School of business

The study generates the optimal dividend model with an incorporated framework, in which, agency, principal, and firm, are involved in the achievement of general equilibrium of dividend policy. For protecting the maximum utility and allowing the wealth transferring between the current and future life period, investors, i.e. principals, make financial and consumption decisions with the constraints of the capital they possess. The decision of capital investment does not only determine the cash availability for firm but also implicitly change the behavior of agency, i.e. executive, in the way of seeking the intrinsic for shareholders. Meanwhile, the decision of finance by agency implies the double objectives, one of which is the personal utility realization. As consequence, there are six factors are resulted as the determinations of theoretical equilibrium. These factors consist of, capital structure of firm, tax shield from debt finance, growth rate of dividend, personal tax on dividend payment, investment strategy of principal and cost of capital.

The study aims to identify the determinants of Thai listed firms’ capital structure using derived theoretical-based models from CAPM and Hamada equations, which incorporate the control variables, i.e. company's operating performance and capital size, with time-invariant and random effects, for improving the explanatory power of the model. The empirical test employs the quarterly data covering the year 2006 to 2010 from the Stock Exchange of Thailand. The results showed that the tax shield and industry classification explicitly demonstrate material relevance to the alteration of the firms degree of financial leverage. The results also showed that the fixed assets merely exert moderate influences on the firm’s willingness to implement a policy of increasing financial leverage. Conclusively, none other relevant factors possess a significant impact on the choice of capital structure, in the case of Thailand.

The study aims to explore how the brand equity influences the budget hotel revisit intentions from the customers’ point of view. The results show that, in sequence of the degree of significance, brand loyalty, brand awareness/brand association and perceived quality as brand equity sub-dimensions have positive relationships with perceived value and revisit intention, based on a convenience sample of 400 respondents who had stayed at top-5 budget hotels in Shanghai in year 2010. Additionally perceived value plays an increasingly important role in budget hotel revisit intentions. By adopting the approaches of multiple regression with dummy interaction regressors to the difference analysis based upon the aforementioned relationships, it was discovered that the effect of brand loyalty on revisit intention is greater for business travelers than for leisure travelers and there are no differences between business travelers and leisure travelers on the impact of brand awareness/brand association, perceived quality, perceived value on revisit intentions. As a whole, this study highlights that perceived quality was a direct determinant of revisit intentions in budget hotel segment, that’s effect was no longer mediated by the perceived value.

This study seeks to explore the hybrid cultural and linguistic spaces that Portuguese immigrants create in Macau in the process of engaging in intercultural communication with the Chinese local community. I use critical discourse analysis to examine data collected through in-depth interviews and observations in order to arrive at an understanding and provide an explanation of how Portuguese residents in Macau negotiate their interactions with the Chinese host culture. In these interviews participants furnish accounts of how they preserve their own cultural and linguistic space, while at the same time achieving functional integration in Macau when interacting with the Chinese population. Using hybridity as the theoretical framework, my research shows how participants deal with living and communicating within and between two distinct cultures; it also demonstrates how their lack of literacy in Cantonese limits the degree and form of integration that they are able to achieve.

This article describes and analyses the linguistic practices and sociocultural discourses of Portuguese nationals residing in Macau
Special Administrative Region (China), a territory under Portuguese rule for more than 400 years until it was returned to
the People’s Republic of China in 1999. Drawing from detailed
interviews with 12 respondents, the research combines a
postcolonial theoretical perspective with Bourdieu’s notion of the
habitus. It is a study of expatriates in a locale where they
previously were ‘colonizers’, but where their collective identity
and status have changed quite radically and suddenly. The
research considers how the wider socio-cultural field that contains
the Portuguese community of Macau has changed in terms of its
relation to the new regime of power in contemporary Macau; and
by way of extension how the habitus of Portuguese expatriates
has informed, and been influenced by, the process of intercultural
interactions with the host Chinese culture.

... 8, no 5, p. 508-527. 33. Cho, Kang Rae and Jangho Lee. Firm Characteristics and MNC's Intra-network Knowledge Sharing Management International Review. Wiesbaden: Fourth Quarter 2004. ... Collaborative Colleagues: Billy TW Yu: colleagues. Peter KC Lee: colleagues. ...

... Subsequently, it has been adopted by numerous business sectors (Curkovic et al., 2000) and numerous research works have reported positive relationships between the MBNQA elements and organizational performance (Lee et al., 2003; Samson and Terziovski, 1999a). ...

ABSTRACT Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent of implementing management system standards among ISO (and other) certified companies in the Pearl River Delta and its effect on the perceived benefits. Design/methodology/approach – A cross-sectional survey of certified companies was carried out using a self-administrated questionnaire. A total of 157 companies participated in the study. Findings – It was found that the majority of the responding companies implement more than one standardized management system, mostly adopting the quality management, environmental management, and occupational health and safety management systems (i.e. ISO9001, ISO14001, and OHSAS18001). Results show that companies certified to ISO9001 and ISO14001 gain more benefits than the others. Research limitations/implications – The study shows that companies implementing multiple management systems can have better corporate performance, product quality, and marketing edges than the others. The results indicate that different combinations of management systems give rise to different level of performance. Originality/value – There is a lack of empirical proof that more benefits will be gained when multiple management system standards are adopted. The paper addresses this short-coming and provides evidence that acquiring more system certifications will result in greater perceived benefits.

... 1992b; Mengistae and Xu, 2004), incentives (Eisenhardt, 1989; Gomez-Mejia and Balkin, 1992a, b), information asymmetry (Husted, 2007; Jacobides ... Alpkan, L., Yilmaz, C., Kaya, N. (2007), "Market orientation and planning flexibility in SMEs: performance implications and an ...