Leicester Castle Business School

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Open Access
Analysis of Sector Led Improvement of Children and Young People’s Services
(2020-01-20) O'Neill, Robert; Virmani, Swati; Bamford, Jim
This paper was commissioned by the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) National Performance and Information Management Group (NPIMG) to support the work of ADCS to evaluate and assess the impact of Sector Led Improvement of Children and Young People’s Services, and to explore the possibility of designing and developing (with ADCS and other partners) an ‘Early Warning’ model. The objective is to identify when and where the performance of Children and Young People’s Services is moving in the wrong direction. We undertake pre-post testing and difference in difference analysis, the latter allows us to use control data to ensure that external factors affecting all regions are considered.
Open Access
Are e-portfolios an asset to learning and placement?
(ASET, 2008-04) Duffy, Katherine; Anthony, Denis Martin; Vickers, Francesca
We asked the question “what is the added value for the student learning experience, of electronic portfolios (e-portfolios) as an innovative means of portfolio assessment?” We answered the question using an holistic approach aimed at giving a panoramic perspective on the role of e-portfolios in placement from the point of view of users as well as academics and policy makers. Within the constraints of time and resources, we believe we have made a worthwhile contribution to our primary objective of supporting placement unit users’ capacity to make informed choices about implementation of e-portfolios. A literature review of both published and “grey” material informed us of the issues and therefore questions to ask. These were put into a survey that was sent to forums that placement academics and administrative staff would be likely to access, such as ASET and PlaceNet mailing lists. Additional views were obtained in interviews with key staff in institutions that were engaged in e-portfolio development and/or innovative assessment in placement. We reviewed commonly used packages used to deliver personal development planning (PDP) in institutions. We gave access to one of the more common e-portfolio packages to a group of students and allowed them to develop their own e-portfolios, and conducted a focus group to explore their views on the utility of an e-portfolio product to them.
Open Access
The Art of Disruption. Creative learning and disruption in the higher education sector
(De Montfort University, 2018-05-22) Granger, R.C.; Bazaz, P.
In an operating environment dominated by rapid technological change, the temptation to call this disruptive is even greater. In this paper, we draw on the disruption literature and the imagery from this, to view and understand significant changes shaping the current UK higher education sector. In particular, we note the way in which the main institutions in society are changing and note the new business models that have emerged relating to fees and commercialisation in universities. We also note however, the new possibilities for universities arising from market demand for new technologies and concomitantly, new job roles in the labour market, all of which require new responses from universities. Focusing on the creative industries, where change has been marked, the ecologies have become crowded, and where incessant skill needs go hand-in-hand with changing student and worker characteristics, universities are faced with an acute pressure point. We argue here that this pressure point is such that the opportunity cost of not responding through disruption will be too great and will lead inevitably to a loss of market position. In this first in a series of think pieces, we look to challenge conventional thinking by considering what disruption might mean in the context of universities, and what sort of transformation is needed to secure universities’ provision and role in the creative economy.
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Black and minority ethnic communities and housing in the East Midlands: a strategy for the region.
(National Housing Federation: East Midlands, 2008) Oxley, Michael; Brown, Tim J.; Lishman, Ros; Richardson, Joanna
Open Access
Briefing Note: Lockdown Compliance in the UK
(2020-08) Cartwright, Edward; Rose, Jonathan
Open Access
Business incubators and entrepreneurship development in Africa’s innovation systems: a bibliometric review
(Private Enterprise Development in Low-Income Countries (PEDL), 2023-03-15) Egbetokun, Abiodun
Business incubators are a policy tool for spurring and supporting entrepreneurial businesses. In recent years, many African countries have established many of them. Business incubators in Africa have received some attention in the academic literature but there are no systematic analyses of the body of evidence to help researchers make sense of what we already know and what remains to be known. Herein lays the purpose of this paper. Using standard bibliometric methods, this paper reviews the state of the art of the research in this area and identifies the gaps for future research. The analyses highlight the five major themes in the research literature on incubators in Africa: incubator types and support for different business types; incubator performance in fostering innovation and capability building; impact of incubators on businesses and the economy; role of incubators in supporting emergence and growth of start-ups; and incubators as enablers of firm-level learning. Some remaining gaps in the literature are identified. First, limited evidence exists on how to improve incubator support to businesses across sectors and countries. Second, barely any evidence exists on how to design and implement adaptive, responsive and inclusive incubation systems. Third, rigorous impact evaluations are conspicuously missing from the reviewed body of research. These gaps represent opportunities for future studies.
Open Access
Can the news tell us anything about uncertainty that the markets don’t?
(2018-09-01) Lambe, Brendan; Li, Z.; Omar, A.
This study investigates the dynamic interactions between changes in economic policy uncertainty and movement in price and trade volumes across a sample of 21 countries. Within a vector autoregressive framework, we find that an expectation of uncertainty drives market movement for 18 countries. Our analysis in terms of VAR coefficients, granger causality tests and impulse response functions show a significant market reaction to an expectation of uncertainty, implying that the markets are more sensitive to politically driven economic policy change than media commentators. In light of perceived policy change researchers are cautioned against relying solely on media generated measures of uncertainty when investigating market movements.
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Centralized resource reduction and target setting under DEA control
(2013) Hosseinzadeh Lotfi, F.; Hatami-Marbini, A.; Agrell, P. J.; Gholami, K.; Ghelej Beigi, Z.
Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a powerful tool for measuring the relative efficiencies of a set of decision making units (DMUs) such as schools and bank branches that transform multiple inputs to multiple outputs. In centralized decision-making systems, management normally imposes common resource constraints such as fixed capital, budgets for operating capital and staff count. In consequence, the profit or net value added of the units subject to resource reductions will decrease. In terms of performance evaluation combined with resource allocation, the interest of central management is to restore the general efficiency value of the DMUs. The paper makes four contributions to the literature: (1) we take into consideration the performance evaluation of the centralized budgeting of hierarchical organizations along with sales and market allocation within manufacturing and distribution organizations; (2) we address the evaluation problems that the central decision maker does not desire to deteriorate the efficiency score of the DMUs after input and/or output reduction; (3) we develop a common set of weights (CSW) method based on the goal program (GP) concept to control the total weight flexibility in the conventional DEA models; (4) we extend a new approach to optimize the inputs and/or outputs contraction such that the efficiency of all DMUs will get bigger than or equal to the efficiency of previous change. We ultimately present a numerical example involving with three inputs and two outputs to illustrate the applicability and efficacy of the proposed approach.
Open Access
Conversando con Goliat. Participación, movilización y represión en torno a conflictos neoextractivistas y ambientales [Conversing with Goliath: Partcipation , mobilization and repression in neoextractivist and environmental conflicts]
(FLACSO, DMU, CIESAS-CCIUDADANO, 2019-01-10) Zaremberg, Gisela; Guarneros-Meza, Valeria; Gallardo Robles, Lourdes; Ortuno Martinez, Ivonne
This working paper/report provides the initial findings of the first phase of the project entitled 'Conversing with Goliath', funded by the British Academy (2017-2020). The findings are mostly based on a legal analysis of extractive projects in Mexico which underline the participatory institutions this legal framework contains. The report also presents information of 40 in-depth interviews conducted to government officials, NGOs and academics with knowledge about the extractive sector in the country and results of a national survey of experts on the topic from the private, public and third sectors. The report presents a summary of the existing participative institutions, their limitations and challenges in the implementation of the extractive regulation. The findings underline the lack of coordination between different tiers of government and their agencies and the historical problems that have characterised weak participation in Mexico.
Open Access
Counter-Islamophobia Kit: Briefing Paper and Toolkit of Counter-Narratives to Islamophobia
(University of Leeds, 2018-09-28) Law, Ian; Easat-Daas, Amina; Sayyid, S
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Crossing the Liminal Line – How Interracial Couples in China Experience Marriage
(Advances in Consumer Research, 2021-10-09) Takhar, Amandeep; Bebek, Gaye; Zhong, Jiayi
This research study seeks to understand, just how interracial couples in China, make consumption choices during the liminal and transitional stage of marriage. We contribute to current literature by identifying the fluidity of their identity projects, as a consequence of the liminality that is experienced during this milestone.
Open Access
Crude Oil Pricing and the Statecraft: Lessons from Economic Sanctions
(2018-09-01) Omar, A.; Lambe, Brendan
This study investigates the economic implications of the US’s foreign policy of coercive sanctioning as a means of exerting pressure on other states. When sanctions are imposed we find that oil prices exhibit a significant abnormal adjustment in magnitude. We show that the nature of the change is decided by the target country’s status either as a net importer or exporter of oil. We then investigate the costs or benefits flowing to the US as a result of sanctioning, such externalities do not appear to be considered when designing and deploying measures of economic coercion.
Open Access
DMU Cross-Faculty Colloquium on Creative and Cultural Industries
(DMU, 2017-05-04) Granger, R.C.
Open Access
Do Stock Market Fluctuations Affect Suicide Rates?
(SSRN, 2018-08-01) Wisiniewski, Tomasz; Lambe, Brendan
This paper uncovers a new influential factor driving suicidal behavior. Using an international sample, we document a robust and significant inverse relationship between stock market returns and the percentage increase in suicide rates. Trends in suicides are affected by market fluctuations both contemporaneously and at a lag. This predictive quality of stock returns offers the potential to implement pro-active suicide prevention strategies for those who could be affected by the vagaries of the market and general economic downturns.
Open Access
Does (or can) Confucianism inform environmental accounting and reporting in China
(Centre for Global Finance, University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China, 2009) Margerison, John
This paper seeks to do two things: Firstly it reviews some of the literature on both Confucianism and its application to business. Secondly it outlines a proposed research project that will further explore the usefulness of Confucianism in the social and environmental accounting and reporting arena. It is from Neo-Confucian philosophy that this paper mainly draws. In particular the idea of “anthropocosmic” shows that Confucianism has close ties with ecology (and thence with environmental issues). The research project proposed involves interviewing a small group of Chinese accountants and managers using semi-structured interviews to establish how useful Confucian thinking is to them in their environmental accounting and reporting work (now or in the future).
Open Access
Empirical Studies on Stock Return Predictability and International Risk Exposure
(2016-03-21) Lu, Qinye
Empirical evidence on the predictability of aggregate stock returns has shown that many commonly used predictor variables have little power to predict the market out-of-sample. However, a recent paper by Kelly and Pruitt (2013) find that predictors with strong out-of-sample performance can be constructed, using a partial least squares methodology, from the valuation ratios of portfolios. This paper shows that the statistical significance of this out-of-sample predictability is overstated for two reasons. Firstly, the analysis is conducted on gross returns rather than excess returns, and this raises the apparent predictability of the equity premium due to inclusion predictable movements of interest rates. Secondly, the bootstrap statistics used to assess out-of-sample significance do not account for small-sample bias in the estimated coefficients. This bias is well known to affect tests of in-sample significance (Stambaugh, 1986) and I show it is also important for out-of-sample tests of significance. Accounting for both these effects can radically change the conclusions; for example, the recursive out-of-sample R2 values for the sample period 1965-2010 are insignificant for the prediction of one-year excess returns, and one-month returns, except in the case of the book-to-market ratios of six size- and value-sorted portfolios, which is significant at the 10% level.
Open Access
The Enigmatic Services Sector of India
(Munich Personal RePEc Archive, 2018-09-26) Virmani, Swati; Balasubramanyam, V.N.
The share of services in India’s GDP, at round 60%, is much higher than that in other emerging economies including China. Since the year 1991 Growth of services in the economy has surpassed that of agriculture and manufacturing, a feature that defies received wisdom on the growth pattern of economies. Received wisdom, grounded in the Kuznets paradigm, is that growth in the productivity of agriculture and agricultural incomes provides the manufacturing sector both low cost agricultural raw materials and a demand for its output. In time, the continued growth in incomes promotes the growth of the services sector both through a demand for consumer services and for services as growth promoting inputs into manufacturing and agriculture. India’s services sector, though, has grown alongside an agriculture sector that is none too productive, and a manufacturing sector that accounts for a relatively low 20% of the GDP. This paper provides an explanation, grounded in the country’s history and economic policies of the pre- liberalization era, for the growth of the services sector and argues that, contrary to popular opinion, it can lead the economy.
Open Access
Entrepreneurial Collective Intelligence: Working paper including Case Studies
(Centre for Enterprise & Innovation, 2023-08-01) Rae, David; Blenker, Per
The purpose of this Working Paper is to provide a single point of reference for a set of case studies which were researched and written during 2021-23 to inform conference and journal papers on the new concept of Entrepreneurial Collective Intelligence (ECI). The cases themselves were too long in total to be included in full in these publications. Also, the cases may be of value separately for research, demonstration and educational purposes. Based on insights from the case studies, a conceptualisation identifies four categories of collaborative structures and collective work processes which characterise ECI in the organisations studied, as well as more generally. These include: Collaborative processes; distributed working; intelligence availability, and organisation of infrastructures.
Open Access
Environmental accounting in China: the case of a medium sized Chinese state owned enterprise
(Department of Accounting and Finance, De Montfort University, Leicester, 2014-09) Margerison, John
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussions about the radical change that is required if any notion of sustainability is to hold in the future. It is hypothesised that developments in environmental sustainability accounting are likely to take place in China because it has both a tradition of harmony in its predominant philosophical schools and it has a political system based on strong government that is able to shape approaches to sustainability. Design/methodology/approach –The paper contains a synthesis of the literature on environmental accounting and on episteme change. Using a Foucauldian epistemic framework and method, a case of a Chinese state owned enterprise is examined for evidence of developments in environmental accounting and of the attitudes of the accountants implementing changes to the accounting systems to incorporate such developments. Findings – Developments in environmental accounting are found to mirror the developments in environmental management more generally. The influences on these developments are found to be rooted in a life-centred morality based on Chinese philosophy, invention using new technologies, removal of some of the barriers caused by specialisation and an awareness of issues linked to anthropocosmic (rather than anthropocentric) notions of world order. Practical implications – A case such as this opens the door for Chinese organisations to move towards environmental sustainability and its associated accounting in ways that are not mimetic of practices in other parts of the world (i.e. the West). This means that China could lead the world in new approaches to accounting for sustainability that do more than reduce organisations’ short term reputational risk. Originality/value – This paper builds on the theoretical work on episteme change and the possibility of a new primal episteme by applying it to a Chinese organisation so as to test the theory as developed originally by Foucault.
Metadata only
Estimating returns to scale in imprecise data envelopment analysis
(2014) Hatami-Marbini, A.; Ghelej Beigi, Z.; Hougaard, J. L.; Gholami, K.
The economic concept of Returns-to-Scale (RTS) has been intensively studied in the context of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The conventional DEA models that are used for RTS classification require well-defined and accurate data whereas in reality data are often imprecise, vague, uncertain or incomplete. The purpose of this paper is to estimate RTS of Decision Making Units (DMUs) in Imprecise DEA (IDEA) where the input and output data lie within bounded intervals. In the presence of interval data, we introduce six types of RTS involving increasing, decreasing, constant, non-increasing, non-decreasing and variable RTS. The situation for non-increasing (non-decreasing) RTS is then divided into two partitions; constant or decreasing (constant or increasing) RTS using sensitivity analysis. Additionally, the situation for variable RTS is split into three partitions consisting of constant, decreasing and increasing RTS using sensitivity analysis. Finally, we present the stability region of an observation while preserving its current RTS classification using the optimal values of a set of proposed DEA-based models.

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