Search

In an era where work and workplaces are increasingly digitized, the pervasive phenomenon of cyberloafing—diverting work hours to non-job-related online activities—poses a growing challenge. This study delves into the intricacies of cyberloafing among Indian IT professionals, identifying and prioritizing its antecedents using a Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP). Surveying 250 employees from CMMI Level 5 IT companies in Delhi-NCR, our findings reveal that interpersonal factors hold the most significant weight (58.7%) in contributing to cyberloafing, followed by individual (29.7%) and situational antecedents (11.6%). Notably, factors such as status at work (44.3%), personality (15.6%), and managerial support (14.4%) emerged as crucial sub criteria. This research not only adds precision to understanding cyberloafing but also proposes tailored measures to mitigate its impact. Our results underscore the imperative for organizations to address cyberloafing, especially in the context of the dynamic Indian IT landscape.

This study aims to examine total factor productivity (TFP) growth in the Indian life insurance sector from 2008–09 to 2017–18 using a non-parametric frontier methodology. The methodology's unique approach over a decade and nine observation windows provides insights into industry dynamics. Results indicate a negligible role of efficiency change, emphasizing the industry's reliance on technical advancements. The results are pivotal for industry stakeholders, policymakers, and researchers aiming to boost efficiency and competitiveness. The findings underscore the need for strategic adaptation to technological shifts and optimized managerial practices to drive sustainable productivity growth in the dynamic landscape of the Indian life insurance sector.

Abstract: The vital players on the financial market in developing countries, banks, need strong corporate governance to ensure better performance and stability. This is the first study that investigates the impact of women in corporate governance in the banking industry and identifies research hotspots. The focus is on journal-published papers indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database. Descriptive analytics is used to show how papers are distributed in the observed period as well as by publisher, category in the WoS, and the most cited authors and papers. Content analysis is used to examine how women impact corporate governance in the banking industry. By mining the abstracts, research hotspots are identified for the entire examined period and for the last five years. In the last five years, 70.4% of papers have been published, indicating that researchers' interest in this area is growing. Emerald Publishing Group LTD is the top publisher, while the most cited authors are Berger, A.N., Kick, T., and Schaeck, K. The keywords "approach, responsibility, difference, institution, commitment, financial performance, and risk" were the most frequently used in the whole analyzed period, while in the last five years, the most commonly used keyword is "value". The positive impact of women in corporate governance prevails, especially on CRS disclosure data, bank performance, stability, and value. Our findings may serve as a starting point for further research for academics, researchers, and banking professionals, as well as for shareholders and regulatory bodies when composing the bank boards.

The scarcity of high-resolution empirical data directly tracking diversity over time limits our understanding of speciation and extinction dynamics and the drivers of rate changes. Here, we analyze a continuous species-level fossil record of endemic diatoms from ancient Lake Ohrid, along with environmental and climate indicator time series since lake formation 1.36 million years (Ma) ago. We show that speciation and extinction rates nearly simultaneously decreased in the environmentally dynamic phase after ecosystem formation and stabilized after deep-water conditions established in Lake Ohrid. As the lake deepens, we also see a switch in the macroevolutionary trade-off, resulting in a transition from a volatile assemblage of short-lived endemic species to a stable community of long-lived species. Our results emphasize the importance of the interplay between environmental/climate change, ecosystem stability, and environmental limits to diversity for diversification processes. The study also provides a new understanding of evolutionary dynamics in long-lived ecosystems.

This paper aims to assess and compare the relative efficiency of commercial banks in six Western Balkan developing countries (North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H), Kosovo1, and Albania), using the leading nonparametric methodology Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for the period 2016-2020, and investigating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemics on the performance of banking systems in these countries. The output-oriented DEA model has been implemented with interest expenses and non-interest expenses as inputs and interest revenue and non-interest revenue as outputs. Our findings show that the average efficiency of the six Western Balkan banking systems differs, and Kosovo’s banking system has noted the highest average efficiency in the whole observed period (2016–2020). In contrast, the banking system in Bosnia and Herzegovina noted the lowest average efficiency. The COVID-19 pandemic decreased the relative efficiency of the banking sectors in all six of the Western Balkan countries observed, except Kosovo. However, additional research that includes all pandemic years is recommended to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the banking systems in the Western Balkans. This study provides invaluable insights for academic members, banking management and regulatory bodies, governments, and the interested public. It is the first empirical study that includes a glimpse of the first impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on banking systems in the developing countries of the Western Balkans.

Insurance companies play a pivotal role in the financial systems of developing countries, wielding substantial influence on systemic financial stability. Thus, understanding their efficiency, performance, and sustainability is paramount for policymakers and stakeholders alike. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the relative efficiency of insurance companies within the North Macedonian market spanning the years 2018 to 2022. Employing the input-oriented BCC DEA model, the study integrates capital and labour as inputs, while assessing risk-pooling/bearing services and intermediate function as outputs. Our findings underscore the fluctuating efficiency levels within North Macedonia’s insurance sector. Notably, the sector exhibited its peak efficiency in 2018 at 83.62%, dipping to its lowest point of 73.81% in 2020. Moreover, discerning between life and non-life insurers, we observe an average relative efficiency of 0.8067 for non-life insurers, contrasted with a higher average efficiency score of 0.9011 for life insurance companies over the examined period. This study contributes significantly on multiple fronts. Firstly, it pioneers empirical investigation of the efficiency on the North Macedonian insurance market, encompassing pre- and post-COVID efficiency metrics. This fills a notable gap in the literature, particularly within the context of emerging European markets. Secondly, our comprehensive approach facilitates a holistic evaluation of the insurance sector’s performance across a five-year span, offering insights into its overarching dynamics and efficacy. Thirdly, the implications of our findings extend to policymakers, regulators, and insurance company management, aiding in informed decision-making and strategic planning.

In this paper, we investigated the impact of financial leverage on investment decisions on a sample of 811 firms from ten emerging South-Eastern European countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Croatia, Greece, Romania, North Macedonia, Slovenia, Serbia and Turkey). We apply a panel regression model involving investment ratio as a dependent variable, leverage as independent variable, and control for several firm characteristics that closely determines the corporate investments. The results of the analysis show that leverage is negatively related to investment in the companies in SEE. But only long term debt has a stronger negative impact on investment for firms with low growth opportunities than for firms with high growth opportunities. These findings show supportive evidence of agency theories of corporate leverage, especially with the debt overhang theory, but did not give strong validation that leverage has a disciplining role for firms with low growth opportunities in SEE emerging markets. In addition to leverage, we found that corporate investments in the SEE countries decrease significantly with tangibility and the company size. Corporate investments in the SEE countries increase significantly with cash flow, sales, non-debt tax shield and profitability. Overall, the results slightly defer with those from the research on the case of developed markets.

Electroporation is used in medicine for drug and gene delivery, and as a nonthermal ablation method in tumor treatment and cardiac ablation. Electroporation involves delivering high-voltage electric pulses to target tissue; however, this can cause effects beyond the intended target tissue like nerve stimulation, muscle contractions and pain, requiring use of sedatives or anesthetics. It was previously shown that adjusting pulse parameters may mitigate some of these effects, but not how these adjustments would affect electroporation’s efficacy. We investigated the effect of varying pulse parameters such as interphase and interpulse delay while keeping the duration and number of pulses constant on nerve stimulation, muscle contraction and assessing pain and electroporation efficacy, conducting experiments on human volunteers, tissue samples and cell lines in vitro. Our results show that using specific pulse parameters, particularly short high-frequency biphasic pulses with short interphase and long interpulse delays, reduces muscle contractions and pain sensations in healthy individuals. Higher stimulation thresholds were also observed in experiments on isolated swine phrenic nerves and human esophagus tissues. However, changes in the interphase and interpulse delays did not affect the cell permeability and survival, suggesting that modifying the pulse parameters could minimize adverse effects while preserving therapeutic goals in electroporation.

Abstract To minimize neuromuscular electrical stimulation during electroporation-based treatments, the replacement of long monophasic pulses with bursts of biphasic high-frequency pulses in the range of microseconds was suggested in order to reduce muscle contraction and pain sensation due to pulse application. This treatment modality appeared under the term high-frequency electroporation (HF-EP), which can be potentially used for some clinical applications of electroporation such as electrochemotherapy, gene electrotransfer, and tissue ablation. In cardiac tissue ablation, which utilizes irreversible electroporation, the treatment is being established as Pulsed Field Ablation. While the reduction of muscle contractions was confirmed in multiple in vivo studies, the reduction of pain sensation in humans was not confirmed yet, nor was the relationship between muscle contraction and pain sensation investigated. This is the first study in humans examining pain sensation using biphasic high-frequency electroporation pulses. Twenty-five healthy individuals were subjected to electrical stimulation of the tibialis anterior muscle with biphasic high-frequency pulses in the range of few microseconds and both, symmetric and asymmetric interphase and interpulse delays. Our results confirm that biphasic high-frequency pulses with a pulse width of 1 or 2 µs reduce muscle contraction and pain sensation as opposed to currently used longer monophasic pulses. In addition, interphase and interpulse delays play a significant role in reducing the muscle contraction and/or pain sensation. The study shows that the range of the optimal pulse parameters may be increased depending on the prerequisites of the therapy. However, further evaluation of the biphasic pulse protocols presented herein is necessary to confirm the efficiency of the newly proposed HF-EP.

Book review of “Practical Decision Making: An Introduction to the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) Using Super Decisions v2” written by Enrique Mu and Milagros Pereyra-Royas (2017). Springer Nature. ISBN: 978-3-319-33860-6; ISBN: 978-3-319-33861-3 (eBook); DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-33861-3.

Financial analysis plays a major role in investing the disposable income of various economic agents. Stock markets are predominantly made up of small investors with limited information and low capabilities for a suitable analysis. Researchers, as well as practitioners, are divided over the findings on the adequacy of technical analysis in investing. This paper examines the Markov chain process in the stock market to discover the essential links and probabilities for the stocks’ transition through three states of stagnation, growth, and decline (i.e., stagnant, bull, and bear markets). The subject of analysis is a randomly selected portfolio of 20 shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The data suggest that the portfolio relatively quickly, in four trading days, achieves equilibrium probabilities that allow a certain amount of predictability of future movements. At the same time, when analyzing the expected time intervals for the first transition, we found that the portfolio returns to a state of growth much faster than a decline. In addition, the results negate the basic habits of frequent trading, herding, and taking a short position in events of negative price fluctuations. Our research contributes towards observing regularities and stock market efficiency with a clear goal of improving expectations and technical analysis for small individual investors.

Purpose: This paper measures the relative efficiency of commercial banks in the Republic of Croatia in a period of eleven years (2009-2019) by using the leading non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodology. Methodology: In the selection of variables (inputs and outputs) and the DEA model, we have followed Banker et al. (2010). Results: Based on the results obtained, we have found that the average efficiency of the Croatian banking sector in the observed period is 92%. The highest (96%) and the lowest (90%) mean efficiency score were achieved in 2009 and in 2017, respectively. In addition, we have analyzed several banks that show significant changes in the efficiency scores, and provided targets for improvement of their efficiency. Conclusion: Croatia is a developing country characterized by a bank-based financial system and this study shows that its banking system is highly efficient, but certain relatively inefficient banks should improve their efficiency. Therefore, our findings provide valuable information for regulators, policymakers and bank management in order to take proper actions to maintain the stability of the key players in the financial system in Croatia.

In the current millennium, the Indian general insurance market has witnessed major structural changes because of the establishment of a market regulator and the initiation of entry deregulation. The present study evaluates the efficiency performance of fifteen Indian general insurance companies for the period 2011/12 - 2016/17 using a robust nonparametric approach. The study also seeks to explain efficiency by considering the influence of environmental variables on the efficiency scores. The results indicate that efficiency is positively related to ownership, insurer age, market share, and return on equity but negatively related to size.

Based on our search in the Scopus data base with the phrases: "bibliometric analysis" and "performance measurement" and "business, management and accounting" in title - abstract - keywords we have not found any study considering this topic. Taking into account the importance of performance measurement in business, management and accounting we have conducted a bibliometric analysis in this area in the Scopus database. Our analysis covers the first 1,000 journal published articles with most citations and the period is 42 years (1978-2019). We provide analysis and visualization on distribution of articles per year, top journals, most cited articles, top authors, country-co-authorship as well as in depth keywords co-occurrence analysis by mining the abstracts. This study will serve as a starting point for researchers and practitioners interested in measurement of performance in business, management and accounting.

Even though plants represent an essential part of our lives offering exploitational, supporting and cultural services, we know very little about the biology of the rarest and most threatened plant species, and even less about their conservation status. Rapid changes in the environment and climate, today more pronounced than ever, affect their fitness and distribution causing rapid species declines, sometimes even before they had been discovered. Despite the high goals set by conservationists to protect native plants from further degradation and extinction, the initiatives for the conservation of threatened species in Europe are scattered and have not yielded the desired results. The main aim of this Action is to improve plant conservation in Europe through the establishment of a network of scientists and other stakeholders who deal with different aspects of plant conservation, from plant taxonomy, ecology, conservation genetics, conservation physiology and reproductive biology to protected area's managers, not forgetting social scientists, who are crucial when dealing with the general public.

Genska terapija postaja čedalje bolj zanimiva tudi v onkologiji. Med aplikacijami je morda najzanimivejša imunostimulacija. Pripravimo lahko plazmidno DNA, ki nosi zapis za različne imunostimulatorne molekule, ki jih vnesemo v celice tumorjev ali normalnih tkiv. Ta tkiva postanejo proizvajalci teh molekul, ki lahko delujejo lokalno ali pa se izločajo tudi sistemsko v krvni obtok. Ker plazmidna DNA ne prehaja celične membrane, so potrebni dostavni sistemi, virusni ali nevirusni. V naših študijah uporabljamo predvsem nevirusni dostavni sistem – elektroporacijo. Interlevkin 12 (IL-12) je eden od zanimivih citokinov, za katerega je znano protitumorsko delovanje s spodbujanjem imunskega odziva in antiangiogenim delovanjem. Namen projekta SmartGene.si je bil pripraviti plazmid z zapisom za interlevkin 12 (plazmid phIL12) in pripraviti vse potrebno za njegovo klinično testiranje za zdravljenje kožnih tumorjev. V konzorciju smo združili moči s partnerji z akademskega in industrijskega področja. Treba je bilo pripraviti plazmid za uporabo v humani onkologiji po zahtevah Evropske agencije za zdravila (EMA). Za prijavo klinične študije na Javno agencijo za zdravila in medicinske pripomočke (JAZMP) smo morali izvesti tudi vse neklinične raziskave o varnosti in učinkovitosti zdravila. Nato je bilo treba razviti postopek priprave zdravila, zagotoviti primerne prostore za pripravo in izvedbo postopka priprave zdravila. V treh letih smo dosegli vse te zastavljene cilje in dobili dovoljenje za izvajanje klinične študije na kožnih tumorjih, ki ga je izdala JAZMP na osnovi pozitivnega mnenja Komisije Republike Slovenije za medicinsko etiko. Zdaj poteka klinična študija faze I preizkušanja plazmida phIL12 na kožnih tumorjih glave in vratu z namenom preveriti varnost in sprejemljivost genskega elektroprenosa plazmida v tumorje. Cilj študije je prav tako določiti primeren odmerek zdravila, ki bi ga v nadaljnji klinični študiji uporabili kot adjuvantno zdravljenje k ablativnim terapijam, kot sta radioterapija ali elektrokemoterapija.

The aim of this paper is to assess the relative efficiency of commercial banks in one developing country, i.e. the Republic of North Macedonia by using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique-window analysis. The selection of inputs and outputs plays a key role when applying DEA for assessing the efficiency of decision-making units (DMUs). In the conducted research two inputs and two outputs have been selected. The sample consists of 14 commercial banks and the period that is being observed is an eleven year span from 2007 to 2017. According to the average efficiency score for the whole observed period, the most efficient bank belongs to the group of large banks, which simultaneously shows the highest efficiency. The banking sector in the Republic of North Macedonia, as a whole, showed the highest efficiency in 2007, and the lowest efficiency in 2011.