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This study aims to investigate the direct relationship between audit committee effectiveness and sustainability performance and the mediating role of risk management in the relationship between audit committee effectiveness and firm sustainability performance.

The Hayes Process regression mediation model was used in this study. The data included 2,590 firm-year observations from 518 publicly non-banking and finance companies on the Indonesia Stock Exchange from 2017 to 2021.

This study proves the important role of risk management in mediating the effect of audit committee effectiveness on firm sustainability performance. Audit committee effectiveness was found to positively and significantly affect risk management. However, the effect of audit committee effectiveness on firm sustainability performance was statistically insignificant. The robustness checks and additional tests support all the main regression results.

Sample firms from Indonesia were used as representatives of developing countries. Further research may use more sample firms from multiple countries or provide a comparative study between firms in different countries.

The authority must enhance the audit committee’s role in risk management quality due to the indirect effect between the audit committee and sustainability disclosure. It should also expand the audit committee’s role to include sustainability disclosure.

This study could increase community awareness of firm sustainability. Where a company is required to provide more eco-products, stakeholders are, therefore, expected to have more equal concerns.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine risk management as a mediator of the effect of audit committee effectiveness on firm sustainability performance.

This article describes what department directors and chiefs of staff reported when asked about the competencies they need to be effective in addressing on-the-job challenges. The study analyzed the generated data in two different ways to both understand what participants said in their own terms and to determine whether there is a fit between participants’ responses and facilitative leadership theory.

Twenty-four semi-structured interviews were conducted with five department directors and seven chiefs of staff in a US city that had a mayor-council form of government. Responses were analyzed in two ways. Initially, coding categories were developed inductively in an effort to employ what anthropologists characterize as an emic or insider perspective. Then the data were recoded from an etic perspective using the theory of facilitative leadership as a conceptual framework.

Although participants identified a wide variety of competencies, all participants emphasized the importance of working collaboratively with others, including the members of their teams, the elected official they worked with (and for) and constituents.

While most studies of facilitative leadership have focused on mayors and city managers, i.e. those at the top of the city administration hierarchy, this study’s focus is on middle managers who are not necessarily thought of as leaders but who must in fact, exercise leadership at least at times. Another relatively unique feature of this paper is its focus on a city that employs a mayor-council form of governance, a type of governance structure that has been underdiscussed in the literature to date.

Given that the literature on the links between taxation and inclusive human development is ambiguous, it is important to investigate whether the mediating influence of governance in taxation for inclusive development exists. Thus, this study aims to explore the linkages between the governance quality, taxation and inclusive human development (i.e. inequality-adjusted human development index).

This study employs the generalized method of moments (GMM) technique to establish the empirical findings on 52 African countries for the period 2010–2018. Among the existing GMM approaches, this study follows the Roodman approach, an enhancement of the Arellano and Bover techniques, which limits the proliferation of instruments. This study uses the two-step approach, which deals with issues of the heteroscedasticity as against instead the one-step procedure, which solely addresses the homoscedasticity concerns.

The following findings are established. First, there is an unconditional positive effect of taxation on inclusive human development. Second, the net effects of taxation on inclusive human development, associated with the interaction of the government revenue with governance quality variables, are positive for the most part. It is then evident that when taxation policies are combined with good governance initiatives, the ultimate impact of inclusive human development is likely to be enhanced.

This study establishes that, whereas taxation dynamics largely have a favorable incidence in promoting inclusive human development, when such taxation measures are complemented with good governance initiatives, the overall impact of inclusive human development is also likely to be positive. It follows that policies designed to promote political, economic and institutional governance should be implemented in tandem, which policies designed to boost tax performance in the sampled countries. The findings can also be understood from the perspectives that inclusive human development is likely to be boosted when taxation measures are complemented with, (1) the free and fair election and replacement of political leaders (i.e. political governance), (2) the formulation and implementation of inclusive policies for the delivery of public goods (i.e. economic governance) and (3) the respect by citizens and the state of institutions that govern interactions between them (i.e. institutional governance).

The long-term sustainability of microfinancing institutions (MFIs) is essential for poverty reduction. This study aims to empirically evaluate whether contemporary microfinance economics supports the institutionalization of MFIs, which are crucial for the socioeconomic development of marginalized communities.

This research examines the flow of funds from wealthy economic areas (high-income countries, richer urban areas and capital-rich corporations) to poorer regions (low-income countries, poorer rural areas, female borrowers and financially constrained microenterprises) as a proxy for microfinance economics. Financial sustainability and institutionalization are assessed through return on assets and operational self-sufficiency. The study also considers credit risk as a key independent variable. Using panel data analysis of 333 MFIs from the USA and India, covering 2008–2018, sourced from the Microfinance Information Exchange data set on the World Bank website, this paper analyzes these dynamics.

Results show that credit risks negatively affect the financial sustainability of MFIs in both developed and developing countries. Contrary to expectations, the development status of a nation positively moderates the impact of credit risks on financial sustainability. In developing countries, intra-nation investments do not yield additional returns for MFIs or interact with credit risks. However, the economics of microfinance support the institutionalization of MFIs in these regions.

This study provides valuable empirical evidence on the relationship between microfinance economics and institutionalization, addressing a critical need in the microfinancing sector.

Microfinancing is one of the most essential tools for fighting world poverty. But what if microfinancing were a living entity like all of us? How would microfinancing narrate its life story to the world? The current viewpoint essay generates critical reflections on microfinancing, in the light of contemporary observations, experiences, literature reviews and logical reasoning and narrates the autobiography of microfinancing in its own words.

The paper adopts a first-person omniscient methodology, where microfinancing is the narrator of its life story. Microfinancing is well aware of its perception among other characters (stakeholders), such as practitioners, academics, researchers and lawmakers.

The paper concludes that microfinancing can eradicate world poverty. However, to do so, microfinancing should achieve financial sustainability. While the institutionalists support the financial self-reliance of microfinancing, welfarists contend for donor-based support. Some argue that financial objectives cause a drift in the social mission of microfinancing (mission drift), for which it was conceived in the first place. Nevertheless, in line with the contemporary literature, the current essay, while narrating the story of microfinancing, strongly supports its institutionalization. It is only through financial sustainability that microfinancing can continue its fight against world poverty.

Focusing on the institutionalization of microfinancing should provide practical implications for managers.

The viewpoint supports the fight against world poverty via the sustainability of the microfinancing sector.

In a unique way of narrating the autobiography, the essay intends to draw significant attention to the sustainability of microfinancing. The paper intends to draw more attention toward research on the microfinancing sector to fight world poverty.

This study aims to present a model for detecting and predicting creative accounting in companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE).

The authors conduct this research in three stages. First, the authors review the literature to determine the dimensions, components, indicators and techniques of creative accounting. Second, the authors conduct semi-structured interviews with experts using the fuzzy Delphi technique to obtain screening and reach a consensus. Finally, the authors develop a model to predict creative accounting by classifying the financial statements of the sample companies into two groups based on the use or non-use of creative accounting techniques, measuring the indicators determined in the previous stage, running various machine learning algorithms and choosing the superior algorithm.

The results indicate the usefulness of accounting information for detecting and predicting creative accounting and the relevance of several financial attributes as important predictors. The results also indicate the superiority of extremely randomized trees over other algorithms in predicting creative accounting and suggest that the primary purpose of creative accounting in Iran is earnings management. Contrary to the political cost hypothesis, large Iranian companies use creative accounting to inflate profits.

The present research also has several limitations that must be considered, and caution must be exercised in interpreting and generalizing the findings as specified in the revised manuscript.

This study’s implications are significant for policymakers, standard-setters and practitioners. By recognizing the detrimental effects of creative accounting on financial transparency within companies, policymakers can address existing gaps in accounting standards to minimize the potential for earnings manipulation. Consequently, strengthening internal and external mechanisms related to a firm’s financial performance becomes achievable. The study provides evidence of the need for audit firms to recognize the importance of creative accounting and consider creative accounting in their audit plans to prevent insufficient or even misleading disclosure by companies that extensively use creative accounting practices in their financial reporting. Moreover, knowledge of creative accounting techniques can help auditors assess audit and detection risks and serve as a valuable guide for reducing audit costs and improving audit quality.

Given that creative accounting practices distort the true or real accounting results, curbing creative accounting practices reduces corporate failures and could lead to the reduction of job losses and other social consequences.

This study uses a unique database in Iran to determine a model for predicting creative accounting using a mixed-method methodology, qualitative and quantitative, to identify creative accounting techniques and run various machine learning algorithms.

The pandemic of corruption in Africa reflects the more general climate of the lack of both ethical leadership and appropriate anti-corruption systems found throughout most of the continent. The purpose of this study is to examine the manner in which corruption was perpetrated in an anti-corruption project that was intended to produce outcomes to reduce and control said corruption, in a sub-Saharan Africa country, for sustained development outcomes, including progress in meeting the sustainable development goals.

Based on a field experience, and drawing on the active participant observation research methodology, buttressed by open-ended interviews, this work provides a qualitative analysis and assessment case study of corruption in the implementation process of the anti-corruption project.

It is shown that corruption remains a significant barrier to positive development outcomes, especially in those environments where certain social norms and collectivist behaviour are prominent. In such environments, special systems need to be in place for project implementation success even in cases where a project itself is designed to reduce and control that corruption. Key lessons learned include the imperatives of recruiting qualified and ethical personnel and the importance of country ownership, political will and persistent project monitoring including by the citizen beneficiaries of sustainable development projects.

The paper’s value is the insights it provides through the mapping of the key lessons learned for successful implementation of projects and systems to control corruption and improve ethical behaviour in Africa and beyond.

This study aims to examine the association between anti-corruption corporate disclosure and earnings management practices by bringing evidence from a developed market.

The study uses data from non-financial FTSE 100 Shares in 2016 and 2017. This study develops a disclosure index to capture the anti-corruption disclosures and run pooled, fixed effects and generalized methods of moments regression models to explore the anti-corruption disclosure–earnings management association. This study also disentangles discretionary accruals into positive and negative, use adjusted discretionary accrual computation and take a more conservative view on discretionary accruals computation as an additional analysis.

The results show a negative and significant association between anti-corruption disclosure and earnings management practices. When disentangling discretionary accruals (overvalued/positive and undervalued/negative), the authors found that higher anti-corruption disclosures were negatively associated with positive discretionary accruals, but not associated with negative discretionary accruals. The additional analysis confirmed the previous results, showing that anti-corruption disclosures are perceived as a substantive practice, rather than a mere disclosure practice for legitimacy reasons.

This study contributes to debate on the symbolic versus the substantive uses of anti-corruption disclosures in the UK context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the possibility of a curvilinear relationship between governance structure and nonfinancial risk disclosure. This paper also examines the moderating role of ethical values on the governance structure and nonfinancial risk disclosure relationship.

The sample of this paper contains 71 nonfinancial firms listed on the Saudi Stock Exchange from 2013 to 2020 (568 firm-year observations). The authors use OLS regressions to test the hypotheses.

The authors find there is a U-shaped relationship between governance structure and nonfinancial risk disclosure. Moreover, they show that ethical values moderate the relationship between governance structure and nonfinancial risk disclosure.

The findings of this study offer implications for policy makers and firm managers in Saudi Arabia which there should periodically assess and adapt their governance frameworks due to potential fluctuations in the optimal level resulting from internal or external disruptions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study in Saudi Arabia that provides new empirical evidence on the curvilinear relationship between governance structure and nonfinancial risk disclosure and the moderating role of ethical values on this relationship.

Organizations working in high-hazard environments contribute significantly to modern society and the economy, not only for the valuable resources they hold but also for the indispensable products and services they provide, such as power generation, transportation and defense weapons. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to develop a framework that outlines future research on systems safety and provides a better understanding of how organizations can effectively manage hazard events.

In this research, we developed the high hazard theory (HHT) and a theoretical framework based on the grounded theory method (GTM) and the integration of three established theoretical perspectives: normal accident theory (NAT), high reliability theory (HRT) and resilience engineering (RE) theory.

We focused on the temporal aspect of accidents to create a timeline showing the progression of hazard events and the factors contributing to safety and hazards in organizations. Given the limitations of the previous theories in providing a coherent explanation of hazard event escalation in high-hazard organizations (HHOs), we argue that the highlighted theories can be more complementary than contradictory regarding their standpoints on disasters and accident prevention.

A proper appreciation of the hazard nature of organizations can help reduce their susceptibility to failure, prevent outages and breakdowns of systems, identify areas for improvement and develop strategies to enhance performance.

By developing HHT, we contribute to systems safety research by developing a new, refined theory and enrich the theoretical debate. We also expand the understanding of scholars and practitioners about the characteristics of organizations working in high-hazard environments.