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The papers in this volume of "International Finance Review" provide a reflection on the role of international finance - and its relationship to strategy, economics, political science and public policy - in examining value creation in multinational enterprise. These are 22 original papers submitted specifically for this volume based on its theme. The papers present a breadth of methodologies, including theoretical, empirical, conceptual, and case study approaches. Several papers offer combinations of these different categories. Among the empirical papers, there are many kinds of data sets analy

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via the DOI in this record. ; Skyline queries identify skyline points, the minimal set of data points that dominate all other data points in a large dataset. The main challenge with skyline queries is executing the skyline query in the shortest possible time. To address and solve skyline query performance issues, we propose a decision tree-based method known as the decision tree-based comparator (DC). This method minimizes unnecessary dominance tests (i.e., pairwise comparisons) by constructing a decision tree based on the dominance testing. DC uses dominance relations that can be obtained from the decision rules of the decision tree to determine incomparability between data points. DC can also be easily applied to improve the performance of various existing skyline query methods. After describing the theoretical background of DC and applying it to existing skyline queries, we present the results of various experiments showing that DC can improve skyline query performance by up to 23.15 times. ; Institute of Information & communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government(MSIT) ; Industrial Strategic Technology Development Program funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy (MOTIE, Korea).

Background Post-traumatic growth is defined as positive psychological, social or spiritual growth after a trauma. Objectives This systematic review aimed to identify studies that quantitatively measured post-traumatic growth among (ex-) military personnel, to determine whether there is evidence of growth in this context and whether such growth is associated with any sociodemographic, military, trauma or mental health factors. Data sources The electronic databases PsycInfo, OVIDmedline and Embase were searched for studies published between 2001 and 2017. Study eligibility criteria and participants Papers were retained if they involved military or ex-military personnel, where some had been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Study appraisal Quality assessment was conducted on all studies. Results 21 studies were retained. The Post-Traumatic Growth Inventory was employed by 14 studies: means ranged from 32.60 (standard deviation = 14.88) to 59.07 (23.48). The Post-Traumatic Growth Inventory Short Form was used by five studies: means ranged from 17.11 (14.88) to 20.40 (11.88). These values suggest moderate growth. Higher levels of social support, spirituality and rumination and minority ethnicity were most frequently associated with more post-traumatic growth. Limitations The involved studies may lack generalisability and methodological quality. Conclusions Overall, this paper confirms that negative reactions to trauma, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder, are not the only possible outcomes for service personnel, as moderate post-traumatic growth can also be observed. Implications of key findings Interventions aimed at helping current and former armed forces personnel to identify and promote post-traumatic growth post-conflict may be beneficial for their well-being.

Abstract. Most landslides in Korea are classified as shallow landslides with an average depth of less than 2 m. These shallow landslides are associated with the advance of a wetting front in the unsaturated soil due to rainfall infiltration, which results in an increase in water content and a reduction in the matric suction in the soil. Therefore, this study presents a modified equation of infinite slope stability analysis based on the concept of the saturation depth ratio to analyze the slope stability change associated with the rainfall on a slope. A rainfall infiltration test in unsaturated soil was performed using a column to develop an understanding of the effect of the saturation depth ratio following rainfall infiltration. The results indicated that the rainfall infiltration velocity due to the increase in rainfall in the soil layer was faster when the rainfall intensity increased. In addition, the rainfall infiltration velocity tends to decrease with increases in the unit weight of soil. The proposed model was applied to assess its feasibility and to develop a regional landslide susceptibility map using a geographic information system (GIS). For that purpose, spatial databases for input parameters were constructed and landslide locations were obtained. In order to validate the proposed approach, the results of the proposed approach were compared with the landslide inventory using a ROC (receiver operating characteristics) graph. In addition, the results of the proposed approach were compared with the previous approach used: a steady-state hydrological model. Consequently, the approach proposed in this study displayed satisfactory performance in classifying landslide susceptibility and showed better performance than the steady-state approach.