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We empirically investigate the impact of fintech innovation on dividend payout (DP) decisions. In addition, we also examine the mediated and moderated role of intellectual capital (IC) and board characteristics (BC) respectively in the fintech innovation-DP relationship.

Using a sample of 9,441 firm-year observations over the period 2014–2022, we develop a structural model that encompasses fintech innovation, IC, BC and DP decisions. We utilize fixed effects regression to empirically test the model. A battery of tests such as the two-step Generalized Method of Moment, Heckman’s two-stage selection correction and Difference-in-Difference regression are used to check the robustness and sensitivity of the estimates.

Our results suggest that fintech innovation significantly and positively impacts DP decisions and IC partially mediates the fintech innovation–DP relationship. In addition, BC such as independence, age and gender diversity are found to moderate this relationship.

This study’s originality lies in its micro-level analysis of the impact of fintech innovation on DP decisions, considering a novel firm-level innovation metric derived from patent applications. To our knowledge, no previous work has empirically examined the mediating role of IC and the moderating influence of BC in the fintech innovation–DP relationship, offering a unique perspective on the complex interactions shaping dividend policies in the digital era.

This study introduces influential-female-directors as a board-gender-diversity variable that captures not only the female representation on the board but also their position on the informal-boardroom-hierarchy. Further, this study investigates whether such directors have a significant influence on the dividend-payout-decisions of leading firms in an emerging economy, India, where concentrated ownership is prevalent and explores the moderation effect they exert on dividend–ownership relationship.

This study uses generalized methods of moments (GMM) to tackle the issues put forth by the sample of 450 firm-year observations.

This study finds that influential-female-directors have a significant influence on the dividend-payout-decisions of the firm. Additionally, the presence of female directors in the audit-committee makes the board more vigilant and encourages foreign institutional investors to expect more dividends. Furthermore, domestic institutional investors expect a return on their investments through share price appreciation rather than dividends, and the influence of promoters in dividend-payout-decisions is reduced in the presence of such directors.

This study pioneers the use of influential-female-directors as a board-gender-diversity metric and carries an in-depth analysis of the influence and moderation effect they exert on the dividend-payout-decisions of the board and the dividend expectations of different institutional investors, respectively.

This study aims to explore the relationship between promoter share pledging and the company’s dividend payout policy in India. Furthermore, this study also analyses the moderating impact of family involvement in business on the association between share pledging and dividend payout.

A sample of 236 companies from the S&P Bombay Stock Exchange Sensitive (BSE) 500 Index (2014–2023) has been analysed through fixed-effects panel data regression. For additional testing, robustness checks include alternative measures of dividend payout and promoter share pledging, as well as alternative methodologies such as Bayesian regression. Lastly, to address potential endogeneity, instrumental variables with a two-stage least squares (IV-2SLS) methodology have been implemented.

Upholding the agency perspective, a significantly negative impact of promoter share pledging on corporate dividend payouts in India has been uncovered. Moreover, family involvement in business moderates this relationship, highlighting that the negative association between promoter share pledging and dividend payouts is more pronounced in family companies. The findings are consistent throughout the robustness testing.

The present study represents a pioneering endeavour to empirically analyse the link between promoter share pledging and dividend payouts in India. It enhances the theoretical underpinnings of the agency relationship, particularly by substantiating the existence of Type II agency conflicts between majority and minority shareholders. The findings of this research bear significant implications for investors, researchers and policymakers, particularly in light of the widespread prevalence of promoter-controlled entities in India.

Today’s world is struggling with the hardship of climate change that has drastically disturbed human life, wildlife and the earth’s biological system. This study aims to show how implementing climate change mitigation strategies and environmental protection measures can ensure sustainable development through collaborative efforts between governmental authorities and the nation’s populace.

An extensive literature review of studies is conducted from across the world concentrating on holistic, sustainable development, enabling a showcase of various conferences, action plans initiated and resolutions passed. VOSviewer software is used to quantify the results of bibliometric analysis and cluster analysis. A total of 260 research studies released between 1993 and 2022 on the Scopus platform are quantified in terms of topmost publications, collaborations among authors, citations index and year-wise publication. The search string has keywords including “climate change,” “sustainable development” and “environment protection.”

The study results revealed a steep increase in research publications in the last three years, from 2017 to 2021, which serves as the basis of the emergence of high-impact articles. The most cited document in this context throws light on assessing vulnerability to climatic risk and building adaptive capacity. It also draws attention to voluntary carbon markets’ rationale while condemning emission trading systems for climate change due to structural flaws, negative consequences and questionable emission-cutting effectiveness. Low energy demand, zero energy buildings and shared socioeconomic pathways should be implemented as strategies for sustainable development.

This study provides a significant opportunity to construct a valuable addition to mitigate climate change. Also, it shows a positive and significant correlation between mitigation and adaptation policies by analyzing publication efforts worldwide considering local climate risks and national adaptation mandates.

The originality of this study lies in its comprehensive approach, combining literature review, bibliometric analysis and cluster analysis to provide insights into current research trends, challenges and potential strategies for addressing climate change and promoting sustainable development. The study’s emphasis on the correlation between mitigation and adaptation policies adds practical significance to its findings.

The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive overview of sustainable fashion consumption from a consumer behavior perspective, combining scientometric analysis and the SPAR-4-SLR protocol to identify trends, key contributors and research gaps in the field.

The study analyzes 114 articles published between 2014 and 2024, sourced from the Scopus database. A hybrid approach is used, employing VOSviewer and Rstudio for quantitative analysis, along with the theory-context-characteristics-methodology framework to systematically review constructs, theories, contexts and methodologies in the selected articles.

The findings highlight critical insights into consumer behavior regarding sustainable fashion and identify gaps in the literature. The study also provides performance indicators, including publication trends and citation metrics, visualized through tables and maps. It offers practical guidance for businesses and policymakers to promote sustainable consumption practices.

This research contributes to the field by integrating scientometric and systematic review methods, providing a novel approach to understanding sustainable fashion consumption. It also suggests future research directions and explores how benchmarking techniques can enhance consumer engagement and sustainability strategies.

While higher education has been encouraging interdisciplinary research, few studies have been conducted to understand how interdisciplinarity shapes the identity construction of scholars, especially doctoral students who may already strive to socialize into academia.

Therefore, this study adopts the approach of autoethnography to analyze my lived experience of developing disciplinary literacy and constructing interdisciplinary identity as a Chinese international doctoral student at a North American university. Communication theory of identity (CTI) is the theoretical framework through which I understand the negotiation among my personal, enacted, relational and communal identities while communicating my research through diverse literacy practices.

This autoethnography reveals that interdisciplinary doctoral students can flexibly use discursive resources from different disciplines and literacy practices in both English and their first language to dynamically create interdisciplinary identities communicable to different discourse communities. Their identities in different disciplines can develop simultaneously, rather than suppressing one for the development of the other as they do interdisciplinary research.

This study first extends current scholarly discussion of disciplinary literacy to a less-investigated setting, i.e. doctoral education in higher education. Second, it adds an additive and current layer of interdisciplinarity to the existing understanding of international doctoral students’ identity construction. Third, it helps to understand how the development of disciplinary literacy can facilitate disciplinary identity construction and how disciplinary identity construction can facilitate the development of disciplinary literacy.

This paper investigates the impact of various leadership styles on the professionalization and subsequent performance of family businesses.

Using a survey method and employing a partial least squares approach to structural equation modeling, we tested our model and analyzed the collected data based on the responses of 216 managers in Iran.

Our research demonstrates that professionalization mediates the relationship between leadership style and performance. Moreover, our findings show that the participative leadership style is the most effective option for family businesses seeking to achieve professionalization and improve performance.

First, the sample used in this study was drawn from a single country, namely Iran. Second, although we adhered to established practices for measuring financial performance, future research could explore alternative dimensions of performance, including non-financial goals. Third, we did not investigate the impact of different leadership styles on each dimension of professionalization.

These findings provide valuable insights for family business managers seeking to adopt a suitable leadership style to achieve professional management and realize favorable outcomes.

Our study suggests that examining the potential impact of leadership styles on professionalization can provide clarity amidst mixed findings regarding the influence of professionalization on firm performance. Additionally, we challenge the oversimplified categorization of professionalization and argue for a multifaceted view, contending that professionalization comprises various dimensions acting concurrently and potentially mediates the effect of leadership styles on family business performance.

This study aims to systematically review the literature on how various factors influence investor sentiment and affect financial markets. This study also sought to present an overview of explored contexts and research foci, identifying gaps in the literature and setting an agenda for future research.

The systematic literature investigation yielded 555 journal articles, with few other exceptional inclusions. The data have been extracted from the two databases, i.e. Scopus and Web of Science. For bibliometric analysis, VOSviewer and Biblioshiny by R have been used. The period of investigation is from 1985 to July 2023.

This systematic literature review helped us identify factors influencing investor sentiment and financial markets. This study has broadly classified these factors into two categories: rational and irrational. Rational factors include – economics and monetary policy, exchange rate, interest rates, inflation, government mandatory regulations, earning announcements, stock-split, dividend decisions, audit quality, environmental, social and governance aspects and ratings. Irrational factors include – behavioural and psychological factors, social media and online talk, news and entertainment, geopolitical and war events, calendar anomalies, environmental, natural disasters, religious events and festivals, irrationality caused due to government/supervisory body regulations, and corporate events. Using these factors, this study has developed an investor sentiment model. In addition, this review identified research trends, methodology, data and techniques used by researchers.

This review comprehensively explains how various factors affect investor sentiment and the stock market using the investor sentiment model. It further proposes an extensive future research agenda. This study has implications for stock market participants.

Focusing on the Brazilian equity mutual fund industry, this study analyzes whether including the investor sentiment index in asset pricing models is important for explaining fund alpha.

The investor sentiment index and risk factors in the Fama and French (1993) and Carhart (1997) models were estimated, the risk-adjusted performance of a sample of equity mutual funds in Brazil was evaluated, and a United States (US) sample was included for a complementary perspective. The sample period spans 2010–2019 for Brazil and 2010–2018 for the US.

The results contrasted with those evidenced in the US, where the sentiment index was an important factor in explaining the probability of alpha occurrence, especially in the case of winner funds, defined as those exhibiting a positive and statistically significant alpha at the 5% level. Overall, the findings suggest that, in the Brazilian market, pricing models incorporating investor sentiment as an additional factor fail to adequately capture the outperformance probability of equity mutual funds. These results suggest that the factors influencing fund performance may differ between the two countries and highlight the relevance of developing more suitable investor sentiment indicators for emerging markets.

This study examines the impact of the sentiment index on the performance of equity mutual funds in Brazil, specifically its influence on alpha generation.

This study investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic, as a unique environmental factor, influences Australian supermarket customers’ satisfaction and behavioural loyalty intentions through contactless self-checkout systems (SCSs). It examines the role of customer perceptions of service quality and vulnerability in shaping these outcomes and explores how customer perceptions of COVID-19 risk moderate these relationships.

Employing the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) theoretical framework, this research analyses responses from 428 Australian supermarket customers who use contactless self-checkout systems. The study integrates service quality and customer vulnerability as stimuli, examines their impact on customer satisfaction (the organism) and assesses how these factors influence customers' behavioural loyalty intentions (the response). Additionally, it explores how customer risk perceptions related to COVID-19 act as a moderator within these relationships.

The findings demonstrate that both SCS service quality and customer vulnerability significantly enhance customer satisfaction, positively affecting behavioural loyalty toward the supermarket. Furthermore, the study reveals that higher levels of perceived COVID-19 risk strengthen the impact of customer vulnerability on customer satisfaction and the effect of customer satisfaction on loyalty intentions.

This study contributes to the literature by highlighting the underexplored area of SCS usage and customer perceptions of service quality during an emerging pandemic among Australian consumers. It uniquely combines elements of consumer vulnerability and pandemic-related risk perceptions with traditional service quality metrics to offer new insights into customer behaviour in the retail sector. The study’s insights are valuable for supermarket management and marketing practices, particularly in adapting to and capitalizing on changes in consumer behaviour in response to global crises.