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BACKGROUND: Existing research has rarely examined an earthquake's sustained impact and the trajectory of the earthquake survivors' life satisfaction over time. This study aims to analyze longitudinal changes in life satisfaction of Wenchuan earthquake survivors and the impact of social capital and government relief policy. METHODS: This research applied a hierarchical linear model to longitudinal survey data collected after the earthquake. The survey was divided into three waves and was collected from Deyang City and Mianyang City of Sichuan Province. A random sampling method was used; a sample of 225 participants had valid responses over three waves of the survey. RESULTS: This study found that a survivor's social capital and the perception of the fairness of government relief policy have a significant effect on the trajectory of life satisfaction post-disaster. First, the initial life satisfaction of those with high social capital was significantly higher than of those with low social capital, whilst survivors with high social capital had a lower rate of change in life satisfaction. Second, one year after the earthquake, those who felt government policy was unfair had a lower life satisfaction than those who felt it was fair. However, from the first year to the fourth year after the disaster, survivors who believed that the government policy was unfair experienced a higher rate of change in life satisfaction than those who did not. Third, the fairness of government relief policy moderates the relationship between survivors' social capital and changes in life satisfaction. A fair policy of relief can reduce the negative impact of the lack of individual social capital on life satisfaction. CONCLUSIONS: Survivors reconstruct life satisfaction through their social network and the perception of the fairness of the government's post-disaster relief policy. Therefore, to promote the improvement of life satisfaction of survivors, it is necessary to cultivate social capital and ensure fairness of the relief policy.

Research has indicated limited effects of formal governance measures on securities fraud prevention in emerging markets due to the weak rule of law. We propose that hierarchical inconsistency, misaligned rank ordering in formal organizational and informal social hierarchies of the corporate elite, can provide a novel monitoring mechanism to reduce securities fraud. Leaders at the top of the two inconsistent hierarchies can feel distressed and motivated to engage in contestation and challenge each other's authority, thus providing checks and balances and preventing groupthink. This monitoring effect is likely to be stronger when either of the two heads has dominant and unequivocal superiority in their respective hierarchy, making them particularly distressed by the hierarchical inconsistency and prone to contest. We test our argument in the context of publicly listed family-controlled firms in China, where business and family hierarchies may confer superiority to different individuals. Our study contributes to the corporate securities fraud literature by understanding how formal organizational structures and informal social relationships interact and jointly influence governance effectiveness in emerging markets.Funding: This work was supported by the Strategic Management Society [2015 SRF Dissertation Research Grant], Rudolf and Valeria Maag research funds, and INSEAD alumni funds.

Sustainable development (SD) has increasingly played a key background role in government policymaking across the world, especially for the least developed countries in Africa. Therefore, the purpose of our research is to study the SD of African countries in public life, education, and welfare, and then to help policy makers better monitor the status of sustainable development and formulate development policies in these aspects. We firstly propose a new method to assess the SD in public life, education, and welfare. Then we assess the SD status in 51 African countries as well as other countries in the world. After that, we also make a comparison between African countries and the countries in other continents.

AbstractThe ability to perceive approximate numerosity is present in many animal species, and emerges early in human infants. Later in life, it is moderately heritable and associated with mathematical abilities, but the etiology of the Approximate Number System (ANS) and its degree of independence from other cognitive abilities in infancy is unknown. Here, we assessed the phenotypic specificity as well as the influence of genetic and environmental factors on the ANS in a sample of 5‐month‐old twins (N = 514). We found a small‐to‐moderate but statistically significant effect of genetic factors on ANS acuity (heritability = 0.18, 95% CI: 0.02, 0.33), but only when differences in numerosity were relatively large (1:4 ratio). Non‐verbal ability assessed with the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL) was found to be heritable (0.47; 95% CI: 0.34, 0.57) and the phenotypic association between ANS acuity and non‐verbal ability performance was close to zero. Similarly, we found no association between ANS acuity and general attention during the task. An unexpected weak but statistically significant negative association between ANS acuity and scores on the receptive language scale of the MSEL was found. These results suggest that early ANS function may be largely independent from other aspects of non‐verbal development. Further, variability in ANS in infancy seems to, to some extent, reflect genotypic differences in the population.Highlights
Assessing 514 infant twins with eye tracking, we found that infants' sense of approximate numerosity is heritable and not positively associated with concurrent attentional, cognitive or motor abilities.
These results have implications for our understanding of development of mathematical ability and the link between cognitive abilities early in postnatal life.