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Defining co-opted directors as those who join a company’s board after an incumbent chief executive officer assumes office, this study aims to investigate the influence of co-opted boards on bidder performance.

This study applies ordinary least squares regression analyses to a sample of 8,939 acquisition observations announced by US firms spanning the 1999–2019 period. Event study methodology was employed to capture the market response to acquisition announcements. Propensity score matching technique, a two-stage least squares instrumental variable approach and model selection through the Lasso method were performed for robustness and endogeneity correction purposes.

The results depict a significant negative relationship between a co-opted board and return to acquirers, suggesting that managers under co-opted boards make value-destructing Mergers and Acquisitions deals. We also show that the relationship between board co-option and acquisition performance is positively moderated by institutional ownership while being negatively moderated by an entrenched board. Our additional tests reveal that board co-option reduces acquisition efficiency and leads to worse financial performance.

This study offers important implications for regulators and policymakers by highlighting how poor monitoring of the board of directors can influence announcement returns.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper appears to be the first investigation that makes a link between board co-option and various dimensions of acquisition decision.

This study aims to validate the link between production manipulation and a firm’s performance variability (fundamentals and stock returns). It explores whether executives' risk-taking incentives encourage production deviations around the normal level during uncertainty.

Utilizing panel data of manufacturing firms from Compustat over three decades, the study investigates production management practices during economic uncertainty. The Economic Policy Uncertainty Index (EPU) is employed as a key metric. The empirical strategy involves documenting the effect of economic uncertainty on overproduction and underproduction, examining the role of executive compensation and assessing the impact on risk.

The research finds that risk-taking incentives increase over/underproduction, particularly amplifying the extent of underproduction during uncertainty. Production deviation rises, indicating that firms take greater risk by engaging in abnormal business operations. The study’s results are robust against various econometric methods, emphasizing the influence of risk-taking incentives on corporate production decisions.

While providing valuable insights, the study acknowledges inherent limitations, including factors influencing production decisions beyond risk-taking incentives. Further research could explore additional determinants for a comprehensive understanding.

The findings highlight the potential dark side of executive compensation that motivates suboptimal risk-taking decisions, impacting risk, cost of capital and firm performance. Policymakers and compensation committees can use these insights to design efficient systems that mitigate moral hazard problems associated with productivity changes.

The study emphasizes the broader social implications of production manipulation under uncertainty. It prompts discussions on the ethical considerations of managerial opportunism, its potential consequences for stakeholders and market dynamics.

This study contributes to the literature by examining the role of economic uncertainty on production manipulation and the influence of risk-taking incentives. It extends the earnings management literature by considering real activity manipulation and emphasizing the importance of decomposing production deviation into positive and negative values.

Due to the influence of complex and intersecting factors, self-governed public open spaces (POSs) (managed by local communities) are subject to collective action dilemmas such as tragedy of the commons (overexploitation), free-riding, underinvestment and mismanagement. This review paper adopts a multi-dimensional and multi-tier social-ecological system (SES) framework proposed by McGinnis and Ostrom, drawing on collective action theory to explore the key institutional-social-ecological factors that impact POS self-governance.

In this paper, Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) was utilized to systematically screen and review the relevant literature for the period from 2000 to 2023 in three databases: Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. A total of 57 papers were chosen for in-depth analysis.

The literature review identified and categorized several variables associated with the self-organizing system of POS; consequently, an SES-based POS management framework was developed for the first time, consisting of 114 institutional-social-ecological sub-variables from different dimensions and three levels. Compared to ecological factors, among others, governance organizations, property-rights systems, socioeconomic attributes and actors' knowledge of SES have been commonly and primarily studied.

There is still room for the refinement of the conceptual SES-based POS collective action framework over the time (by adding in new factors), and indefinitely empirical research validating those identified factors is also worth to be undertaken, particularly testing how SES factors and interaction variables affect the POS quality (collective action).

The findings of this study can provide local policy insights and POS management strategies based on the identification of specific SES factors for relevant managers. Moreover, this research makes significant theoretical contributions to the integration of the SES framework and collective action theory with POS governance studies.

This paper introduces the special issue on Race and Accounting and Accountability. In so doing, it explores racism in its historical and contemporary forms, the role of accounting and accountability in enabling racism and racial discrimination and also efforts of redress and resistance.

We reflect on several critical themes to demonstrate the pervasive and insidious nature of racism and, review the literature on race and racism in accounting, focusing on studies that followed the seminal work by Annisette and Prasad (2017) who called for more research. We also review the six papers included in this special issue.

While many overt systems of racial domination experienced throughout history have subsided, racism is engrained in our everyday lives and in broader societal structures in more covert and nuanced forms. Yet, in accounting, as Annisette and Prasad noted, the focus has continued to be on the former. This special issue shifts this imbalance – five of the six papers focus on contemporary racism. Moreover, it demonstrates that although accounting technologies can and do facilitate racism and racist practices, accountability and counter accounts offer avenues for calling out and disrupting the powers and privileges that underlie racial discrimination and, resistance by un-silencing minority groups subjected to discrimination and injustice.

This introduction and the papers in the special issue offer rich empirical and theoretical contributions to accounting and accountability research on race and racial discrimination. We hope they inspire future race research to nurture progress towards a true post-racial society.

Dark tourism is a new coinage rooted in the perception of tourism activities at the sites or destinations connected to phenomena that bear varied, flexible, dynamic, diverse, and graded dark shades of life and civilization. It is now customary to subsume it within the sets of niche tourism. Some dark tourism sites attract visitors and generate sizable amounts of revenue, yet most of the world does not register much demand compared to other niches. Accordingly, promotion pursuit turned crucial to draw the market’s attention, creating its competitively distinct position.

Indeed, inherent issues, such as conceptual multiplicity within nature, aspect, attribute, and product paradigm, turn dark tourism into a complex phenomenon and put a challenge toward creating its distinct market position. Additionally, contradictions in semantic and functional significances, conflicts in framing morbid memory and authentic portrayal, variances in ethical, cultural and ideological interpretations, transition of liminal space identity, and diverse focuses in stakeholder engagement in imaging impede efforts to transform dark tourism attractions into a significant driver of tourism.

This chapter will locate and address the issues that challenge the marketability of dark attractions and dark tourism promotion more directly, with attention to the Indian context.

We examine whether the social capital of the area where a firm’s headquarters is located affects that firm’s credit rating. Given that credit rating agencies only infrequently visit a firm’s headquarters, it is pertinent to investigate whether this soft information is considered.

In order to test whether social capital affects firms’ credit ratings, we estimate the following model using an ordinary least squares regression: Rating_it = β₀ + β₁ Social Capital_it + ∑ Controls_it + Industry fixed Effects_i + State−year fixed effects_it + ε_it. We follow recent accounting and finance research and measure societal-level social capital at the county level (Jha & Chen, 2015; Cheng et al., 2017; Hasan et al., 2017a, b; Jha, 2017; Hossain et al., 2023). We use four inputs to calculate social capital: (1) voter turnout in presidential elections, (2) the census response rate, (3) the number of social and civic associations and (4) the number of nongovernmental organizations in each county.

W provide evidence that social capital has a causal effect on credit ratings. Interesting is that this effect is not merely localized to firms near credit rating agencies. We also find that the effect of social capital on credit ratings is concentrated among firms with moderate levels of default risk. For firms with extremely low or extremely high default risk, social capital appears irrelevant to credit ratings, suggesting that social capital plays a larger role in more ambiguous contexts or when greater judgment is required. We demonstrate that the effect of social capital on credit ratings disappears when the rating agency has extensive experience in a particular region. This result is consistent with rating agencies stereotyping certain regions of the USA and using that information to inform their ratings when they have less experience in the region. Finally, we find that while social capital is associated with credit ratings, it has no association with future defaults.

Though we cautiously followed prior studies and were confident in our data construction process, it is possible that we are measuring social capital with error.

Our findings suggest that credit rating agencies could benefit from reevaluating how they incorporate non-financial information, such as social capital, into their assessment processes, potentially leading to more nuanced and equitable credit ratings. Additionally, firms could use these insights to bolster their engagement with local communities and stakeholders, thereby enhancing their creditworthiness and attractiveness to investors as part of a broader corporate strategy. The findings also underline the need for regulatory frameworks that foster transparency and the inclusion of social factors in credit evaluations, which could lead to more comprehensive and fair financial reporting and rating systems.

Recognizing that social capital can influence economic outcomes like credit ratings may encourage both communities and firms to invest more in building and maintaining social networks, trust and civic engagement. By demonstrating how social capital impacts credit ratings, our research highlights the potential to address inequalities faced by regions with lower social capital, guiding targeted social and economic development initiatives. Moreover, understanding that regional social capital can influence credit ratings might affect public perception and trust in the impartiality and accuracy of these ratings, which is essential for maintaining market stability and integrity.

Our research provides fresh insights into how social capital, an intangible asset, influences credit ratings – a topic not extensively explored in existing literature. This sheds light on the dynamics between social structures and financial outcomes. Methodologically, our use of the 9/11 attacks as an exogenous shock to measure changes in social capital introduces a novel approach to study similar phenomena. Additionally, our findings contrast with prior studies such as Jha and Chen (2015) and Hossain et al. (2023), by delving deeper into how proximity and familiarity impact financial assessments differently, enriching academic discourse and refining existing theories on the role of local knowledge in financial decisions.

Most countries are progressing towards digitalisation of the citizen records. India too has progressed extensively in this regards. Different strategies and recent confinement during the pandemic have enabled accelerated the digitalisation to the extent that even the street vendors use digital and mobile payment systems. The objective of this chapter is to understand the progress of other countries through an academic review. It is clear from the different articles that the key indicator of the digitalisation is adoption; different countries are at different levels of adoption. India is on top of the list with 61 crore Permanent Account Number (PAN) cards, 8,840 crore digital transactions, 77.86 crore Aadhaar cards of the total population of 1,460 crore population.

Various economic, strategic and sociopolitical factors drive the decisions related to the location of global supply chain partners. Yet, research on how sociopolitical factors affect these decisions is not that prevalent. We contribute to this line of research by evaluating the changes in global supply base concentration accounted for by three key sociopolitical factors – populism, state fragility and political constraints – that magnify or attenuate the effects of institutional risks, uncertainties and volatility.

Apart from hypothesizing the negative effects of populism and state fragility, political constraints are conjectured to significantly attenuate these negative effects. The proposed hypotheses were motivated using the tenets of institutional economics theory and tested using a comprehensive dataset compiled from six widely used secondary data sources. The panel data spanning 2003–2018 focused on a sample of global US-listed companies with worldwide suppliers.

Our results supported three of the four hypotheses. Specifically, the direct effects of populism and state fragility were found to be significant, suggesting that they reduced the number of suppliers in the country. However, political constraints did not moderate the effect of populism on global supply base concentration, while they negatively moderated the effect of the state fragility index. This result showcases the overpowering effect of populism on a country’s market environment.

Supply chain scholars resoundingly acknowledge the need for more research on the effect of broader sociopolitical factors on global supply chain management. Responding to this call, we evaluate the direct and contingent effects of populism, state fragility and political constraints on global supply base concentration. Our choice of these factors was based on their representation of most of the critical institutional environments prevalent in various countries. One surprising result we found was that populism was found to be pervasive even in countries with strong checks and balances, suggesting its paramount importance to practicing management. Overall, by unraveling the interesting effects of these multidimensional sociopolitical factors, our study makes a valuable contribution to not only theory but also practice.

Previous research on narcissism and leadership seldom takes into account the leader–subordinate dyadic relationship and ignores the role of subordinate. Drawing on the contextual reinforcement model of narcissism, the purpose of this study is to explore the joint effects of both leaders’ and their subordinates’ narcissism on the former’s effectiveness through the latter’s perceived relationship conflict with them (RCWL).

Self-report data were collected from 315 full-time employees using a three-wave survey. Polynomial regression and response surface analysis were used to test the hypotheses.

The results of this study reveal that although RCWL is higher when leaders’ narcissism is higher along both congruence and incongruence line, RCWL is lower when leaders’ narcissism exceeds that of their subordinates than it falls short of subordinates’ narcissism when both leader’s and subordinate’s narcissism are low. Furthermore, the results of this study also demonstrate that leader–subordinate (in)congruence in narcissism has an indirect influence on the leaders’ effectiveness because of the resulting relationship conflict, and that the response surface of the total effect of joint narcissism on leader effectiveness possesses a convex surface, which demonstrates that leader effectiveness is lower at the median point when compared to the low- and high-level congruence points.

This study not only contributes to fit theory, vertical relational conflict and research on narcissistic leader by simultaneously investigating both leaders’ and subordinates’ narcissism and their joint influence on leader–subordinate relational conflict and leaders’ effectiveness but also offers several practical recommendations for companies to enhance leaders’ effectiveness.