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This study aims to explain investors’ intention to invest in the stock market amid the COVID-19 pandemic by expanding the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB).

This study adopts a quantitative approach, and a questionnaire-based survey was conducted to collect responses from existing and potential individual investors. To test the relationships between variables, structural equation modeling was used.

The findings indicated that investors’ attitude and perceived behavioral control had a significant influence on investment intentions. Further, perceived knowledge of COVID-19 improved the ability to predict the intention to invest. Moreover, psychological risk significantly moderated the association between subjective norms related to investors and their attitudes. Overall, the tested model was able to better account for the intention of investors in stock market investments.

In this study, only the investor reactions in the context of an emerging market were evaluated, and future studies could focus on different market contexts and perform comparative studies. Financial markets could be considered as a mechanism that has a direct impact on the wealth distribution of society, and the key findings of this study could be used to promote investment in emerging markets, where participation is comparatively low.

The TPB was expanded by incorporating investors’ perceived knowledge of COVID-19 and psychological risk dimensions, which were then tested in an emerging market context to fill the knowledge gap identified in the contemporary behavioral finance literature.

This study aims to examine the determinants and consequences of integrated reporting (IR) disclosures of listed non-financial firms in an emerging economy.

This study uses data from 39 listed non-financial firms that had adopted IR disclosure framework in Sri Lanka for the period from 2011 to 2018. Firm size, growth opportunity, profitability and firm age are considered significant determinants of IR disclosure, while their consequences are measured in terms of share price, Tobin’s Q, return on assets and return on equity. The authors used the results of the correlation and panel regression analyses to draw this study’s conclusions.

This study finds that firm size and age are the significant determinants of IR disclosure, which is consistent with this study’s expectations. Considering the consequences of IR disclosure, only share price and Tobin’s Q show significant results as per the panel regression analyses.

The findings of this study would be useful in the decision-making processes of existing and prospective investors, regulators, policymakers and society at large. Further, the findings of this study communicate the benefits of this new reporting paradigm in shaping their disclosures in the annual corporate reporting process.

Although existing studies attempted to examine the determinants of IR disclosure and its consequences as isolated studies, this study provides new insights by merging these two aspects into a single study and consider several determinants and consequences as well.

This study aimed to understand better what makes esports fans engage with streamers' live-streaming of esports gameplay. This study used the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and additionally adopted streamer identification and esports game identification as moderating variables.

Data were collected from streamers' esports content streaming viewers over 18 years of age using an online survey in Amazon M-Turk (N = 307). Based on past esports live-streaming weekly watching hours, which range from 1 to 45 h, the participants were divided into lower (n = 152) and higher (n = 155) frequency groups. PLS-SEM and bootstrapping techniques were used to test the moderated mediation relationships among the constructs.

This study found a negative moderating effect of past watching experience on the relationship between attitudes and behavioral intention, and it positively moderated the path between perceived behavioral control and behavioral intention. Also, it was found statistically significant direct impacts of streamer identification (STI) and esports game identification (EGI) on attitude and subjective norms. While the indirect impact of STI on behavioral intention through attitude was statistically significant, there were no significant indirect impacts of EGI on attitude and behavioral intention through subjective norms.

Theoretically, this study extends the TPB model by exploring the two identifications (i.e. streamers and esports games) as antecedents of the focal TPB factors (i.e. attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control) and the moderating effect of prior experience based on high/low weekly watching frequencies. Practically, content creators of esports live-streaming and live-streaming platform managers can use the study’s findings to develop strategies to nurture their current and future viewership.

This study aims to determine the impact of attitude toward content creators, subjective norm and perceived content quality in affecting people’s intention and behavior to watch videos posted on YouTube in Indonesia.

Using questionnaire, data from the total of 112 individuals living in Indonesia were gathered in this study, and these respondents are individuals who have been watching YouTube contents at least 3 h a day for the past eight months. Moreover, all of these data were processed and analyzed using PLS method to determine the impact given by one variable toward the other.

Based on the results of the analysis, the authors concluded that both factors, namely, content credibility and perceived content quality, play significant and positive roles in determining people’s intention to watch – and ultimately behavior to watch – contents or videos published on YouTube, with the former turned out to be the stronger predictor.

The current study attempts to modify and merge both the concept of theory of reasoned action and product quality theory to explain Indonesians’ behavior toward watching contents published on YouTube, and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this type of studies is still in rarity.

This paper aims to achieve two main objectives. First, to introduce to the literature a new versatile active building block, namely, voltage differencing differential voltage current conveyor (VD-DVCC) for analog signal processing applications. Second, to design a novel electronically tunable mixed-mode universal filter. The designed filter provides low-pass, high-pass, band-pass, band-reject and all-pass responses in voltage-mode (VM), current-mode (CM), trans-impedance-mode (TIM) and trans-admittance-mode (TAM).

The proposed filter uses two VD-DVCCs, three resistors and two capacitors. All the capacitors used are grounded, which is advantageous from the monolithic integration point of view. The VD-DVCC is designed and validated in Cadence software using CMOS 0.18 µm process design kit from Silterra Malaysia at a supply voltage of ±1 V.

The proposed novel filter enjoys many attractive features including as follows: the ability to operate in all four modes, no requirement of capacitive matching, tunability of quality factor (Q) independent of pole frequency, availability of both inverting and non-inverting outputs for VM and TIM mode, high output impedance explicit current output for CM and TAM, no requirement for double/negative input signals (voltage/current) for response realization and low active and passive sensitivities. The filter is designed for a pole frequency of 5.305 MHz. The obtained results bear a close resemblance with the theoretical findings.

The proposed novel filter structure requires a minimum number of active and passive components and provides operation in all four operating modes. The filter will find application in structures of mixed-mode systems.

Recent advancements in the domain of smart communication systems and technologies have led to the augmented developments for very large scale integrated circuit designs in electro-magnetic applications. Increasing demands for low power, compact area and superior figure of merit–oriented circuit designs are the trends of the recent research studies. Hence, to accomplish such applications intended for optical communications, the transimpedance amplifier (TIA) was designed.

In this research work, the authors present a multi-layer active feedback structure which mainly composes a transimpedance stage and a gain stage followed by a low pass filter. This structure enables to achieve improved input impedance and superior gain. A simplified cascaded amplifier has also been designed in a hierarchical topology to improvise the noise effect further. The proposed TIA has been designed using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company 45 nm complementary metal oxide semiconductor technology. Moreover, the thermal noise has been analyzed at −3 dB bandwidth to prove the reduction in thermal noise with increase in frequency for most of the devices used in the designed circuit.

The proposed differential TIA circuit was found to obtain the transimpedance gain of 50.1 dBO without applying any external bias current which is almost 8% improvised as compared to the conventional circuit. In addition to this, bandwidth achieved was 2.15 GHz along with only 38 W of power consumption, which is reasonably 100 times improvised in comparison of conventional circuit. Hence, the proposed differential TIA is suitable for the low power optical communications applications intended to work on low supply voltage.

The designed work is done by authors in university lab premises and is not copied from anywhere. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is 100% original.

This paper aims to develop a mathematical model for four-lobe memristor (FLM) element. The four-lobe memristive behaviour can be used in realization of hyperchaotic oscillators and implementation of multi-bit memories. For verification of the developed mathematical framework, two FLM circuit emulators have been presented using VDCC and IC LM13700, respectively.

A mathematical model for FLM has been developed in which, the condition for the existence of symmetrical four lobes, instances and coordinates of the end points of lobes has been derived and presented. Using this mathematical framework, a FLM emulator based on VDCC has been developed. To validate the possibility of practical implementation of FLM concept, an IC LM13700-based circuit has also been developed. The workability of VDCC based circuit has been verified by running simulations in PSPICE environment using CMOS VDCC model. Similarly, the behaviour of LM13700 IC-based circuit has been confirmed by SPICE model of LM13700 IC.

It has been shown mathematically that under certain conditions, third-order flux dependent equation of memductance can be used to generate four lobes on the transient v-i plane. Also, two FLM emulators without using any voltage multiplier circuit/IC have been reported.

From the best knowledge of the authors, there are no such FLM emulators that have been reported in literature so far, which operates at practical operating frequencies.

The purpose of this paper is to study the adsorption properties of a proven traditional medicine of West Africa origin, Alstonia boonei with an attempt to evaluate its application in the corrosion protection of mild steel in 5 M H₂SO₄ and 5 M HCl.

Phytochemical screening and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy analysis were used to characterize the methanolic extract of the plant. Gravimetry, gasometry and electrochemical techniques were used in the corrosion inhibition studies of the extract and computational studies were used to describe the electronic and adsorption properties of eugenol, the most abundant phytochemical in Alstonia boonei.

The extract acted as a mixed-type inhibitor in both acidic solutions, with improved inhibition efficiency achieved with increasing concentration. While the efficiency increased with temperature for the HCl system, it decreased for the H₂SO₄ system. The mechanism of adsorption proposed for Alstonia boonei was chemisorption in the HCl system and physisorption in the H₂SO₄ system, and the adsorptions obeyed Langmuir isotherm at low temperatures. Computational parameters showed that eugenol, being a representative of Alstonia boonei, possesses excellent adsorption properties and has the potential to compete with other established plant-based corrosion inhibitors.

As opposed to pure compounds with distinctive corrosion effects, plant extracts are generally composed of a myriad of phytoconstituents that competitively promote or inhibit the corrosion process and their net effect is evident as inhibition efficiencies. This is, therefore, the main research limitation associated with the corrosion inhibition study of Alstonia boonei.

Being very rich in antioxidant properties by its proven curative and preventive effects for diseases, the interest was stimulated towards the attractive results that abound from its corrosion protection of metals via its anti-oxidation route.

This paper aims to evaluate the inhibitive potential of borage flowers’ aqueous extract (BFAE), Borago officinalis L., against the corrosion of mild steel in 1.0 M phosphoric acid.

Evaluation was carried out by chemical hydrogen evolution (HE), mass loss (ML) and electrochemical potentiodynamic polarization (PDP) measurements. SEM-EDX analysis also was used to confirm the existence of the adsorbed film.

It was found that the inhibition efficiency of BFAE increases with the increase in its concentration, but decreases with the increase in temperature. The potentiodynamic polarization curves indicated that BFAE acts as a mixed-type inhibitor with a predominantly anodic action. The adsorption of BFAE on mild steel surface was found to obey Langmuir and thermodynamic-kinetic adsorption isotherms by forming a thin film on the metal surface. SEM-EDX analysis confirms the corrosion inhibition ability of BFEA in 1.0 M H₃PO₄ by forming a thin film on mild steel surface. In this study, the inhibitive action of BFAE components is discussed on the basis of the physical adsorption mechanism. The same results were obtained for both the freshly prepared extract and the one that kept in a refrigerator for one year.

This paper indicates that BFAE can act as a good inhibitor for the corrosion of mild steel in 1.0 M H₃PO₄ even after one year of preparation.

The inhibiting effects of 2,6‐ionen and 2,10‐ionen type polyvinylbenzyltrimethylammonium chloride, and latex, on low carbon steel in hydrochloric acid solution was investigated by potentiodynamic polarisation measurements and impedance measurement techniques over the temperature range of 20‐60°C at different inhibitor concentrations. It was found that the inhibition efficiencies increased with increasing inhibitor concentration. The degree of shift in E_corr values, together with the change in anodic and cathodic Tafel slopes (β_a, β_c), revealed that the studied inhibitors behaved as anodic inhibitors. Thermodynamic and kinetic parameters for dissolution and adsorption were also calculated.