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This paper aims to examine whether corporate social responsibility influences the cost of equity capital of firms operating in controversial industry sectors.

This paper computes the ex-ante cost of equity capital implied in analyst earnings forecasts and stock prices for a sample of 2,006 US firm-year observations belonging to controversial industry sectors (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, military, firearms, nuclear power, oil and gas, cement and biotechnology) during the period 1991-2012. The baseline regression model links CSR score to the implied cost of equity capital (ICC) and controls for firm-specific characteristics, industry factors and economic or market-wide factors. This model enables to capture the differential effect of CSR on ICC when the firm belongs to a specific sector of the controversial industries by adding an interaction term between CSR and the dummy variable representing this belonging.

The findings show two main results. First, CSR engagement significantly reduces the implied cost of equity capital (ICC) in all controversial industry sectors, taken as a group, as well as in each one of these sectors individually. Second, this effect is more pronounced when the firm belongs to the alcohol and tobacco industry sectors.

The findings have two important practical implications. First, they should increase managers’ confidence and incentives, in controversial industry sectors, to pursue CSR activities. Second, policymakers can encourage managers to undertake CSR initiatives in controversial industry sectors through tax incentives (e.g. reduce taxes for CSR related investment projects).

This paper extends prior studies that investigate the perceptions of capital market participants of firm’s CSR commitment (Sharfman and Fernando, 2008; Goss and Roberts, 2011; El Ghoul et al., 2011; Jo and Na, 2012; Bouslah et al., 2013) by examining the effect of CSR on ICC in the controversial industry sectors. It contributes to the debate around the relevance of CSR in controversial sectors by providing evidence of the reduction effect of CSR activities on ICC in controversial industries and by showing that this reduction impact is more pronounced when the firm belongs to alcohol, tobacco industry sectors.

This paper provides a quantitative review of the literature on the repercussions of idiosyncratic information on firms’ cost of equity (CoE) capital. In total, I review the results of 113 unique studies examining the CoE effects of information Quantity, Precision and Asymmetry. My results suggest that the association between firm-specific information and CoE is subject to moderate effects. First, the link between Quantity and CoE is moderated by disclosure types and country-level factors in that firms in comparatively weakly regulated countries tend to enjoy up to four times greater CoE benefits from more expansive disclosure—depending on the type of disclosure—than firms in strongly regulated markets. Second, a negative relationship between Precision and CoE is only significant in studies using non-accrual quality proxies for Precision and risk factor-based (RFB)/valuation model-based (VMB) proxies for CoE. Third, almost all VMB studies confirm the positive association between Asymmetry and CoE, but there is notable variation in the conclusions reached when ex post CoE measurers are used.

There has been an ongoing call from various groups of stakeholders for social and environmental practices to be integrated into companies’ operations. A number of companies have responded by engaging in socially and environmentally responsible activities, while others choose not to participate in these activities, which incur additional costs. The absence of consensus regarding the economic implications of social and environmental practices provides the impetus for this paper. This study aims to examine the association between corporate social and environmental practices (CSEP) and the cost of equity capital measured by four ex ante measures using a sample of UK listed companies.

First, we undertake a review of the extant literature on CSEP. Second, using a sample of 236 companies surveyed in “Britain’s most admired companies” in terms of “community and environmental responsibility” during the period 2010-2014, we estimate four implied a cost of equity capital proxies. The relationship between a companies’ cost of equity capital and its CSEP is then calculated.

The authors find evidence that companies with higher levels of CSEP have a lower cost of equity capital. This finding determines the significant role played by CSEP in helping users to make useful decisions. Also, it supports arguments that firms with socially responsible practices have lower risk and higher valuation.

The finding encourages companies to be more socially and environmentally responsible. Furthermore, it provides up-to-date evidence of the economic consequences of CSEP. The results should, therefore, be of interest to managers, regulators and standard-setters charged with developing regulations to control CSEP, as these practices are still undertaken on a voluntary basis by companies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the association between CSEP of British companies and their cost of equity capital. The study complements Ghoul et al. (2011), who examine the relationship between CSR and the cost of equity capital of the US sample. The authors extend Ghoul et al. (2011) by using a sample of the UK market after applying International Financial Reporting Standards.

The existence of hierarchies based on reputation in modern science is indisputable. A set of common scientific journals is often assumed to be instrumental in the formation of these hierarchies. However, the character of the hierarchies, how monolithic/pluralistic they are and the functions of this differentiation have been discussed and caused controversy. The article brings together results from a survey of 788 Danish researchers, mainly from the social sciences, concerning their assessments of the most influential researchers and most important journals. The rankings indicate a pluralistic picture and only a moderate degree of consensus among researchers. Comparisons with (the few) other surveys and with citation data do not suggest this to be a peculiarity of Danish social scientists, however.

The purpose of this study is to explore the empirical literature on the resilience of firefighters related to potentially traumatic events (PTE). This paper identifies how resilience is defined in this particular research field, reveals trends in applied research methods and examines the main topics addressed in previous research.

Web of Science, PsycARTICLES and Google Scholar databases were searched, as well as a secondary manual screening of the reference lists of all the selected studies and Dutch academic journals. Based on this review, 54 empirical articles were included in the current paper.

Firstly, this paper revealed that there is no consensus in how to define the concept of resilience in this specific research area. A second observation was that most of the selected studies used a quantitative, cross-sectional research design. Finally, the 54 empirical studies provided insights on six topics: the role of the organization, demographic factors, personal characteristics, coping strategies, social support and the reactions of firefighters in the aftermath of PTE. Comparing the empirical results was challenged by the different interpretations and denominations of the concept of resilience and the myriad of measurement techniques applied across the selected articles.

This literature review discovered some promising avenues for future research regarding resilience of firefighters. Moreover, it demonstrated that studying resilience is particularly interesting as the identification of supporting factors leads to a better understanding of how to enhance the well-being, job satisfaction and job performance of firefighters.

We review and analyze the accounting literature that examines the effects of accounting conservatism on financial statements and financial statement users. We begin by analyzing how conservatism affects the reported numbers on the financial statements. These studies primarily evaluate how conservatism affects earnings quality, including earnings persistence and the presence of earnings management. Next, we assess the effect of accounting conservatism on the users of the financial statements. We identify three primary users of the financial statements: (1) equity market users (2) debt market users and (3) corporate governance users. Within each of these categories, we analyze the findings of prior research and explore unanswered research questions. By analyzing the effects of accounting conservatism from a diverse range of research topics, we inform the discussion on the costs and benefits of accounting conservatism.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of intellectual capital disclosure on the cost of equity capital in the context of integrated reporting, which represents the ultimate frontier in the field of corporate disclosure.

The authors employ content analysis to measure intellectual capital disclosure levels along with a panel analysis on a sample of 164 integrated reports.

Empirical outcomes indicate that intellectual capital disclosure levels have a significantly negative association with the cost of equity capital.

This study's major contribution lies in its originality in terms of empirical examination of the relationship between intellectual capital disclosure in integrated reports and the cost of equity capital.

The brief announcement that the Government had accepted that there should be regulations on open date marking of food, to come into effect in 1975, will come as no surprise. It is a timely reminder of what public pressure can achieve these days; how sustained advocacy and publicity by interested sectors of society—magistrates, local authorities, public health workers, consumer groups—can secure legislative changes which, in this case, run counter to trade opinions and the recommendation originally made by the Food Standards Committee that such a proposal was not practical and the existing law was an adequate protection. This was stated in the FSC Report on Food Labelling of 1964, although there was no indication of the evidence reviewed or that the subject had been considered very deeply; it was, after all, only a small fraction of the problem of food labelling control. It was also stated in this Report that in certain cases, date‐stamping of food could give to purchasers a false sense of security, “not justified by the conditions under which the food has been kept since manufacture”.

The purpose of this study is to investigate organizational culture’s perceived importance and practice as it unfolds across hierarchal layers of a formalized organization. Organizational culture is important in innovation and change and becomes significant if its importance and practice are shared across all levels of an organization. Highly formalized organizations are not an exception to this. Yet, there is a shortage of empirical evidence on how the organizational culture’s perceived importance and practice unfold across the senior-management, middle-management and operational levels of a formalized organization.

Applying a theoretical frame incorporating information asymmetry, knowledge sharing and cultural participation, this paper examined three important facets of culture, namely, trust, collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Using a Jordanian bank’s case study, this paper collected data using a mixed-methods approach; quantitative to identify variations across levels and, subsequently, qualitative to explore the nuanced patterns in the perceived importance and practice of the three facets across different organizational levels in the context of a formalized organization.

The findings suggest that the importance and practice of the three cultural facets are shared, as well as differentiated across organizational levels based on purposiveness, person/situation-dependency and nature of work and nature/relevance of knowledge.

Using a multi-level lens provided insight not yet gained by current work in the field. This allowed us to unearth nuanced differences in the perception of organizational culture across organizational hierarchies. The paper contributes to the scholarship on organizational culture in the context of formalized organizations and to managerial practice by offering insights on how a shared practice of trust, collaboration and knowledge sharing is distributed across organizational levels, not captured before. This paper also suggests propositions related to each of three cultural facets, not spelled out before.