Structural Equation Modelling

This study seeks to explore the relationship between corporate governance and dividend payout policywith the mediating role of leverage.Relationship between corporate governance and dividend payout already established but mediating role of leverage is checked for the first time. Better corporate governance may impact the capital structure due to reduced agency problem and hence the firms change the dividend payout policy. CEO duality, audit committee, number of meetings, independent directors and board size are taken as indicators of corporate governance. The study uses the secondary data of Pakistan Stock Exchange 100 index listed companies from 2011 to 211. Total 327 firm-year observations are included in the study. AMOS is used to apply Structural Equation Modeling for the confirmation of mediation process. The empirical results show that leverage plays mediating role between corporate governance and dividend payout policy when CEO is not holding the office of ChairmanBoD and there is existence of audit committee. Board size is significantly and positively related with leverage and the leverage is significantly and negatively related with dividend payout ratio.

In this study, we investigated whether our understanding of adoption of e-shopping and instore shopping could be advanced through the application of attitude theory. A shortcoming of the analytical frameworks and models featured in attitude theory is that they do not address the issue of what causes the variation in psychological constructs such as perceived behavioural control. A simplified version of the Extended Model of Goal-directed Behaviour (EMGB)(Perugini & Conner, 2000) was therefore expanded to take into account ...

Housing is one of the basic needs of human. Population in Malaysia is increasing and expected to reach up to 35 million in year 2020. This phenomenon creates high demand for housing.
To tackle the squatter problems, the government introduces low-cost housing. Low cost house is known as the government house, where the price is cheaper but still comfortable. Although there are many of low-cost housing projects have been completed to cope with the need of the citizen especially
for low-income group. However, census report reveled that these is huge demand of low-cost housing. This demand might be because of various factors which are very essential to identify in order to meet the required demand of low cost houses. Hence, this study is carried out to assess the demand of low cost housing in Melaka, determine the significant factors affecting demand of low-cost housing, and establish PLS-SEM model for assessing factors affecting low-cost housing demand. In this study, data are collected by distributing questionnaire in Melaka state. The collected data from survey was analyzed using statistical software SPSS and presented in graphs and chart. Further, factors affecting low cost housing demand in Melaka were modeled with the SmartPLS v2.0. The model shows the relationship between low cost housing demand and its indicators. The finding of the study showed that most significant indicators affecting the demand of low-cost housing in Melaka are the economic factors which include housing stock, inflation rate and Gross Domestic Products (GDP). The
Goodness of Fit showed that the model has substantial explaining power for the assessing factors affecting low cost housing demand in Melaka which the values is 0.481. This means that the economic factor has a great influence on the low-cost housing demand in Melaka.

The purpose of this study was to explore the inter-relationships among students’ self-esteem, bullying victimization/perpetration behaviours, and perceived parental support, with a focus on how self-esteem mediates the association of parental support and bullying behaviours and how bullying mediates the association of parental support and self-esteem. We employed structural equation modelling to analyse the secondary data collected in “Young Minds Matter: The Second Australian Child and Adolescent Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing” funded by the Australian Government Department of Health. Analyses were performed on 431 adolescent students selected from 2967 adolescents aged 11-17 years. Our findings revealed that parental support has a direct positive association with self-esteem and a direct negative association with bullying behaviours. This study highlights the importance of parental support in both lowering bullying perpetration/victimization and enhancing student’s self-esteem. Findings of this study could improve anti-bullying programs.
Keywords: parental support, self-esteem, bullying victimization/perpetration, structural equation modelling, secondary school students, adolescents.

This article partially examines Stafford and Warr’s (1993) reconceptualized model of deterrence by investigating the relationship between punishment, punishment avoidance, perceived certainty and severity of punishment, and self-reported driving under the influence (DUI). Generalized Structural Equation Modeling (GSEM) was conducted using self-report data from a nationally representative telephone survey of the general population. As hypothesized, experiences with punishment were positively related to perceptions of certainty of punishment, and increased punishment avoidance is related to decreased perceptions of punishment certainty and self-reported DUI. Although perceived certainty of punishment is negatively related to DUI, perceptions of punishment severity were positively related to self-reported DUI. Results also indicate that personal and vicarious experiences are significantly related to perceptions of certainty and severity of punishment and self-reported DUI. With the exception of perceptions of punishment severity, the findings are largely supportive of the theory. While the literature rarely examines perceptions of severity of punishment, some suggestions for future research are posited. The findings also suggest that deterrence may operate differently for those with alcohol addiction problems. These results considerably add to the scarce research that explores predictors of perceptions of punishment certainty and severity and the indirect path between these predictors and self-reported DUI.

Objective – The study aims to learn effect of Innovation Capability and Customer Relationship Management on young entrepreneur's competency. Methodology/Technique – Questionnaire used for the data collection in this study. The sampling method is probability sampling with simple random sampling technique. The population is all the Marketing students' year 2012, and the calculated sampling is 100 respondents Findings – From the analysis and explanation using SEM, it is found that Innovation Capability and CRM have a big influence towards young entrepreneurs. Those variables also stimulate them to sharpen their business intuition. Novelty – The study proves importance of Innovation Capability and CRM on development of entrepreneurs.

This paper aims to investigate the mediation role of fear of negative evaluation (FNE) in the relationship between perceived autonomy support (PAS) and academic risk-taking (ART) in the context of social studies course. A total of 339 middle school students from Turkey participated in the study. Data were collected through the Learning Climate Scale, Fear of Negative Evaluation in Academic Environments Scale, and Social Studies-Oriented Academic Risk-Taking Scale. Correlation results showed that PAS was negatively correlated with FNE and positively with ART. There was a negative correlation between FNE and ART. Structural equation model analyses showed that PAS predicted FNE negatively and ART positively. In addition, FNE predicted ART negatively. The partial mediation effect of FNE on the relationship between PAS and ART was significant. These results provide empirical evidence for the effect of self-determination theory (SDT) on affective characteristics such as ART and FNE. Keywo...

Searching product information and buying goods online are becoming increasingly popular activities, which would seem likely to affect shopping trips. However, little empirical evidence about the relationships between e-shopping and in-store shopping is available. The aim of this study is to describe how the frequencies of online searching, online buying, and non-daily shopping trips relate to each other, and how they are influenced by such factors as attitudes, behaviour, and land use features. Questionnaire data were collected from 826 ...

The main concern of this paper is to provide an overview of the impact of major design factors on the structural behavior of low/medium/high rise buildings aiming to deepen structure and architect designers understanding of such type of buildings. The study is performed on reinforced concrete and emphasized only on Kuwait City design conditions for wind and seismic. Regular layout plan buildings with different height ranging between five to fifty stories are used. Both serviceability and ultimate strength study are carried out to ensure that deformations and stresses are within the allowable limits according to the international building codes. The studied factors in this paper include the building slenderness ratio and the building core size and location since they are the key drivers for the efficient structural design. Finally, conclusions are summarized as guidelines to be considered in the design practice of reinforced concrete residential buildings in Kuwait.