The classical literature on Confucianism exhorted leaders to practice five core virtues as the basis for becoming a noble person and for sustaining harmonious communities built on trust and good example. We present a theory about how the senior management in modern corporations, by enacting the five Junzi virtues through virtuous environmental, social, and governance policies and practices, might inspire virtue-based relationships between superiors and subordinates and between employees. We argue that if middle managers and employees observe and experience that (...) their firm’s ESG policies and practices are virtuous, they would feel encouraged to practice those virtues in their own behavior, and thus embody and promote interpersonal harmony. We provide three types of illustration for our theory. First, we map the five Junzi virtues to the content of a specimen ESG report. Second, we map seven subtypes of servant leadership behavior of middle managers to the five Junzi virtues. Third, we map seven types of employee organizational citizenship behavior to the five Junzi virtues. (shrink)

When making decisions, people tend to overweigh the impact of losses compared to gains, a phenomenon known as loss aversion. A moderate amount of LA may be adaptive as it is necessary for protecting oneself from danger. However, excessive LA may leave people few opportunities and ultimately lead to suboptimal outcomes. Despite frequent reports of elevated LA in specific populations such as patients with depression, little is known about what psychological characteristics are associated with the tendency of LA. Based on (...) the neurobiological studies of LA, we hypothesized that positive psychological wellbeing may be negatively associated with people's tendency of LA. In the present study, we set out to test this hypothesis in a sample of young adults. We evaluated LA using a decision-making task in which subjects were asked to decide whether to accept or reject a series of coin-toss gambles. Our results revealed that individuals with more advanced personal growth as assessed by the Ryff's Psychological Well-being Inventory showed reduced LA. To our knowledge, this is the first report demonstrating an association between positive psychological wellbeing and LA. These findings suggest that personal growth might be employed as interventional targets for correcting excessive LA in vulnerable populations. (shrink)

Type 2 diabetes mellitus is associated with cognitive impairment in many domains. There are several pieces of evidence that changes in neuronal neuropathies and metabolism have been observed in T2DM. Structural and functional MRI shows that abnormal connections and synchronization occur in T2DM brain circuits and related networks. Neuroplasticity and energy metabolism appear to be principal effector systems, which may be related to amyloid beta deposition, although there is no unified explanation that includes the complex etiology of T2DM with cognitive (...) impairment. Herein, we assume that cognitive impairment in diabetes may lead to abnormalities in neuroplasticity and energy metabolism in the brain, and those reflected to MRI structural connectivity and functional connectivity, respectively. (shrink)

Speech recognition technology has played an indispensable role in realizing human-computer intelligent interaction. However, most of the current Chinese speech recognition systems are provided online or offline models with low accuracy and poor performance. To improve the performance of offline Chinese speech recognition, we propose a hybrid acoustic model of deep convolutional neural network, long short-term memory, and deep neural network. This model utilizes DCNN to reduce frequency variation and adds a batch normalization layer after its convolutional layer to ensure (...) the stability of data distribution, and then use LSTM to effectively solve the gradient vanishing problem. Finally, the fully connected structure of DNN is utilized to efficiently map the input features into a separable space, which is helpful for data classification. Therefore, leveraging the strengths of DCNN, LSTM, and DNN by combining them into a unified architecture can effectively improve speech recognition performance. Our model was tested on the open Chinese speech database THCHS-30 released by the Center for Speech and Language Technology of Tsinghua University, and it was concluded that the DLD model with 3 layers of LSTM and 3 layers of DNN had the best performance, reaching 13.49% of words error rate. (shrink)

Prior research finds that firms with strong business ethics are less likely to be tax aggressive. Labor union is one of the key stakeholders influencing firm’s tax aggressive behavior, whereas the bargaining process between labor union and firms exhibits ethical dilemma. Although industry-wide labor union coverage is commonly used in prior study to explore the monitoring role of labor unions in constraining management’s aggressive financial and tax decisions of their associated firms, we argue that firm-specific labor unions, which represent a (...) different bargaining power of the employees, do play an important role in determining firms’ tax ethical decisions. Specifically, we examine whether and how the firm-specific labor union coverage impacts firms’ tax aggressiveness decisions over and above industry-wide labor union coverage. We hypothesize and find that firm-specific labor unions influence the associated firms to be more tax aggressive, which results in higher levels of residual cash flows. We also find that industry-wide labor unions influence the associated firms to be less tax aggressive, which is consistent with prior findings. We perform further analyses and find that the results are more pronounced for the firms with greater industry-wide labor unions representation. These results demonstrate that the inclusion of and interaction between the firm-specific and industry-wide labor unions matter in determining corporate’s tax aggressiveness decisions, which highlight firm’s ethical perplexity between tax savings and social commitments. (shrink)

Till now, comprehensive and quantitatively meaningful analyses of stock market participation outcomes of retail investors have been limited by data sources in developing countries. This article devised a special questionnaire related to stock investment to measure the financial literacy and stock investment return for the subjects with stockownership in China and to theoretically and empirically study the effects of objective FL, self-assessed FL, and their composite FL on SIR. The results of the comparative analysis showed that self-assessed FL has a (...) greater effect on SIR than objective FL, and the effect is mediated by risk preference. In addition, we found that competent and overconfident respondents have higher SIR, while under confident respondents cannot gain from the stock market. We also found that risk preference has a positive mediating effect in the relationship between competence and overconfidence and SIR, and a negative mediating effect in the relationship between under confidence and SIR. We thus concluded that confident investors can gain more stockholding returns via taking more risks regardless of the level of their actual financial knowledge. Our findings would be a meaningful complement to the studies of stock market participation. (shrink)