The research investigates the impact of the lockdown period caused by the COVID-19 to the stock market of India. The study examines the extent of the influence of the lockdown on the Indian stock market and whether the market reaction would be the same in pre- and post-lockdown period caused by COVID-19. Market Model Event study methodology is used. A sample of 31 companies listed on Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) are selected at random for the purpose of the study. The sample period taken for the study is 35 days (24 February-17 April, 2020). An event window of 35 days was taken with 20 days prior to the event and 15 days during the event. The event (t1) being the official announcement of the lockdown. The results indicate that the market reacted positively with significantly positive Average Abnormal Returns during the present lockdown period, and investors anticipated the lockdown and reacted positively, whereas in the pre-lockdown period investors panicked and it was reflected in negative AAR. The study finds evidence of a positive AR around the present lockdown period and confirms that lockdown had a positive impact on the stock market performance of stocks till the situation improves in the Indian context.

This study investigates the impact of board incentives as proxied by directors` remuneration on the financial performance of listed textile companies in Bangladesh. Using Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) and data pertaining to listed textile companies of Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) during the period from 2011 to 2017 (resulting in a total of 140 firm-year observations), we have estimated the firm performance equation involving directors’ remuneration and board independence as the independent variables and some other control variables like firm age, size, leverage, and operating efficiency. The results reveal that there is a negative association between board remuneration and firm performance. In addition, this study finds no significant relationship between board independence and firm performance of the sample firms. Our findings suggest that higher pay to the board does not stimulate higher firm performance and, in turn, results in shareholders getting nothing in return from this and, hence, is a matter of great concern for them. Moreover, our results indirectly indicate that currently directors` remuneration in Bangladesh is not aligned with the firm performance, which has been emphasized in extant corporate governance literature. Besides, this paper further raises questions about the effectiveness of independent directors in the boards of textile firms in Bangladesh.

The study aims to explore the problems of the existing Shariah Governance Framework (SGF) and its concerned authorities in the context of Bangladesh. Thus, according to responses from 17 respondents, this study outlines that Bangladesh has an absence of a shortage of experts, experienced, knowledgeable, and qualified Shariah people at all levels (i.e., the central bank, Islamic banks, Shariah Supervisory Boards (SSBs), and regulators). Therefore, Bangladesh does not have a separate Islamic banking act, Shariah audit firm, Shariah index institutions, and comprehensive SGF. The existing guideline has a limitation concerning its comprehensiveness, accountability, responsibility, and structure of SSBs. Islamic banks do not follow the instruction of the central bank in the formation of SSBs. As a result, there is an absence of competent and qualified SSB, which also results in the functions of Shariah departments as well as Shariah applications. Usually, the Board of Directors (BOD), management, executives, customers, and the public also have the conceptual gap about Islamic banks, SGF, and banking system compared to the regular prayers, faith, and belief. Concisely, Bangladesh requisites a comprehensive SGF, Islamic banking act, a standard accounting system, and a robust Shariah audit system for the overall development of Islamic banks and SGF.

This study aims to investigate whether financial literacy, parental socialization, peer influence and self-control have a significant impact on money management among students of a Malaysian public university. In most settings, the studies on the determinants of personal saving behavior among university students focus on personality factors, attitudes toward money and possessions, and financial knowledge as predictors of money management behavior. Primary data are collected using a self-administered questionnaire with the samples comprised 186 students. The findings show that all the financial literacy and parent socialization have a positive relationship with money management; meanwhile, peer influences and self-control have a negative relationship with money management. This is because the majority of students admit they cannot control their self in managing their money. In this study, parent socialization has a significant relationship with money management which signifies that parents are playing essential roles in ensuring their children to establish money management. In practical, this study can contribute to the parents in providing their children to foster sound money management. Besides, Perbadanan Tabung Pendidikan Tinggi Nasional (National Higher Education Fund Corporation) PTPTN should monitor the loan, and management process and arrange motivational program so that students can more focus on the educational expense.

The main purpose of this study is to examine the impact of intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) on firm performance in the pharmaceutical and chemical industry of Bangladesh. In this study, 21 listed pharmaceutical and chemical companies have been selected as sample for 2016 and 2017. This study used the intellectual capital disclosure index developed by Rahman, Sobhan, and Islam. Return on assets and return on equity have been used as the proxy variable of firm performance. In this study, content analysis is performed to assess the level of disclosure regarding intellectual capital and pooled cross-sectional analysis is used to assess the relationship between ICD and firm performance. The study has found a positive and significant relationship between ICD and firm performance. Besides, an in-depth analysis of this study shows that all the components of ICD namely internal capital disclosure, external capital disclosure, and human capital disclosure are also positively and significantly associated with firm performance. The study suggests the development of an intellectual capital disclosure framework by the regulatory authority for mandatory compliance. This will improve the quality and quantity of ICD in the annual reports. Besides, firms should more emphasize on ICD which will help to improve their performance.

This study aims to find out the legalization status of a central Shariah regulatory authority for the Islamic banks in Bangladesh. In this regard, the central bank can legalize the existing Centralized Shariah Board for Islamic Banks of Bangladesh (CSBIB) or form a new Centralized Shariah Supervisory Board (CSBB) under the management of the central bank in Bangladesh. Based on the data obtained by the semi-structured interviews, this research finds diversified opinions regarding the legalization of CSBIB or the formation of a new CSBB. Initially, without the law, it would be difficult to form CSSB under the central bank as the Islamic banks and banking environment are still not ready. In addition, it is difficult to legalize the existing CSBIB because the format of its structure is different from the CSSB structure in Malaysia and Bahrain. The existing banking company act authorizes the central bank to provide circulars regarding banking issues and it will be considered as an act. The central bank can legalize the existing CSBIB or form a new CSSB through a circular which will be helpful to monitor the overall Shariah issues. The presence of a CSSB will fulfill the expectations of all Islamic banks, and the concerned stakeholders.

The purpose of this study is to identify the barriers of university and industry cooperation and to develop recommendations for the internal ecosystem of technology commercialization. The research method used is a survey of three categories of experts from 9 universities of Almaty (researchers, technology transfer managers, spin-off-owners). Despite the strong efforts of the government of Kazakhstan in building innovation infrastructure, there is a low level of innovation activity, less than 5% of university inventions are transferred into the industry. The results of the expert survey showed that the main barriers for cooperation between university and industry are: lack of resources to build university-industry links, lack of time due to high teaching load, poor qualification of technology transfer managers and lack of networking with industry. Based on the results of the expert survey, it is proposed to develop the ecosystem for the commercialization of university-based technologies, for which the following economic activities are important: human resources, financing, intellectual property management system, and intermediary infrastructure. The results of this study can be applied in developing the strategies and policies for universities, public research organizations, as well as for national R&D and higher education policies.

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to find out the intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) and its determinants in the pharmaceutical and chemical industry of Bangladesh. Research design, data, and methodology - This research study is conducted on the listed firms of pharmaceutical and chemical industry in Bangladesh during the period of 2016 to 2017. This study develops a self-structured intellectual capital disclosure index; and the proxies of determinants of ICD are used as board characteristics (board size, independent directors and female directors), ownership structures (institutional ownership and director ownership), and firm characteristics (firm size, leverage and performance). The study uses a content analysis to analyze the extent of ICD and a pooled cross-sectional method to find the determinants of ICD. Research Findings - This study finds that intellectual capital disclosure is positively associated with firm size, leverage, and firm performance and negatively associated with director ownership and institutional ownership. This study also finds that there is no significant association of ICD with independent director or female director. Conclusions - The study recommends that the regulatory authority should develop mandatory guidelines on ICD for ensuring proper and consistent disclosure about the intellectual capitals. Besides, the companies should include a separate section in the annual reports to disclose the measurement and management of intellectual capital.

Environmental awareness and its relation to the development of economy has garnered increased attention in recent years. Researchers, over the years, have argued that sustainable development warrants for minimizing environmental degradation since one depends on the other. This study analyzes the relationship between environmental degradation (carbon emission taken as proxy for degradation), economic growth, total energy consumption and industrial production index growth in Bangladesh from year 1998 to 2013. This study uses Vector Autoregression (VAR) Model and variance decomposition of VAR to analyze the effect of these variables on carbon emission and vice-versa. The findings of VAR model suggest that industrial production and GDP per capita has significant relationship with carbon emission. Further analysis through variance decomposition shows carbon emission has consistent impact on industrial production over time, whereas, industrial production has high impact on emission in the short run which fades in the long run which is consistent with Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis. Carbon emission rising along with GDP per capita and at the same time having low impact in the long run on industrial index indicates there may be other sources of pollution introduced with the rise in income of the economy over time.

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the factors that have an impact on public policy, green products and technology in Kuala Lumpur, given government initiatives to boost the environment awareness. The data used in this study was collected by distribution questionnaires randomly in six areas of Kuala Lumpur and 400 respondents were interviewed. Based on a literature review, three hypotheses were stated and tested using structural equation modeling (SEM). SEM is a statistical analysis method that involved two or more variables in analyzing structural relationships among the variables. The SEM model shows that green products and government policies have a direct influence on environmental awareness. However, green technology does not have a direct influence on environmental awareness. Since, knowledge on green technology does not have a significant impact on raising environmental awareness among the public, a much more pragmatic awareness campaign needs to be put in place to use green technology as a part of modern living. The study suggests that the urban population needs to be more aware of the environmental issue as cities tend to have better infrastructure to raise public awareness on green issues. Moreover, the government should increase the environmental awareness among younger generation through workshops, seminars, campaigns, and pamphlets.

We extend the results of Yu et al. (2015b) of the novel sharpness angle measurement to a large number of spectra obtained from the Fermi gamma-ray burst monitor. The sharpness angle is compared to the values obtained from various representative emission models: blackbody, single-electron synchrotron, synchrotron emission from a Maxwellian or power-law electron distribution. It is found that more than 91% of the high temporally and spectrally resolved spectra are inconsistent with any kind of optically thin synchrotron emission model alone. It is also found that the limiting case, a single temperature Maxwellian synchrotron function, can only contribute up to 58+23 -18% of the peak flux. These results show that even the sharpest but non-realistic case, the single-electron synchrotron function, cannot explain a large fraction of the observed spectra. Since any combination of physically possible synchrotron spectra added together will always further broaden the spectrum, emission mechanisms other than optically thin synchrotron radiation are likely required in a full explanation of the spectral peaks or breaks of the GRB prompt emission phase.

This study investigates the impact of Malaysia’s capital market and other key determinants on Economic Growth from the period of 1988 to 2012. The key determinants studied are foreign direct investment and real interest rate. This study also examines the long run and short run relationship between the economic growth and capital market, foreign direct investment, and real interest rate by using bound testing cointegration of Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) and Error Correction Model (ECM) version of ARDL model. The empirical results of the study suggest that there is long- run cointegration among the capital market, foreign direct investment, real Interest rate and economic growth. The result also suggests that capital market and real interest rate have positive impact on economic growth in the short run and long run. Foreign direct investment does not show positive impact on economic growth in the short run but it does in the long run.

As one of the most important crop, rice is not only a staple food of half world’s population but a wonderful model plant, which has been leading the evolution and functional genomics study. The next-generation sequencing technology are expediting rice genomic study, by providing a simple but powerful way. In this study, we re-sequenced a core collection of 137 rice accessions from all over the world along with 158 Korean breeding varieties. Finally, 6.3G uniquely mapped reads were obtained, and about 10 million SNPs and ~1.2 million InDels were identified with average sequencing depth of 7.5X. These will help us to maximize our germplasm utilization and assists all the deep research in population dynamics and functional studies. Here, we’d like to show the approaches applied to resequencing data mining and on-going activities.

The plant family chrysanthemum is known for its medicinal, ornamental, and economic purposes. Owing to its economic and biological significance to the difficult identification based on morphological characters, it is useful to develop DNA barcodes. DNA sequence data enable not only the inference of phylogenetic relationships but also provide an efficient method for species-level identifications under terms DNA barcoding or DNA taxonomy. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the utility of DNA barcoding in discriminating Chrysanthemum species. Four cpDNA regions (matK, rpoC, rpoB, trnH-psbA) and one nuclear (ITS) marker have sequenced from 28 specimens of 11 species from 4 genera of Chrysanthemum which were collected from 5 provinces in Korea. Comparisons of within and between species levels of sequence divergence showed that genetic variation between species exceeds variation within species.

This report describes the inception, development and extensive use over 30 years of elliptical polarimeters at the Uni\-versity of Pennsylvania. The initial Mark I polarimeter design utilized oriented retarder plates and a calcite Foster-Clarke prism as the analyzer. The Mark I polarimeter was used on the Kitt Peak 0.9 m in 1969-70 to accomplish a survey of ap\-proximately 70 objects before the device was relocated to the 0.72 m reflector at the Flower and Cook Observatory. Suc\-cessive generations of automation and improvements included the early-80’s optical redesign to utilize a photoelastic modulated wave plate and an Ithaco lock-in amplifier–the photoelastic modulating polarimeter. The final design in 2000 concluded with a fully remote operable device. The legacy of the polarimetric programs includes studies of close binaries, pulsating hot stars, and luminous late-type variables.

Investigation on oriental melon was carried out for 30 minutes starting at 7 PM every day from March 21 to May 24 to find out the effect of light emitting diode on seedling quality, grafting, growth and flowering of oriental melon. According to the result of the investigation, plant height was longer in Blue, Infrared, Red+Blue and Red treatment and leaf number was higher in Blue, Red+Blue and Infrared treatment than those of control. No big difference was identified between control and Yellow, Green, Ultraviolet treatments. Grafting rate was high in Green, Red+Blue and Green treatment. The number of flower evef}' week in control was nine, the number was almost 1 higher in White and Ultraviolet A treatments, but it was 1 to 4 lower in the rest of treatments. The number of female flowers of control was 10, however, it was 21 in Infrared treatment, 17 in White, 15 in Ultraviolet, 13 in Red+lnfrared, 12 in Blue and Red+Blue, 11 in Yellow and 8 in Green.