Board of directors (BOD) bring valuable human and relational capital to firms but may act as self-interested agents by design. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the compensation of BOD members in high-technology sectors affects overall firm performance. We tested our specific hypotheses using panel regression methodology on data gathered from the CRSP, Compustat, BoardEx, and ExecuComp databases. Our final sample consisted of 9,127 firm years, and the companies in our sample were all high-tech publicly traded U.S. firms from 1992 to 2019. Our results showed that there is an association between BOD’s pay structure and firm performance (accounting-based return on assets and market-based Tobin’s Q). Our findings demonstrate originality and contribute to the literature since we empirically demonstrate that the level of variable BOD pay has a diminishing effect on return on assets and Tobin’s Q. This study advances our knowledge of executive compensation in the high technology sector.

The respective delivery roles of public and private providers is a key battleground in the ongoing transformation of welfare states. But despite a burgeoning literature on public attitudes to aspects of welfare state activity, delivery has to date received scant attention. This article makes a first step in addressing this knowledge gap. Drawing on original survey data from the United Kingdom, it analyses attitudes towards the delivery of social policies and explores their relationship to other welfare attitudes. We show that views on delivery display less variation than attitudes to welfare generosity and redistribution, that public support for private sector involvement in delivery is limited to certain fields and that there is very little consistent support for outright privatisation. The article thus demonstrates that there is very little congruence between attitudes to ‘welfarism’ and attitudes to ‘statism’.

This study explores the relationship between maternal working hours and a child's emotional well-being using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study. Child well-being is assessed through self-reported happiness and a well-being index that includes concerns, temperament, bullying, and behaviour. Results show a positive association between maternal employment and child well-being, supported by factor analysis combining child, mother, and teacher reports. The association remains consistent across income levels and is unaffected by commuting time or cohabitation status. These findings highlight the importance of maternal employment and contextual factors in shaping child well-being.

L-carnitine has an important role in the control of oxidative stress and lipid β-oxidation during in vitro culture and cryopreservation of ovarian follicles, oocytes and embryos. This substance balances the acetyl-CoA/CoA ratio, maintains glucose metabolism and increases energy production in mitochondria. It also plays a key role in reducing endoplasmic reticulum stress, by transferring palmitate to mitochondria or eliminating it to avoid toxicity. By eliminating reactive oxygen species, L-carnitine increases the percentages of mature oocytes with uniform mitochondrial distribution and improves embryo post-thaw cryotolerance. Therefore, L-carnitine controls lipid β-oxidation and oxidative stress during in vitro culture of ovarian follicles, oocyte maturation, embryonic development and cryopreservation.

This study examines the changes over time of the twinning rate and infant and child mortality across 17 rural villages in the province of Zaragoza (Spain) over a span of 200 years. The aim is to understand how the twinning rate evolved in conjunction with the processes of economic and social modernization, as well as the demographic transition. During the period analyzed, the twinning rate increased by 10%, rising from 1.26 per 1000 births in the second half of the 18th century to 1.38 per 1000 births in the first half of the 20th century. This rate varied due to hereditary issues, biological factors such as the mother’s age and parity, and socioeconomic features like family occupation and the mother’s education level. In terms of child mortality, twins historically faced a significantly higher mortality rate. However, they benefited greatly from the mortality transition, at least in absolute numbers. While nearly 60% of twins did not survive beyond 5 years of age in earlier periods, the mortality rate for twins decreased to 40% by the first half of the 20th century. The excess mortality was particularly severe for girls, driven by a widespread preference for sons, which led to higher mortality rates for girls in the first 5 years of life, especially in the earliest months. These findings help us understand the improvements in uterine and childhood survival rates for contemporary twins, which can be attributed to the socioeconomic and medical advancements of the 20th century.

This article explores the shift in mental health recovery from mere symptom management to a holistic approach via the CHIME framework. It delves into the author’s experience, beginning with the loss of his father, a war veteran with mental health struggles, at 16, thrusting him into the role of primary caregiver for his mother, who also battled mental health issues and eventually took her own life. These events spotlight the shortcomings of traditional mental health care and the urgent need for empathetic, multifaceted services. Advocating for co-creation in mental health services, the article outlines a transition towards a system that integrates recovery principles through stages from co-ideation to co-evaluation, emphasising holistic, person-centred care. It calls for a reimagined mental healthcare system that respects individual journeys and is rooted in co-creation, signalling a critical move towards systemic change.

While I believe that the authors, Emiline Smith and Erin Thompson, have legitimate concerns regarding the theft of cultural objects, I consider that, in the article “A Case Study of Academic Facilitation of the Global Illicit Trade in Cultural Objects: Mary Slusser in Nepal”, International Journal of Cultural Property (2023), 1–20, the authors present a number of serious misrepresentations.

The day has arrived that genetic tests for educational outcomes are available to the public. Today parents and students alike can send off a sample of blood or saliva and receive a ‘genetic report’ for a range of characteristics relevant to education, including intelligence, math ability, reading ability, and educational attainment. DTC availability is compounded by a growing “precision education” initiative, which proposes the application of DNA tests in schools to tailor educational curricula to children’s genomic profiles. Here I argue that these happenings are a strong signal of the geneticization of education; the process by which educational abilities and outcomes come to be examined, understood, explained, and treated as primarily genetic characteristics. I clarify what it means to geneticize education, highlight the nature and limitations of the underlying science, explore both real and potential downstream bioethical implications, and make proposals for mitigating negative impacts.

A 10-year-old child with stabilised idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy was admitted to the hospital with sudden worsening of heart failure. Further analysis showed increased NT-proBNP and positive for COVID-19. Myocarditis secondary to COVID-19 was assumed. Recurrent hospitalizations with inotropic support were required due to the progressive worsening of cardiac function. Seven months after SARS-CoV-2 myocarditis, she underwent heart transplantation.

This paper investigates the intricate interplay between tax expenditures (TEs) and social policy. Leveraging the Global Tax Expenditures Database (GTED), we carry out the first data-driven comparative assessment of direct spending and TEs for social welfare across countries to shed light on this often-overlooked aspect of fiscal policy. Our research reveals prevalent TE usage for social purposes and substantial costs in terms of revenue forgone worldwide, averaging over 1 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 6 per cent of tax revenue. Our analysis showcases varying strategies employed by countries, particularly emphasizing the reliance of high-income economies on TEs granted through personal income taxes, and low/middle-income countries predominantly using value-added tax-related TEs for social objectives. Our results also highlight the importance of functions such as housing in contributing significantly to social spending through TEs with the ratio tax expenditure/direct spending reaching roughly 365 per cent in the US and 203 per cent in France. Hence, our study underlines the necessity for meticulous evaluation and efficient design of TEs to better align TE regimes with governments social policy objectives as well as to minimise unintended social or economic consequences.

This article examines the complex relationship between Sufism, secularity, and psychiatry through Refik Halid Karay’s 1956 novel, Kadınlar Tekkesi (Women’s Lodge). The article argues that Kadınlar Tekkesi recontextualizes Sufism by medicalizing and pathologizing it through psychiatry and psychopathology. This analysis draws upon discourse analysis and Michel Foucault’s exploration of abnormality and power dynamics. The article contends that this approach diverges from previous anti-Sufi agendas of Turkish novels, which were primarily motivated by religious and moralistic criticisms. The article argues that the application of psychiatric terminology to Sufism suggests a shift in Turkish secularism’s attitude toward Sufism, which transitions from dismissing Sufism as obsolete to engaging with it systematically through scientific study. Informed by modern scientific rationality, this shift signifies a redefined interaction between knowledge and power and the gendered aspects of the medicalization process. The article underscores that interactions between the discourses of secularism, Sufism, and psychopathology suggest a new regime of truth based on secular and scientific thought, while implicitly supported by orthodox Islamic principles.

Some recent work on populist conservative forces engaged in legal mobilization in Europe highlights the involvement of US-based conservative legal advocacy organizations and their European affiliates. These groups are linked to efforts to resist the integration of Europe and the power of the European courts to implement the projects of liberal, left-leaning pro-EU social forces. Little attention thus far has focused on the lawyers active in these advocacy groups, their ties to the American conservative legal movement and the transnational lawyer networks of which they are a part. This essay sketches an agenda for future research on the composition, operations, strategies and discourse of this complex constellation of conservative lawyers and their organizations.

The toolbox for resisting illiberalism is quite diverse. It includes high-level diplomatic negotiations concerning sanctions to enforce democracy and citizens’ mobilisation for local causes. This article focuses on strategic litigation as legal mobilisation, relying on the language of rights and the rule of law and addressing courts as defenders of liberal democracy. Such mobilisation leads to litigation before national and European courts concerning issues such as media freedom, judicial independence, minority rights or the rights of migrants. In order to be authoritative, however, courts need support from political institutions at national and EU levels from the transnational judicial community and from civil society. The embeddedness in structured civil causes and organisations seems particularly relevant in the context of strategic litigation. This article aims to map out particular factors in the EU legal and institutional systems that directly affect the prospects of strategic litigation against illiberal reforms using EU law.

On the one hand, the EU legal system does not provide direct access to the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU). The multilevel system of judicial protection in the EU means that litigation aimed at resisting illiberalism mostly needs to start before national courts, making it vulnerable to political capture of national judiciary. On the other hand, the EU law system is based on the purposive constitutional framework of the Treaties. The tendency to follow a teleological interpretation of the CJEU makes it a promising ground for advocating for new interpretations of the law in light of a changing social context. Finally, EU law is a system with a particular legal culture and a field of experts who are well-versed in applying that culture. This field does not directly overlap with the specialised lawyers who often initiate strategic litigation; who tend to be experts in the fields of migration, transparency or the environment; and who do not have a broader understanding of EU law and its integration logic.

Ishitsuka et al. [‘Explicit calculation of the mod 4 Galois representation associated with the Fermat quartic’, Int. J. Number Theory 16(4) (2020), 881–905] found all points on the Fermat quartic ${F_4\colon x^4+y^4=z^4}$ over quadratic extensions of ${\mathbb {Q}}(\zeta _8)$, where $\zeta _8$ is the eighth primitive root of unity $e^{i\pi /4}$. Using Mordell’s technique, we give an alternative proof for the result of Ishitsuka et al. and extend it to the rational function field ${\mathbb {Q}}({\zeta _8})(T_1,T_2,\ldots ,T_n)$.

School connectedness may offset mental health risks associated with childhood adversity. The present study examined the potential protective effects of school connectedness against childhood adversity when predicting adolescent mental health outcomes in 9,964 individuals (51% female, 81% white) from the Millennium Cohort Study. Structural equation models were fitted to examine the longitudinal relationships between childhood adversity, school connectedness, and adolescent mental health. Childhood adversity was a risk factor, predicting greater internalizing and externalizing problems and lower levels of positive mental health. School connectedness was a promotive factor as it predicted fewer mental health problems and greater positive mental health. Furthermore, school connectedness at age 11 was protective against childhood adversity when predicting internalizing and externalizing problems at age 14. That is, students with a history of adversity who felt more connected to school were less likely to exhibit internalizing and externalizing symptoms than those who felt less connected to school. Only school connectedness at age 11 was protective against childhood adversity, indicating that feeling connected to school at younger ages may disrupt processes linking childhood adversity to adolescent mental health. Schools should foster students’ feelings of connectedness to protect vulnerable individuals and benefit all pupils’ mental health.