This study empirically investigates and explores the relationship between firms' environment consciousness and banks lending decision. We consider all US firms' in the Kinder, Lydenberg and Domini Research & Analytics, Inc. social performance database for the year 1991 to 2006 and use their...

This paper examines the impact of the recent global financial crisis on the cost of debt capital (syndicated loans) in a leading emerging market, namely China, using difference-in-differences and GARCH approaches. Before the crisis China adopted banking reforms allowing entry of foreign banks...

Risk analysis in seaports plays an increasingly important role in ensuring port operation reliability, maritime transportation safety and supply chain distribution resilience. However, the task is not straightforward given the challenges, including that port safety is affected by multiple...

Since the development of organic food, to a great extent, depends on the needs of consumers, the studies on the consumer behavior of organic food would have far-reaching significance to the development of the whole organic food industry. The recent studies in this field mainly include the...

In the present paper, a numerical study is presented to investigate the cascade utilization of waste heat in sinter cooling bed. With the aid of CFD (computational fluid dynamics), a two-dimensional unsteady mathematical model, which would significantly reduce the computational time, is...

Areas of water shortage comprise many smaller sub-areas into which water is transported from external sources. Fairness and efficiency of distribution are overriding principles. Each local area requires adequate water for community and ecological purposes as well as a supply sufficient to...

This study presents a mathematical model that designs a reliable multi-modal transportation network for a biofuel supply chain system, where intermodal hubs are subject to site-dependent probabilistic disruptions. The disruption probabilities of intermodal hubs are estimated by using a...

This paper studies the contributing factors of maritime piracy by analyzing previous incidents that have been reported to the International Maritime Organization (IMO). Part of the analysis is to filter those ship types that are particularly vulnerable to piracy attacks. The paper also...

Terrorist attacks in the past decade had raised concern that terrorists capable of the suicide hijackings of airplanes could readily adapt such capabilities to maritime targets like ports. Although a large number of port security control measures have been proposed which have greatly enhanced...

Digester sludge and rumen fluid were explored as the inoculum sources of anaerobic reactors fed with aquatic plants. Methane and volatile fatty acid were both expressed in terms of chemical oxygen demand (COD) in this study. A higher product yield of 464.3 g COD/g total solid (TS) was achieved...