and assumed that pig-butchering operations with scam-related fraud are a complex problem that requires a well-rounded and coordinated response, the exact approach would depend on each country’s specific circumstances. Full article

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is essential for enhancing economic resilience and promoting sustainable development. However, inefficiencies in financial connectivity and capital allocation have hindered the facilitation of FDI. Bank linkages between countries in the global sectors of multinational enterprises (MNEs) offer potential solutions to these challenges. In this paper, we focus on whether sustainable FDI can benefit from consolidating bank linkages, which are measured for each pair of countries in each year as the number of bank pairs in both countries that are connected through cross-border syndicated lending. Using the gravity model, we provide empirical evidence based on cross-border data to support the following conclusions: (1) Bank linkages can sustainably enhance the host country’s attractiveness to FDI through information, external financing, and international financial services channels. (2) This positive effect is pronounced in host countries with lower financial development, weaker institution quality, and higher investment risk while remaining insignificant for OECD countries. (3) Bank linkages exhibit a lagged impact on FDI, but newly established bank linkages are more conducive to inward FDI than those established earlier. In this paper, we offer some policy implications for emerging economies and suggest that emerging economies should continue to deepen their financial openness and strengthen international bank links through various means to attract more inward FDI. Full article

In the context of the Chinese market, foreign cross-border venture capitalists have devised specific strategies to mitigate the challenges associated with the liabilities of foreignness, such as risks and information asymmetry. They have strategically leveraged social capital to not only decrease investment risk but also to influence their investment preferences and behaviors. To investigate the influence of different types of social capital on the investment decisions of cross-border venture capitalists, hypotheses are proposed and tested using regression analysis. Our research reveals several key findings in this regard. Firstly, cross-border venture capitalists with a robust structural social capital network exhibit a greater propensity to invest in early-stage companies. This suggests that well-established connections and partnerships within the Chinese entrepreneurial ecosystem provide a level of comfort and confidence when investing in ventures at their infancy. Interestingly, relational and cognitive social capital, though undoubtedly valuable, do not significantly impact the decision to make early-stage investments. Furthermore, we have observed that venture capitalists with higher levels of structural and cognitive social capital are more inclined to form syndications. Collaborative partnerships and shared knowledge networks seem to be crucial factors that drive syndication decisions. Lastly, venture capitalists endowed with substantial structural and relational social capital tend to allocate larger investment amounts, signifying the influence of business or personal relationships and network connections on the scale of their investments. Full article

In this paper, we empirically examine the impact of venture capital investment on the dividend policy of the invested companies using a sample of list companies from China’s ChiNext market during the period 2014 to 2019. Our empirical results show that different types of VC investments have different impacts on the dividend policies of the invested companies. To be specific, we found independent venture capital companies (IVCs) promote the company’s dividend payment and increase the level of dividend payments while corporate venture capital (CVC) inhibits the company’s dividend payment. The joint participation of multiple types of venture capital investment (syndication) also increases the company’s dividend distribution. Our main contributions are two-fold. First, we provide a comprehensive analysis in the field of VC and dividend policy; second, we differentiate VC from the perspective of investment objectives and examine its different impacts on the dividend policies of the invested companies. Full article

This paper investigates how historical inter-firm syndication networks influence venture capitalists’ (VCs) propensity to invest in startups pursuing novel, uncertain technologies, with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI). We theorize that VCs’ positional attributes within cumulative syndication networks determine their access to external expertise and intelligence that aid AI investment decisions amidst informational opacity. Specifically, reachability to prior AI investors provides referrals and insights transmitted across short network paths to reduce ambiguity. Additionally, VC brokerage between disconnected industry clusters furnishes expansive, non-redundant information that is pivotal for discovering and assessing AI opportunities. Through hypotheses grounded in social network theory, we posit network-based mechanisms that equip VCs to navigate uncertainty when engaging with ambiguous innovations like AI. We test our framework, utilizing comprehensive historical records of global venture capital investments. Analyzing the location information of VC firms in this database, we uncovered a history of 14,751 investments made by Korean and Japanese firms. Using these data, we assembled an imbalanced panel dataset from 1984 to 2022 spanning 230 Korean and 413 Japanese VCs, with 4508 firm-year observations. Negative binomial regression analysis of this dataset reveals how historical relational patterns among venture capital firms foster readiness to evaluate unfamiliar innovations. Full article

The lead arrangers of syndicated loans often have lending relationships with the borrowers, while other lenders participating in the syndicate largely engage in an arm’s length transaction. Relatively little is known about how these relationships affect the shares of syndicated loans that the lead arrangers retain in their portfolio. Using a random sample of 10,328 syndicated loans made to 7316 nonfinancial U.S. firms over the period 1987 to 2013, this paper investigates the impact of lending relationships on the shares of loans retained. The results show that lending relationships are associated with a significant reduction in retained shares. These results are robust to alternative estimation techniques, such as propensity score matching and binary endogenous treatment models, which are employed to address endogeneity concerns. Furthermore, the results provide additional evidence that the existence and strength of lending relationships lead to decreased retained shares, particularly for non-top-tier lead arrangers. Moreover, the findings also demonstrate that when lead arrangers have lending relationships with borrowers, they retain significantly smaller shares whether the loans are made to informationally opaque, small, or speculative-grade-rating firms. Overall, the findings of this paper have important implications for lenders seeking to reduce their risk exposure in syndicated loans. Full article

Venture capital plays a vital role in boosting economic growth by providing an inexhaustible impetus for economic innovation and development. We use all the joint venture capital events of Chinese listed companies in the past 10 years to describe the characteristics of the joint venture capital network structure, identify the dynamic evolution characteristics of the community, and introduce random attacks and deliberate attacks to explore the resilience of joint venture capital cooperation. The study finds that the joint venture capital network in China has expanded in scale, with an increasing number of participants and a diversified investment industry. However, the connection between members within the network remains relatively loose, indicating fragmentation and a need to improve network quality. The community structure of core members is significant, with evident differences in scale. The network exhibits weak robustness, relying heavily on key enterprises and demonstrating a poor ability to resist external interference. The study proposes countermeasures and suggestions for optimizing the network structure of joint venture capital, aiming to enhance the environment and performance of joint venture capital and promote the high-quality development of China’s joint venture capital market. Full article

This study utilizes the joint bond joint underwriting data of China’s securities firms from 2011 to 2020 to systematically explore the evolutionary characteristics of China’s collaborative bond joint underwriting networks from temporal, topological, and spatial dimensions. By employing social network analysis, Ucinet, and ArcGIS, we construct a longitudinal network panel data to quantitatively analyze the driving factors and their underlying mechanisms. The findings reveal that, in terms of topological structure, China’s bond joint underwriting networks exhibit increasingly mature, active, balanced, and accessible features, with domestic securities firms such as China Securities Co., Ltd. emerging as the backbone and foreign-backed firms gradually fading. In the spatial dimension, urban collaboration presents a transformation from triangular to butterfly-shaped, quadrilateral, and ultimately multicore networks. At the regional scale, inter-regional collaboration is most extensive between the eastern regions, followed by eastern–central regions, with eastern–western and central–western regions relatively less engaged. At the urban scale, the central positions of Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai are gradually strengthening, and their external radiation scope is expanding annually. The underlying mechanism driving this evolution is the increasing opportunities for securities firms to establish and adjust their cooperative relationships due to the maturing and active bond joint underwriting networks in China. To compensate for the opportunity cost of bond joint underwriting and to maximize collaboration benefits, securities firms need to select potential partners with close geographical proximity, similar business domains, larger underwriting scales, “friends of friends,” and “network star” status, thereby promoting the continuous evolution of China’s bond joint underwriting syndicates. Full article

The present article addresses the COVID-19 syndemic, that is, the interaction of SARS-CoV-2 with other diseases that interact and are determined by patterns of social inequality. The living and working conditions of migrant farmworkers increases the transmission of COVID-19. Descriptions of the experiences of migrant farmworkers provided by the professionals from different organizations that tend to them allowed the authors to discover the syndical nature of COVID-19. This study is based on qualitative descriptive research. Seventeen workers from different organizations participated in the study, through in-depth interviews between January and June 2022. A thematic analysis was performed to analyze the qualitative data. Two main themes emerged: Non-compliance with the collective labor agreement, and non-compliance with workplace health and safety standards. The results suggest that the adverse living and working conditions of the migrant farmworkers increased their risk of COVID-19 infection, due to the lack of compliance with the health measures decreed. The vulnerability experienced by migrant farmworkers increased work conflicts and prompted their mobilization to fight for their rights. Full article

Telemedicine has entered the daily lives of doctors, although the digital skills of healthcare professionals still remain a goal to be achieved. For the purpose of a large-scale development of telemedicine, it is necessary to create trust in the services it can offer and to favor their acceptance by healthcare professionals and patients. In this context, information for the patient regarding the use of telemedicine, the benefits that can be derived from it, and the training of healthcare professionals and patients for the use of new technologies are fundamental aspects. This consensus document is a commentary that has the aim of defining the information on and training aspects of telemedicine for pediatric patients and their caregivers, as well as pediatricians and other health professionals who deal with minors. For the present and the future of digital healthcare, there is a need for a growth in the skills of professionals and a lifelong learning approach throughout the professional life. Therefore, information and training actions are important to guarantee the necessary professionalism and knowledge of the tools, as well as a good understanding of the interactive context in which they are used. Furthermore, medical skills can also be integrated with the skills of various professionals (engineers, physicists, statisticians, and mathematicians) to birth a new category of health professionals responsible for building new semiotics, identifying criteria for predictive models to be integrated into clinical practice, standardizing clinical and research databases, and defining the boundaries of social networks and new communication technologies within health services. Full article