The impact of sustainable public procurement on corporate ESG performance-The Chinese evidence.

Public procurement is an important bridge between public demand and market supply and may affect corporate behavior. However, in the advocacy of sustainable development, the extant research has rarely combined sustainable public procurement (SPP) with corporate ESG performance, to explore whether governments have contributed to the development of sustainable corporate performance through their sustainable procurement activities. This paper fills in the gap by matching the actual implementation of SPP of 42,369 projects in China over 2015~2020 with 20,125 corporate ESG performance data, to analyze the relationship between SPP implementation and corporate ESG performance. The results show that the implementation of SPP has a significant positive impact on corporate ESG performance. Further heterogeneity analysis reveals that the impact is stronger in China's eastern and central regions than in other regions, and corporates at a mature stage are more likely to follow the government sustainable behavior. In addition, the implementation of SPP has a long-term effect on corporate ESG performance. The above findings have important policy implications: firstly, there is a better role for government to play as the "invisible hand", to participate in the market economy; Specifically, SPP policy should be added to government policy tool box to improve corporate ESG performance in addition to disclosure requirement, and the SPP policy employed should in particular attend to the "missing sectors" of sustainability in SPP for the good of corporate ESG; secondly, the government should implement differentiated policies tailored to the region's economic development conditions and corporate development characteristics; thirdly, a long-term evaluation mechanism should be established so that the government can play a more long-term demonstration and leading role.

The link between green innovations, corporate performance, ESG activities, and sharing economy.

In current years (environment, social, and governance), ESG activities in various countries have been focus more attention their stakeholders by enterprises. The world largest developing country China. The Chinese registered Enterprises ESG performance helps to apprehend the deficiencies of their sustainable ability and development for boost the organizations value. Furthermore, enterprises must balance the allocation of resources between green innovation investment and ESG activities in the future as a result of the interaction effect between these two factors. This research examines the effects of environmental, social, and governance issues on financial and non-financial performance at registered Chinese manufacturing firms since 2009 to 2019. Green innovation is also tested as a moderating factor. Results show that environment, common, and governance performance has negative influence on the firm financial performance. On the other hand, its negative effects on financial performance will be enhanced. The environmental activities have negatively affected financial performance but green innovation has positively regulated them. Non-financial performance is positively impacted by the ESG performance. The ESG general performance and the environmental performance have positive influence on corporate reputation with the improvement of green innovation levels increase. Corporate financial performance is influenced by green innovation and social activities in a substitutional manner.

The finest diamond must be green: a closer look at the roles of institution in shipping firms' sustainable practices.

Shipping companies' implementation of sustainable shipping management is an important means of protecting major water bodies in the marine environment. This research establishes a theoretical model based on institutional theory and incorporates a micro-consciousness level to explore the factors influencing companies' implementation of sustainable shipping practices. After surveying the management of Chinese shipping companies, a total of 282 datasets were obtained for analysis. This study demonstrated that rules and regulations, societal norms, environmental awareness, and legal awareness can improve shipping companies' sustainable shipping practices. Meanwhile, these practices have a positive impact on the environmental, financial, and competitive performance of shipping companies. Moreover, these findings are highly significant for maritime environmental protection and sustainability.

Results of the 2020 Survey of the American Alliance of Academic Chief Residents in Radiology.

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES: An annual survey of chief residents in accredited North American radiology programs is conducted by the American Alliance of Academic Chief Residents in Radiology (A3CR2). The purpose of this study is to summarize the 2020 A3CR2 chief resident survey. MATERIALS AND METHODS: An online survey was distributed to chief residents from 194 Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education-accredited radiology residencies. Questions were designed to gather information about residency program practices, benefits, fellowship or advanced interventional radiology (IR) training choices, and the integration of IR training. Subsets of questions focused on the perception of corporatization, non-physician providers (NPPs), and artificial intelligence (AI) in radiology and their relationship to the radiology job market. RESULTS: 174 individual responses from 94 programs were provided, yielding a 48 % program response rate. Extended emergency department coverage has steadily decreased over the last 5 years (2016-2020), however only 52 % of programs have independent overnight call (without attending coverage). Regarding the impact of new integrated IR residencies on training, 42 % indicated there was no appreciable impact on their DR or IR training, while 20 % indicated DR training for IR residents suffered and 19 % indicated IR training for DR residents suffered. Corporatization in radiology was perceived as the biggest potential threat to the future job market. CONCLUSIONS: Integration of IR residency did not detrimentally affect DR or IR training in most programs. Radiology resident perception of corporatization, NPPs, and AI may help residency programs shape educational content.

Official Turnover and Corporate ESG Practices: Evidence from China.

In recent years, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) have been extensive concerned. However, few studies have focused on the impact of situational factors on corporate ESG practice decisions. Based on this, using 9428 observations of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2019, this paper attempts to explore the impact of local official turnover on corporate ESG practices, and analyzes the boundary effects of this impact from three aspects: region, industry, and corporate. Our results suggest that (1) official turnover can lead to changes in economic policies and redistribution of political resources, which can stimulate companies' "risk aversion motivation" and "development motivation" and thus promote their ESG practices; (2) this effect is more significant in the high degree of government intervention, the high level of industry competition and private corporates. (3) Further test finds that only when the official turnover abnormally and the regional economic development well, official turnover can significantly contribute to corporate ESG. This paper enriches the relevant research on the decision-making scenarios of corporate ESG practices from the macro-institutional perspective.

As startups no contexto da organização capitalista financeira e as subjetividades empreendedoras / Startups in the context of financial capitalist organization and entrepreneurial subjectivities / Startups en el contexto de la organización capitalista financiera y subjetividades emprendedoras

As startups são empresas que apresentam modelos de negócios marcados pela inovação, rapidez, flexibilidade e alta capacidade de adaptação aos mercados. Atuando em diferentes setores socioeconômicos, elas prometem criar e transformar produtos e serviços. A emergência e disseminação dessas empresas ocorrem em um momento histórico de mudanças iniciadas a partir de 1970 e marcadas pelas crises geradas com o esgotamento do paradigma da sociedade urbano industrial. No Brasil, o número desse modelo de negócio apresentou uma expansão expressiva, alcançando a marca de 13.374 nos últimos cinco anos. Atento a esse cenário, o objetivo desta pesquisa consistiu em compreender como sujeitos, grupos e instituições atribuem sentidos à experiência de trabalho nas chamadas startups. Na parte teórica, as condições sociais e econômicas que possibilitaram a emergência e disseminação das startups são analisadas em uma perspectiva crítica. A parte empírica, por sua vez, apresenta depoimentos de empreendedores relatando o contexto geral de atuação nas startups. Ao final deste artigo, conclui-se que há uma instrumentalização capitalística de componentes subjetivos específicos selecionados e colocados em circulação para fortalecer o modo de produção capitalista financeirizado.(AU)

Startups are companies that have business models characterized by innovation, speed, flexibility, and a high capacity to adapt to markets. Operating in different socioeconomic sectors, they promise to create and transform products and services. The emergence and dissemination of these companies occur at a historical moment of changes that began from 1970 and are marked by the crises generated by the exhaustion of the paradigm of industrial urban society. In Brazil, the number of businesses in this model showed a significant expansion, reaching 13,374 companies in the last five years. Attentive to this scenario, the objective of this research was to understand how subjects, groups, and institutions attribute meanings to the work experience in so-called startups. In the theoretical part, the social and economic conditions that enabled the emergence and dissemination of startups are analyzed in a critical perspective. The empirical part presents entrepreneurs reporting the general context of action in startups. At the end of this article, it is concluded that there is a capitalistic instrumentalization of specific subjective components that are selected and put into circulation to strengthen the financed capitalist production.(AU)

Las startups son empresas que tienen modelos de negocio marcados por la innovación, la velocidad, la flexibilidad y una alta capacidad de adaptación a los mercados. Desde diferentes sectores socioeconómicos, las startups prometen crear y transformar productos y servicios. La aparición y difusión de estas empresas se produce en un momento histórico de cambios que comenzó a partir de 1970 y que está marcado por crisis generadas por el agotamiento del paradigma de la sociedad urbana industrial. En Brasil, estas empresas se expandieron significativamente alcanzando la marca de 13.374 empresas en los últimos cinco años. En este escenario, el objetivo de esta investigación fue entender cómo los sujetos, grupos e instituciones atribuyen significados a la experiencia laboral en las startups. En la parte teórica, se analizan las condiciones sociales y económicas que permitieron el surgimiento y la difusión de las startups en una perspectiva crítica. La parte empírica presenta testimonios de emprendedores que informan sobre el trabajo en startups. La investigación concluye que hay una instrumentalización capitalista de componentes subjetivos específicos que se seleccionan y ponen en circulación para fortalecer el modo de producción capitalista financiero.(AU)

Impact of corporate sustainable practices, government initiative, technology usage, and organizational culture on automobile industry sustainable performance.

The increasing worldwide automobile production and usage adversely impact the environmental, economic, and social well-being. Although the automobile companies are trying to solve this problem by adopting corporate sustainability, there is a gap in the extant literature on sustainable corporate practices that are the most important to empower better sustainability performance. This study highlights the impact of core corporate sustainable practices attributes, government initiative, technology usage, and organizational culture on the sustainable performance of the automobile industry in India. The study proposed six aspects and fifty-three criteria from the literature review. The current article has used survey questionnaires to collect the primary data. The present article also applied the smart-PLS to test the association among the variables. The results indicated that the corporate sustainable practices attributes, technology usage, and organizational culture have a positive and significant linkage with the sustainable performance of the automobile industry. The current article guides the regulators in developing the regulations to improve sustainable organizational performance using sustainable corporate practices.

Situating Food Industry Influence: Governance Norms and Economic Order Comment on "'Part of the Solution': Food Corporation Strategies for Regulatory Capture and Legitimacy".

Lacy-Nichols and Williams provide important new insights into the ongoing contest over policy space and consumer behavior. I attempt to situate these insights in relation to government mandates and governance norms and situate these norms and mandates in the prevailing economic order. This approach is necessary to understand how corporate practices persist and why governments are receptive to the approaches outlined in the analysis conducted by Lacy-Nichols and Williams. This approach can help explain why governments are often receptive to corporations positioning themselves as 'part of the solution'. Governments want strong economies and big food positions itself as contributor to this end. The point I attempt to articulate is that we often conceive of corporate power as power over, while I suggest that corporate power is rather power within and through a system that is oriented towards profits and economic growth.

What determines the progress of online information access to banking corporate governance practices? The case of Paraguay.

This paper contributes to the lack of longitudinal studies concerning online information access to corporate governance (CG) practices in the banking sector of Latin American countries. In particular, this study aims to analyze the factors that influence information transparency, both mandatory and voluntary, related to CG practices of banks that operate in Paraguay via their websites from 2016 to 2019. Findings indicate the need to improve the level of information available on websites, with disclosure of voluntary information on CG practices being more prevalent than the disclosure of mandatory information. Likewise, banks that operate in Paraguay have made scant "progress" regarding online access to their governance information over the years analyzed. Moreover, the factors "Bank size" and "listed status" positively influence the information transparency regarding CG practices of Paraguayan banks. In contrast, "leverage," "liquidity," "size of the audit firm," and "credit risk rating" are factors that have a negative relation with the extent of CG disclosure.

Corporations and Health Watch

Health impacts of the corporate practices of the alcohol, automobile, firearms, food and beverage, pharmaceutical or tobacco industries.

Association between self-reported sleep duration and cardiometabolic risk in corporate executives.

PURPOSE: This cross-sectional study aimed to compare the association between self-reported sleep duration and cardiometabolic risk among men and women corporate executives and investigate potential lifestyle, work- and stress-related mediators thereof. METHODS: Self-reported sleep duration and lifestyle, occupational, psychological and measured anthropometrical, blood pressure (BP) and blood marker variables were obtained from health risk assessment data of 3583 corporate executives. Sex-stratified regression analyses investigated the relationships between occupational and psychological variables with self-reported sleep duration, and sleep duration with individual cardiometabolic risk factors. Mediation analyses investigated the effects of work, psychological and lifestyle factors on the relationships between self-reported sleep duration and cardiometabolic risk factors, as well as a continuous cardiometabolic risk score calculated from the sum of sex-stratified z-standardized scores of negative fasting serum HDL, and positive plasma Glu, serum TG, body mass index (BMI), waist circumference, systolic and diastolic BP. RESULTS: Longer work hours and work commute time, depression, anxiety and stress were associated with shorter sleep duration in both men and women (all p < 0.05). Shorter sleep duration was associated with higher BMI, larger waist circumference and greater cardiometabolic risk scores in both men and women (all p < 0.05), higher diastolic BP in men (p < 0.05) and lower HDL cholesterol in women (p < 0.05). Physical activity, working hours and stress significantly mediated the relationships between self-reported sleep duration and BMI, waist circumference, diastolic BP and cardiometabolic risk score in men only. CONCLUSION: In these corporate executives, shorter self-reported sleep duration is associated with poorer psychological, occupational and cardiometabolic risk outcomes in both men and women. Given that physical activity, working hours and stress mediate this association among the men, the case for sleep health interventions in workplace health programmes is warranted.

A novel investigation of the influence of corporate governance on firms' credit ratings.

Corporate governance is the way of governing a firm in order to increase its accountability and to avoid any massive damage before it occurs. The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of capital structure, firms' size, and competitive advantages of firms as control variables on credit ratings. We investigate the role of corporate governance in improving the firms' credit rating using a sample of Jordanian listed firms. We split firms into four categories according to WVB credit rating. We use both the binary logistic regression (LR) and the ordinal logistic regression (OLR) to model credit ratings in Jordanian environment. The empirical results show that the control variables are strong determinants of credit ratings. When we evaluate the relationship between the governance variables and credit ratings, we found interesting results. The board stockholders and board expertise are moderately significant. The board independence and role duality are weakly significant, while board size is insignificant.

Predicting corporate credit risk: Network contagion via trade credit.

Trade credit is a payment extension granted by a selling firm to its customer. Companies typically respond to late payments from their customers by delaying payments to suppliers, thus generating a ripple through the transaction network. Therefore, trade credit is as a potential vehicle of propagation of losses in case of default events. The goal of this work is to leverage information on the trade credit among connected firms to predict imminent defaults of firms. We use a unique dataset of client firms of a major Italian bank to investigate firm bankruptcy between October 2016 to March 2018. We develop a model to capture network spillover effects originating from the supply chain on the probability of default of each firm via a sequential approach: the output of a first model component on single firm features is used in a subsequent model which captures network spillovers. While the first component is the standard econometrics way to predict such dynamics, the network module represents an innovative way to look into the effect of trade credit on default probability. This module looks at the transaction network of the firm, as inferred from the payments transiting via the bank, in order to identify the trade partners of the firm. By using several features extracted from the network of transactions, this model is able to predict a large fraction of the defaults, thus showing the value hidden in the network information. Finally, we merge firm and network features with a machine learning model to create a 'hybrid' model, which improves the recall for the task by almost 20 percentage points over the baseline.

Reducing Medical Admissions and Presentations Into Hospital through Optimising Medicines (REMAIN HOME): a stepped wedge, cluster randomised controlled trial.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate whether integrating pharmacists into general practices reduces the number of unplanned re-admissions of patients recently discharged from hospital. DESIGN, SETTING: Stepped wedge, cluster randomised trial in 14 general practices in southeast Queensland. PARTICIPANTS: Adults discharged from one of seven study hospitals during the seven days preceding recruitment (22 May 2017 - 14 March 2018) and prescribed five or more long term medicines, or having a primary discharge diagnosis of congestive heart failure or exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. INTERVENTION: Comprehensive face-to-face medicine management consultation with an integrated practice pharmacist within seven days of discharge, followed by a consultation with their general practitioner and further pharmacist consultations as needed. MAJOR OUTCOMES: Rates of unplanned, all-cause hospital re-admissions and emergency department (ED) presentations 12 months after hospital discharge; incremental net difference in overall costs. RESULTS: By 12 months, there had been 282 re-admissions among 177 control patients (incidence rate [IR], 1.65 per person-year) and 136 among 129 intervention patients (IR, 1.09 per person-year; fully adjusted IR ratio [IRR], 0.79; 95% CI, 0.52-1.18). ED presentation incidence (fully adjusted IRR, 0.46; 95% CI, 0.22-0.94) and combined re-admission and ED presentation incidence (fully adjusted IRR, 0.69; 95% CI, 0.48-0.99) were significantly lower for intervention patients. The estimated incremental net cost benefit of the intervention was $5072 per patient, with a benefit-cost ratio of 31:1. CONCLUSION: A collaborative pharmacist-GP model of post-hospital discharge medicines management can reduce the incidence of hospital re-admissions and ED presentations, achieving substantial cost savings to the health system. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry, ACTRN12616001627448 (prospective).