Search results

By analyzing the mechanisms by which rural infrastructure resilience (RIR) impacted population loss in Longxi County, this study proposes measures to improve RIR, which provides a practical reference for realizing China's rural revitalization strategy, besides providing ideas for alleviating population loss in similar regions around the world.

This study considered 213 administrative villages in Longxi County in the Longzhong loess hilly region as the evaluation unit. Based on the construction of a multidimensional RIR evaluation system, the spatial spillover effect of RIR on population loss was determined using the spatial Durbin model (SDM).

The average resilience of each subsystem of rural infrastructure in Longxi County was low, and there were large differences in the spatial distribution. The mean RIR index value was 0.2258, with obvious spatial directivity and agglomeration characteristics. The population loss index of Longxi County had a value of 0.1759, with 26.29 of villages having a high loss level. The population loss was relatively serious and was correlated with the spatial distribution of RIR. The villages with larger RIR index values had lower population loss. The RIR had a significant spatial spillover effect on population loss. Productive infrastructure resilience and living infrastructure resilience (LIR) had negative spillover effects on population loss, and social service infrastructure resilience (SSIR) had a positive spillover effect on population loss.

By analyzing the mechanisms by which RIR impacted on population loss in Longxi County, this study proposes measures to improve RIR, which provides a practical reference for realizing China's rural revitalization strategy, besides providing ideas for alleviating population loss in similar regions around the world.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature of blended learning by practically implementing best practices in employee training.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, an organization had modified its training procedures over the course of three years to improve employee and organizational outcomes. Employee candidates who were onboarded into sales positions during the years 2019–2021 were given the opportunity to learn the content in an online format and subsequently evaluated prior to their in-person training and final evaluation to provide them with a self-paced blended learning experience. Both evaluation scores, along with the length it took to complete the trainings, were used to determine the trainings effectiveness and efficiency respectively.

The findings for the study showed that the organization was successfully able to improve upon the efficiency of the training by reducing training length and the effectiveness by improving employee outcomes.

The study’s design was limited to the probation process, which resulted in issues drawing conclusions for employee outcomes that were relevant to their long-term organizational success. This emphasizes the importance of comprehensive investigations for future practical studies.

The findings allow for the improvement of blended learning models within real-world organizational contexts that provide organizations with the opportunity to improve employee outcomes while reducing time costs.

This study provides data from applied blended learning procedures that were validated using empirical findings, which contributes to the practicality of blended learning in workplace training.

This study examines whether and how government fiscal pressure influences corporate charitable giving (CCG).

The authors exploit sub-national tax revenue sharing changes as exogenous variations to government’s fiscal pressure at the city level and then construct a quasi difference-in-differences (DiD) model to conduct the analysis based on a sample that consists of 14,168 firm-year observations in China during the period of 2003 to 2012.

The authors found that firms increase charitable donations when local governments face higher fiscal pressure. Such effects are more pronounced for firms that have stronger demand for political connectedness in the sample period. Furthermore, this study’s findings suggest that the timing strategy of donating helps firms to lower the effective tax rate and to build stronger political connections. In addition, donating firms outperform non-donating firms in terms of bank loan access and market reputation.

The authors contribute to at least three lines of literature: first, extend the understanding of timing strategies of corporate charitable behaviors; second, contribute to the literature studying the “crowd out” effect between government-provided charitable funds and private donations; finally, contribute to the emerging literature exploring the financial interests associated with corporate donation strategy (Claessens et al., 2008; Cull et al., 2015).

This study aims to examine how incorporating gamification elements into an offline training program influences learner engagement and learning outcomes in a non-academic, organizational setting.

A randomized pretest–posttest control group experiment was designed to investigate participants’ levels of affective, behavioral and cognitive engagement (learner engagement), as well as their scores on a knowledge and skills assessment (learning outcomes) under two training conditions – traditional instructional strategy (TI) and gamification instructional strategy (GL). Training content, which was the same in both groups, included disease-related information, diagnostic expertise and product operational assistance. Participants (N = 98) were medical sales representatives from a multinational company.

Participants in the treatment group had higher levels of learner engagement in comparison to those in the control group. Additionally, participants in the GL group had outperformed their counterparts in the control group on the knowledge and skills assessment.

This is one of the first studies demonstrating how incorporating gamification elements into corporate training can improve medical sales representatives' learner engagement and learning outcomes.