Search results

With growing evidence of financial misconduct spreading through director networks, research on financial fraud contagion has garnered significant attention. This study incorporates the regulatory enforcement perspective into existing literature to examine how regulatory penalties mitigate financial fraud contagion within director networks.

This study uses a panel dataset of A-share listed Chinese firms covering 2007–2022. Based on the nature of the dataset, we construct ordinary least squares regression models with firm- and year-fixed effects. Data are collected from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research, Wind Information Co., Ltd and China Research Data Services. We use Python to scrape the coordinates of regulators and firms and retrieve travel distances from the Baidu Maps API.

This study verifies the existence of financial fraud contagion in director networks. Our findings indicate that regulatory penalties can mitigate the contagion between director-interlocked firms, improving accounting quality. Moreover, the mitigation effects are mediated by independent directors’ dissent and auditors’ efforts at director-interlocked firms and are more pronounced when these firms have superior network centrality and internal control quality.

This study enriches the literature on financial fraud contagion by examining director networks and regulatory penalties. We propose mediating effects of auditor effort and director dissents on the relationship between regulatory penalties and financial fraud contagion. Our findings provide insights for regulators to alleviate pressures and highlight the importance for directors to consider financial risks within their networks.

Previous research mainly uses graph neural networks on syntactic dependency graphs, often neglecting emotional cues in sarcasm detection and failing to integrate image features for multimodal information effectively. To address these limitations, this study proposes a novel multimodal sarcasm detection model based on the directed graph isomorphism network with sentiment enhancement and multimodal fusion (DGIN-SE-MF).

The approach extracts image and text features through vision transformer and BERT, respectively. To deeply integrate the extracted features, the author develops a text-guided multi-head attention fusion mechanism module. Subsequently, a directed graph is constructed through SE and the multimodal factorized bilinear pooling method to integrate image features into the graph. The DGIN then fuses the image and text features, using a weighted attention mechanism to generate the final representation.

The model is validated on three datasets: English, Chinese and an Indonesian–English dataset. The results demonstrate that the proposed model consistently outperforms other baseline models, particularly on the Chinese and English sarcasm datasets, achieving F1 scores of 88.75 % and 83.10 %, respectively.

The proposed model addresses the inadequacies of previous methods by effectively integrating emotional cues and image features into sarcasm detection. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work to leverage a DGIN-SE-MF for this task, leading to significant improvements in detection performance across different languages.

The business landscapes in Asia and Africa are predominantly characterized by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) facing significant resource constraints. Understanding the capability dynamics of these enterprises in such contexts carries significant implications for theory and practice. This paper aims to addresses a crucial question of whether increasing customer involvement capability consistently yields the necessary rent for enterprises operating under resource constraints in emerging markets in Asia and Africa. By investigating this question, the paper offers SMEs a more nuanced approach to capability development, enabling them to achieve better returns on their investments.

To ensure the robustness of the findings, data were collected from SME service firms operating in two emerging economies: India (Asia) and Ghana (Africa). Data were collected in two waves to allow for catering to specific environmental conditions not accounted for in the study. Two-stage data analysis was then conducted to test the hypothesized relationships across the two countries.

The findings reveal that customer involvement capability does not always lead to an increase in firm-level competitiveness, and the effect follows an inverted U-shaped pattern. However, the nature of this relationship varies under different market conditions in both contexts. Specifically, in periods of low customer demand and intense competition, the relationship is linear and positive. On the other hand, in periods of high demand and competition, the relationship becomes inverted U-shaped, returning to a direct relationship with firm-level competitiveness.

This paper provides a resolution to the critical issue of whether customer involvement capability consistently delivers firm performance benefits, particularly for resource-constrained SMEs in emerging markets. By explaining how SMEs in emerging markets can fully capitalize on their capability development to optimize their resources, this paper makes a distinctive contribution. Moreover, it sheds light on the importance of aligning involvement capabilities with prevailing market conditions for SMEs to reap the maximum benefits.

The social dimension of sustainable development has garnered increasing attention. As universities embrace their social responsibility and consider the interests of various stakeholders, the potential issue of social washing has emerged as a critical topic. This study aims to investigate the presence of social washing in university sustainability reports.

The study examines three key stakeholder elements: full-time faculty salaries, weekly teaching hours for full-time faculty and hourly wages for part-time faculty. A content analysis was conducted on the 2022 sustainability reports published by all private universities registered in Taiwan.

Results indicate that only 30% of private universities published independent sustainability reports for 2022, and of those, only 62.5% adhered to global reporting initiative guidelines. The study raises concerns about selective disclosure and the concealment of negative information, suggesting the possibility of social washing. This investigation offers an overview of social washing in the sustainability reports of higher education institutions, thereby contributing to the academic discourse on comprehensive and transparent communication with stakeholders.

Universities should take into account the interests of stakeholders and embrace greater social responsibility in their sustainability initiatives. This study analyzes the content of university sustainability reports and encourages higher education institutions to foster balanced communication with their stakeholders.

Social washing is difficult to detect. This study uses objective indicators to assist higher education institutions in identifying potential social washing behaviors and provides guidance for universities to avoid misleading communication in their sustainability reports.