Search results

This study aims to investigate the role of negative media coverage of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues in deterring tax avoidance. Inspired by media agenda-setting theory and legitimacy theory, this study hypothesises that an increase in ESG negative media coverage should cause a reputational drawback, leading companies to reduce tax avoidance to regain their legitimacy. Hence, this study examines a novel channel that links ESG and taxation.

This study uses panel regression analysis to examine the relationship between negative media coverage of ESG issues and tax avoidance among the largest European entities. This study considers different measures of tax avoidance and negative media coverage.

The results show that negative media coverage of ESG issues is negatively associated with tax avoidance, suggesting that media can act as an external monitor for corporate taxation.

The findings have implications for policymakers and regulators, which should consider tax transparency when dealing with ESG disclosure requirements. Tax disclosure should be integrated into ESG reporting.

The study has social implications related to the media, which act as watchdogs for firms’ irresponsible practices. According to this study’s findings, increased media pressure has the power to induce a better alignment between declared ESG policies and tax strategies.

This study contributes to the literature on the mechanisms that discourage tax avoidance and the literature on the relationship between ESG and taxation by shedding light on the role of media coverage.

In the realistic multi-project scheduling, resources are not always shared among multiple projects, nor are they available to perform activities throughout the planning horizon. Besides, according to construction technology, some architectural jobs cannot be interrupted for any reason. However, these characteristics of resources and activities have not been fully studied, which may lead to the reduction of engineering quality and the failure of scheduling work. Therefore, this paper aims to model a multi-project scheduling problem with the above characteristics and provide an effective method to meet the actual needs of the construction industry.

A three-phase CPLEX with quota auction mechanism (TPCP–QAM) is developed to solve this problem, which significantly improves the solving performance of CPLEX by adjusting the search strategy and implementing a distributed procedure. In this approach, resources are dedicated to individual projects through a global coordination mechanism, while each project is independently scheduled by a local scheduling algorithm.

(1) For the proposed problem, CPLEX 2019's default search strategy. (Auto) is far inferior to another search strategy (Multi-point) in optimizing the project total cost and average resource capacity. (2) Compared with other two algorithms, TPCP–QAM has obvious advantages in the multi-project total cost (MPTC) and CPU time, especially for large-size instances. (3) Even though the number of non-working days may not be changed for the protection of labor resources, managers can reduce MPTC or shorten the multi-project total makespan (TMS) by appropriately adjusting the distribution of non-working days.

This paper fulfils an identified need to investigate how to complete a multi-project portfolio with the minimum cost while ensuring engineering quality under a practical multi-project scheduling environment.

The changes in the service context due to COVID-19 have challenged service marketers to understand and react to consumers’ feelings that impact their shopping behavior in services. Moreover, consumers had to face a challenging situation with an impact on mental health. This study aims to assess the impact of spirituality and compassionate love as coping mechanisms that might increase hope, which, in turn, decreases anxiety. Hope also mitigates the impact of fear on anxiety. The authors also investigate the mediate effect of hope in its relationship to spirituality and well-being during the pandemic in Brazil and its potential impact on services marketing.

To investigate the relationship between fear, anxiety, hope, compassionate love, spirituality and well-being, the authors conducted an online survey with 469 Brazilians who had been in quarantine for more than 45 days. To conduct the investigation, the authors used a purposive sampling to reach respondents due to the exceptional situation of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using a structural equation model, the authors found that hope is a mediator with a buffer effect on the relationships between anxiety and fear and between spirituality and anxiety. Moreover, the authors found that hope mediates the relationship between spirituality and well-being, leading to greater levels of well-being. Service companies in general can benefit from using these findings to better manage their relationships with consumers during and after COVID-19 pandemic.

The sample included only Brazilian respondents, and pre-pandemic well-being was not measured.

There is evidence that traumatic events (e.g. war) influence feelings and consumer behavior. The findings suggest that the adoption of practices related to spirituality during an extreme, stressful situation has an influence on people’s hope and potentially mitigates anxiety. Increasing spirituality and hope can also benefit perceptions of well-being. Besides, in this context, the authors recommend that service providers communicate unobservable elements in a transaction (e.g. care, safety) by providing observable signals of spirituality and hope to reduce negative emotions.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the consequences of retaliations and our evidence indicates that retaliations are beneficial for firms with supranormal earnings by making their higher earnings more persistent, but harmful for firms with subnormal earnings by slowing the recovery of their earnings.

This paper use annual Compustat files based on Fama-French 48 industry. The time-varying competitive reactions (CRs) for each firm are captured using quarterly rolling-window estimation across 41 windows with five years (i.e. 20 observations) in each window. This paper measure earnings persistence as the slope coefficient (ß1) from regressing future earnings on current earnings. The result remains qualitatively similar to the main findings when alternative measures of earnings persistence.

Abnormal earnings are expected to dissipate in the long run owing to competitive forces, but this paper show that more retaliatory CRs increase earnings persistence. This is good news for supranormal firms as they can sustain high profitability. However, it will be harder to revert subnormal earnings to the industry mean if such firms conduct more retaliatory CRs. This paper also show that these associations are stronger for less competitive industries.

First, high earnings persistence per se would not be a major consideration in the firm’s strategic decisions but a natural by-product of such decisions spanning an extended period of operations. Second, though this paper focus on the period of 2004–2018 that includes the rebound after financial crisis in 2008, an extension of the observation period over a longer economic cycle would verify our results.

CRs are regarded as an evolving portfolio of dynamic marketing decisions and tools for strategic decisions in our study. It helps how firms manage competition over time to lengthen the superior performance. Also it helps the low-profitability firms attempting to improve profitability by showing nonretaliation may be a more appropriate strategy than retaliation.

Firms in financial distress suffer from illiquidity, survival of firms is contingent on meeting their financial obligations, thus need for turnaround decisions. However, retaliations under financial distress can mitigate the effect of such turnaround decisions and thereby aggravate the situation.

Greater persistence extends the benefits of superior earnings, thus increasing the opportunities for value exploitation, but it may also restrict earnings recovery. This paper finds that the way that firms react within the competition explain the differences in earnings persistence. Although a large body of research has examined the static drivers (e.g. firm size and diversification) of the differential persistence of earnings, there has been little research on dynamic drivers that explicitly recognize the erosion process for earnings.

Our paper examines how formal institutional agents influence the legitimacy of companies in a highly regulated industry. We focus on the Brazilian personal protective equipment (PPE) industry because its characteristics are particularly suited to this investigation. Companies are subject to isomorphic pressures imposed by regulatory demands they must comply with for successful market entry, and the institutional environment plays a significant role in shaping organizations’ strategic decision-making. However, customer purchasing decisions are often influenced by price rather than by an organization’s performance in pre-certification testing.

We conducted a case study, holding 13 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, including PPE manufacturers, their suppliers and customers, representatives from formal institutional agents, industry experts and consultants.

Our findings highlight the role of formal institutional agents in creating and implementing the rules of the institutional environment. However, we found that the regulatory framework alone has insufficient credibility to establish legitimacy for PPE manufacturers from the perspective of their consumers. This is in part because of weak regulatory oversight, manifested as the absence of enforcement through post-certification inspections, which is possibly due to mimetic isomorphism.

Our study contributes to the field of organizational legitimacy by analyzing and offering insights into the role of formal institutional agents in a regulated industry. In the empirical field, it helps organizations to understand how institutions impact customers’ perception of legitimacy in the market, paradoxically, by showing that sometimes the impact is negligible.

This study investigates how corporations navigate the increasingly prominent field of environmental, social and governance (ESG) through the lens of resource dependence theory (RDT). It aims to elucidate the strategic responses of companies to media-driven public sentiment on ESG, examining the alignment of their operations and competitive strategies – specifically differentiation and cost leadership – to the external resource of media ESG sentiment.

Employing Python software, this research extracted over two million ESG-related news articles from Baidu News. Using machine learning and text analysis, the study assesses the media ESG sentiment and its correlation with the competitive strategies of China’s A-share listed companies over a period from 2007 to 2022. The approach leverages RDT to understand how firms adjust their strategies in response to media-driven public sentiment on ESG.

The findings indicate that positive media ESG sentiment acts as a crucial external resource, significantly influencing firms’ strategic alignment toward minimizing ESG public sentiment risks and enhancing competitive positioning, especially in the social (S) and governance (G) domains. This alignment is evident in firms’ adoption of differentiation and cost leadership strategies, affirming the study’s theoretical prediction within the RDT framework.

This paper provides a novel contribution by integrating RDT with the analysis of media-driven ESG sentiment to explore corporate strategic adjustments. It offers empirical evidence on the theory’s applicability in contemporary strategic corporate management, particularly in the context of ESG challenges. The research deepens the understanding of the interplay between media ESG sentiment and corporate strategy, highlighting the strategic importance of positive media sentiment in the ESG landscape.

This study elucidates the interactive relationship of sustainability assurance (SA) quality with corporate environmental sustainability performance (CESP) and firm value and explores the moderating impact of CESP on the SA quality–firm value relationship.

The sample comprises 320 firm-year observations of 40 companies listed on the Cotation Assistée en Continu (CAC 40) from 2010 to 2019. The authors use the simultaneous equations model to capture the CESP and SA quality–firm value relationship and apply the three-stage regression and generalised method of moments approaches to address possible endogeneity.

The results show that CESP, as assessed by International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) 14001 certification, has a significant positive effect on firm value, the relevance of which implies that in the case of good environmental performance, society's perception of a firm is much more favourable; consequently, the firm is likely to be rewarded with a premium value in capital markets. In addition, environmental performance has a stronger interaction with SA quality, acting as a moderator variable; thus, greater SA quality signals credibility owing to increased eco-efficiency. The authors interpret their findings within a multi-theoretical framework that draws insights from legitimacy, stakeholders and signalling theoretical perspectives.

This study contributes to the literature by re-examining the relationship between SA quality and firm value. It also provides new evidence of the moderating effect of CESP on the SA quality–firm value nexus. Specifically, this study explores the joint effects of credibility and eco-efficiency on market confidence in sustainability information. The authors use a simultaneous equation model to capture the reciprocal association between SA quality and firm value, whereas prior studies on SA quality and market performance have frequently used single-equation regression. The authors also find that CESP positively moderates the relationship between SA quality and firm value. Including CESP and exploring the moderating impact of eco-efficiency on the SA quality–firm value relationship is a novel approach.

It is widely agreed that transformation processes that are triggered by crisis events can challenge conventional behavioural norms and stimulate new ideas and innovations that can assist in the preparations for future challenges. This impetus for transformation processes not only applies to the COVID-19 pandemic, but has also been seen in many other instances, such as the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 or the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, which have sparked significant socio-political change processes often with a global reach. The multitude of wicked tourism policy problems discussed in our book often occur in parallel, are of growing complexities, are often not well understood and indistinguishable from one another and exert pressure on the resilience of vulnerable political, economic and community-based systems. These circumstances often present as tipping points which can trigger necessary long-term transformations. However, this process of long-term change must be well planned and strategically implemented. Thus, future transformative destination management should be built on a holistic approach, underpinned by adaptive political leadership in which tourism is not only seen as a driver for economic growth and employment, but as a strategy which successfully integrates social, cultural and ecological goals.

This study aims to investigate the effects of three dimensions of ChatGPT strategic value – organization support (OS), managerial productivity (IM) and decision aids (DA) – on the business sustainability (BS) of Malaysian public universities.

A quantitative methodology was adopted for this study to examine the relationships between ChatGPT strategic value and the BS of Malaysian public universities.

The study found that two dimensions of ChatGPT strategic value, namely, OS and IM, influence BS, whereas DA do not.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first to address the relationship between ChatGPT strategic value and BS in a specific context – Malaysian public universities – providing new contributions to theory by extending the literature on the topic.

The findings are expected to guide universities in Malaysia in leveraging ChatGPT strategic value for enhancing BS.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this empirical study is the first in the literature to examine the relationships between ChatGPT strategic value and BS in the education sector. Supported by an original conceptual model, the insights provided should extend the literature dedicated to ChatGPT strategic value and BS in the context of a South Asian economy.

The purpose of this paper is to systematically investigate the hydraulic fracture branching phenomena in porous media under different loading conditions and the stepwise phenomenon. The effect of the pore pressure in hydraulic fracturing branching is studied, and more evidence for the stepwise phenomenon with the peridynamics approach is provided.

A fully coupled fluid-filled explicit peridynamics model is developed to simulate the complex evolution of crack branching and stepwise phenomena in saturated porous media. Based on the peridynamics theory, an explicit time integration scheme is used to solve the coupled equation system including rock deformation, fluid flow and fracture propagation. Using the proposed model, a series of peridynamic computational tests are performed to examine two common kinds of phenomena observed in hydraulic fracturing: the crack branching phenomenon and the stepwise phenomenon.

For crack branching phenomenon, the results obtained indicate that sufficient loading is required in order to initiate the crack branching process. Compared with the stress applied on crack surfaces condition, crack branching is more easily induced with the stress applied on boundaries. In addition, for the fluid-driven crack (stress applied on crack surfaces), the existence of pore pressure will depress the growth and branching of the crack. For stepwise phenomena, the results obtained indicate that the peridynamics is a promising tool to study the stepwise phenomenon. The stepwise phenomenon is more distinct under mechanical loading conditions due to the solid behaviour. A sudden jump or crack extension will happen when enough energy is accumulated in the hydraulic fracturing system.

In this study, the explicit method is used, which means it is conditionally stable, and the critical time step needs to be decided. The reason to use the explicit method is for the study purpose; the explicit method is faster and has no need for matrix inversions.

This study helps to understand the effect of the pore pressure in hydraulic fracturing branching and provides more evidence for the stepwise phenomenon with peridynamics.