Narrow Results

The Indian banking industry is going through turbulent times. With the lowering of entry barriers and blurring product lines of banks and non-banks since the financial sector reforms, banks are functioning increasingly under competitive pressures. Hence, it is imperative that banks maintain a loyal customer base. In order to achieve this and improve their market positions, many retail banks are directing their strategies towards increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty through improved service quality. Moreover, with the advent of international banking and innovations in the marketplace, customers are having greater and greater difficulty in selecting one institution from another.

Hence, to gain and sustain competitive advantages in the fast changing retail banking industry in India, it is crucial for banks to understand in-depth what customers perceive to be the key dimensions of service quality and to evaluate banks on these dimensions. This is because if service quality dimensions can be identified, service managers should be able to improve the delivery of customer perceived quality during the service process and have greater control over the overall outcome.

The study suggests that customers distinguish four dimensions of service quality in the case of the retail banking industry in India, namely, customer-orientedness, competence, tangibles and convenience. A methodological innovation in this study has been in the use of TOPSIS in the field of customer-perceived service quality. TOPSIS has been used to evaluate and ranking the relative performance of the banks across the service quality dimensions. Identifying the underlying dimensions of the service quality construct and evaluating the performance of the banks across these factors is the first step in the definition and hence provision of quality service in the Indian retail banking industry.

In this paper, the authors estimate portfolio volatilities and use variance−decomposition techniques and Cholesky factorization to construct a portfolio volatility spillover index. Furthermore, the authors show that spillover risks are persistent and much more common than well-known indicators like the turbulence index and the CBOE VIX index might suggest. Moreover, portfolio volatilities show contributions to and from other portfolio volatilities, which indicate elevated financial market interconnectedness and heightened risk. Foreign exchange contributes strong volatility shocks to other portfolios. More importantly, its contribution has a different magnitude and direction after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) than before depending on the base currency. To show the causality effects of portfolio volatility spillover the authors apply both econometric models and graph theory, demonstrating that the importance is time varying. This requires monitoring and analysis in decision making regarding portfolio management, portfolio construction, and risk management.

In this paper we prove that the CAR flows on type III factors arising from a large class of quasi-free states are not extendable, in the sense of Bikram, Izumi, Srinivasan and Sunder.⁸ As a consequence, CAR flows and CCR flows on type III factors are not cocycle conjugate. This is in sharp contrast with the situation for the type I_∞ factor, for which CAR and CCR flows are in fact conjugate. In addition, we also compute the super-product systems associated to CAR flows.

Research on social entrepreneurship (SE) has increased significantly over the past ten years, with growing interest in the ecosystems that support initiatives to address social problems with innovative solutions. Such ecosystems can facilitate solutions to society’s wicked problems on a much larger scale. However, there is a lack of research on the nature of such ecosystems, the essential players in them and the factors driving their development and sustainability. The current study aims to fulfill this research gap. Based on a systematic literature review, the study analyzes 43 peer-reviewed papers related to SE ecosystems and SE efforts that address environmental problems. It is found that there are at least 24 patterns/ types of SE ecosystems classified into five general groups. Moreover, a diverse set of factors support SE ecosystems and facilitate them to thrive faster and more sustainably. These ecosystems often develop around particular social problems. Using environmental challenges as an example, four groups of significant environmental problems solved by SE ecosystems and SE are identified. The key findings are presented as a comprehensive study framework, which is the basis for a recommended research agenda.

This research aimed to identify the factors that influence farming households’ decisions on adaptation strategies and the highest priority strategy in South-Western coastal Bangladesh. Seven unions in Koyra Upazila were surveyed, and 60 households were interviewed from each union. The binary logit and multinomial logit models were used to analyse the data. The findings indicate that 58.6% of farming households adopted climate-related adaptation strategies, with seasonal migration being the most top priority. Similarly, the data suggested that years of education of the household heads, number of household members, land tenure, farming experience, climatic event risk perception, and farmer-to-farmer extension influenced both farming households’ adaptation decisions and the likelihood of choosing the highest priority adaptation strategies. Public–private partnerships (PPPs) can integrate funds, knowledge, and power structures. It can also balance expenses, liabilities, and opportunities. So, the development of PPPs may promote suitable adaptation strategies.

In this paper, we consider a conjecture of Erdős and Rosenfeld and a conjecture of Ruzsa when the number is an almost square. By the same method, we consider lattice points of a circle close to the x-axis with special radii.

Merger and acquisition is known as a market expansions strategy. This paper examines several factors associated with M&A namely bank size, intermediary role, modes of financing, bank-specific variables, and macro-economic variables on the operational performance and stability along with the mediation role of market structure for Islamic banks. This paper employs empirical research methods, namely POLS, panel data techniques and SEM to analyse a set of unbalanced panel samples of 10 Islamic banks during 2004Q1 to 2020Q4 from six countries, namely Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Pakistan. Stata package 14.2 is used to estimate M&A results (5 years pre and 5 years post). The results indicate that M&A improve Post-M&A performance of Islamic banks while stability does not improve. Interestingly, there is no mediation effects of market structure on the relationship between M&A, operational performance, and stability. Policymakers should take into consideration those factors taking M&A decisions considering the role of market structure.

This research focuses on the impact of the state-owned investment on economic growth in the case of Vietnam. System generalized method of moments (SGMMs) and minimum Bayes factor (MBF) are used with the dataset from 49 provinces of Vietnam. The results show that labor productivity of the state-owned sector (LP_S) has positively large impacts, while the number of working labors (LBs) and the rate of trained employees (RTEs) have no effect on economic growth. Additionally, implementing investment of the state-owned sector (II_S) and capital productivity (CP) negatively affected Vietnam’s economic growth during the period from 2013 to 2017. Hence, Vietnam needs to use the state-owned investment more effectively and reduce its proportion while increasing the proportion of non-state investment and FDI. Moreover, the labor productivity of state-owned sector should be strongly improved to promote economic growth in the future.

Since my early days, Science promised a universal method to explain everything, but university science with its inner contradictions left me bored. Ortega showed that science can fossilise and become superstition. The African tropical rainforest around 1963 and audacious new thinking together with young French scientists paved the way to my later analysis of living system hierarchies. The rainforest is a great debunker of arrogant scientists. Its plants and animals are countless, its inner subdivisions are not sharp, timing of events there is imprecise. In highly complex ecosystems no situation is recurrent. Hierarchical systems analysis, chaos theory and fuzzy logic, all of the 1960-ies, show the same way. Time is no factor, but an invisible dimension, a measuring stick, and visible space is 3D. Knowledge from foreign lands and from the past often sees reality as “more or less” defined, “elastic” (“jam karet”, rubber time, in Indonesian). Our neat science predicts correctly how stars move, but not epidemics or jobless periods, or tree growth. The dilemma of structure (3D) versus becoming (4D) always was central to human thought. It is met by two axioms defining an elastic universe with fractal dimensions. First, structure is a very slow process and process is a very short-lived structure. Second, due to a short life-span, humans can only perceive infinity if broken down, folded, refolded etc., a fractal image. These axioms and some rules derived yield a logically coherent image of the universe, inclusive of but broader than science as taught in schools today.

Several g factors of excited states of moderately neutron-rich ²⁵²Cf fission fragments were measured using the IPAC method from data gathered with the GAMMASPHERE array. These results shine new light onto two regions of the nuclear chart very sensitive to the number of valence nucleons. The results for ¹⁰¹Zr and ^103,105Mo focus on the single particle properties of nuclei in a region characterised by rapid shape changes and the emergence of triaxiality, and were found consistent with a particle–rotor picture. The g factors of ^138,140,142Xe constitute an excellent test of single–particle properties near the N=82 shell closure. The measured g factors are in excellent agreement with recent shell-model and QRPA calculations.

With the popularization of computer network technology, people are becoming increasingly dependent on computer networks, thus the reliability problem of computer network systems has become an important and pressing issue. This paper has identified and analyzed four influential factors of reliability and discusses the four effective methods to improve the reliability of computer network based on the connotation of computer network reliability.