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Construction safety is a crucial aspect that has far-reaching impacts on economic development. But safety monitoring is often reliant on labor-based observations, which can be prone to errors and result in numerous fatalities annually. This study aims to address this issue by proposing a cloud-building information modeling (BIM)-based framework to provide real-time safety monitoring on construction sites to enhance safety practices and reduce fatalities.

This system integrates an automated safety tracking mobile app to detect hazardous locations on construction sites, a cloud-based BIM system for visualization of worker tracking on a virtual construction site and a Web interface to visualize and monitor site safety.

The study’s results indicate that implementing a comprehensive automated safety monitoring approach is feasible and suitable for general indoor construction site environments. Furthermore, the assessment of an advanced safety monitoring system has been successfully implemented, indicating its potential effectiveness in enhancing safety practices in construction sites.

By using this system, the construction industry can prevent accidents and fatalities, promote the adoption of new technologies and methods with minimal effort and cost and improve safety outcomes and productivity. This system can reduce workers’ compensation claims, insurance costs and legal penalties, benefiting all stakeholders involved.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study represents the first attempt in Bangladesh to develop a mobile app-based technological solution aimed at reforming construction safety culture by using BIM technology. This has the potential to change the construction sector’s attitude toward accepting new technologies and cultures through its convenient choice of equipment.

This study examines the moderating role of female directors on the relationship between the firms’ characteristics and tax avoidance in an emerging economy.

This study employs the second-generation unit root test and the generalised method of moments (GMM) techniques. The Kao residual cointegration test corroborates a long-run cointegration among variables.

Female directors demonstrate mixed and unusual findings. No significant impact of female directors on tax avoidance is found. In addition, the presence of female directors does not show any negative or significant moderating impacts on the relationship between leverage, firm age, board size and tax avoidance. However, having more female directors can negatively and significantly moderate the relationship between more profitable firms, larger firms and tax avoidance. These findings show that the board of directors could use the presence of female directors to maximise their opportunistic behaviour, such as to avoid tax.

Research limitations – The study is limited by considering only 62 listed firms. The scope could be extended to include non-listed firms.

Research implications – There is increasing pressure for female directors on boards from diverse stakeholders, such as the European Commission, national governments, politicians, employer lobby groups, shareholders, and Fortune and Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) rankings. This study provides input to decision-makers putting gender quota laws into practice. Our findings can help policy-makers adopt regulatory reforms to control tax avoidance practices and enhance organisational legitimacy. Policymakers can change their policy to include female directors up to the threshold suggested by the critical mass theory.

This is the first attempt in Bangladesh to explore the role of female directors in the relationship between the firms' characteristics and tax avoidance. The current study has significant ramifications for bringing gender diversity into practice as a component of good corporate governance.

This study investigates the relationships between environmental, social, and governance (ESG) controversies and insolvency risk in the insurance sector. Drawing from legitimacy and stakeholder theories, the authors explore the impact of ESG controversies on insurers’ insolvency risk and the moderating effect of ESG practices on this relationship.

This study utilises a dataset comprising 120 stock insurance firms spanning from 2011 to 2022. The authors employed system-GMM estimations to control for potential endogeneity and conducted several robustness checks.

ESG controversy positively influences insurers’ insolvency risk, with ESG practices mitigating these positive effects. The Governance (G) component of ESG practices plays a key role in counteracting the effects of ESG controversies on insurance companies’ insolvency risk.

This is the first study to investigate the direct relationship between ESG controversies and insolvency risk in the insurance industry. It underscores the critical influence of stakeholders’ perceptions of the company’s legitimacy, which is determined by the number of ESG controversies undertaken by the insurer company, on its insolvency risk. Additionally, by examining the three components of ESG practices individually, the authors offer insights into how managers can gain a competitive edge, particularly by utilising governance practices as safeguards against the adverse effects of ESG controversies on their financial risk.

In the context of macroeconomic fluctuations and uncertainty in policy changes, it is essential to understand how companies adapt their environmental strategies and marketing tactics to ensure survival and growth. This study, therefore, examines the impact of perceived economic policy uncertainty on corporate greenwashing.

Based on panel data from listed companies on the Chinese A-share market between 2013 and 2022, this paper employs a high-dimensional fixed effects model to explore the impact of perceived economic policy uncertainty (PEPU) on corporate greenwashing behavior.

The results show that higher PEPU increases greenwashing, with agency costs and investor sentiment mediating the relationship. Corporate credit availability and managerial short-sightedness positively moderate this effect. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that non-state-owned enterprises in central and western regions, particularly those with weak environmental regulation and high pollution, are most impacted by PEPU.

This paper provides practical guidance for how to avoid the phenomenon of green reshuffle in economic and environmental policies and encourages enterprises to take more real and effective environmental protection measures.

These findings highlight the importance of considering corporate responses to policy uncertainty when formulating economic and environmental policies. They provide valuable insights for emerging economies in fostering genuine corporate environmental behavior and promoting sustainable development.

This research analyzes the impact of “Environmental, Social, and Governance” (ESG) practices on Indian banks’ performances with respect to market and operational performance.

This research examines 28 Indian banks (12 public sector and 16 private sector) from 2021 to 2023, using multiple regression models and a robust generalized least square (GLS) estimation. The models include Tobin’s Q (TQ) and Return on Assets (ROA) as dependent variables, while current and lagged ESG performance scores (sourced from Refinitive database) constitute the main independent variables. Additionally, five control variables specific to banks and the COVID-19 pandemic are also incorporated into the analysis.

The study reveals that ESG practices have a time sensitive impact, meaning that the current year ESG activities have a substantial influence in driving financial performance of Indian banks than past year ESG activities. The benefits derive from past year ESG activities tend to diminish over time. The findings reinforce the necessity for banks to maintain dynamic and evolving ESG framework to remain competitive. Additionally, it is also found that private banks show greater initiative in implementing ESG practices than public banks.

This study offers noteworthy inputs for academicians, banks, regulators and other stakeholders. Additionally, this research broadens the understanding of sustainable banking practices in Indian domain across different time horizons, offering an initial assessment of how ESG transparency affects bank performance during the post-mandatory ESG disclosure phase.

This research investigates the time-sensitive impacts of ESG-centric practices (considering current and lagged effect) on bank performance, undertaken after the implementation of the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) 2020 circular relating to mandatory ESG disclosure for the Indian commercial banks.

This study aims to investigate whether board gender diversity has improved and influence environment, social and governance (ESG) performance. It also explores whether firm earning volatility moderates the relationship between board gender diversity and ESG performance.

This study uses 907 final firm-year observations of public firms listed on the Australian Securities Exchange from 2010 to 2023.

The findings show that women’s representation on board has improved following the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) amendment and is significantly associated with higher ESG performance; however, firm earning volatility weakens the positive influence of women directors on ESG performance. The results remained the same even after addressing potential endogeneity concerns and are robust across (1) alternative proxies, (2) dynamic, (3) two-step system generalized methods of moments and (4) difference-in-differences model.

In addition, the findings of this study offer important practical implications for investors to focus on companies with higher female representation on their boards and demonstrating strong financial stability. It also has important practical implications for policymakers in understanding the importance of considering the time required to achieve meaningful board diversity and sufficient financial resources to meet the expectations of ASX recommendations and principles.

This study contributes to the academic literature by providing empirical evidence of how firm earning volatility affects the relationship between board gender diversity and ESG performance. Notably, the author identifies the previously unexplored moderating role of firm earnings volatility in this relationship. The result underscores the importance of stable financial conditions for maintaining the positive influence of board gender diversity on corporate sustainable practices.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of accounting measurement and disclosure of social capital (AMDSC) in improving financial performance (FP) in industrial companies in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRG) and Sulaimani city. The research also examines the mediating role of reliability of financial information (RFI) between AMDSC and FP.

This research uses SmartPLS to analyze the questionnaire that was sent to 10 industrial companies operating in the iron sector during 2021.

The findings reveal that AMDSC has a significant effect on improving the FP of the industrial companies in KRG. The results also confirm that the RFI mediates between AMDSC and FP. Thus, this suggests that social capital (SC) needs to be considered in the companies’ strategy to secure future financing in this area.

This paper is limited to the iron sector of KRG/Sulaimani city. Future studies could address other sectors, such as sugar, cement, clothes, automobiles and medicines.

This paper focuses on improving FP in industrial companies in KRG and Sulaimani city through considering SC in their companies’ strategies, as there was no concern for SC in KRG before.

Organisations encourage green creativity among their employees to mitigate pollution and achieve sustainable growth. Green inclusive leadership practices have a key role in influencing employees’ green attitudes and environmental efficiency. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate how green inclusive leadership influences employees’ green creativity. It also aims to analyse the intermediating mechanism of green human capital and employee voice between the relationship of green inclusive leadership and green creativity.

Data was collected through an in-person administered questionnaire-based survey from 312 employees of the manufacturing industry of Pakistan. SPSS PROCESS macro was used for hypothesis testing in the present study.

The findings depict that the perception of green inclusive leadership positively influences employees’ green creativity. Moreover, the findings demonstrate that green human capital and employee voice play substantial intervening roles among the associations investigated.

This research study is novel because it is one of the scarce research studies to examine green inclusive leadership and employees’ green creativity with the underlying mechanism of green human capital and employee voice in an eastern context.

This study explores the moderating effect of board gender diversity (BGD) between a firm's Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance and Economic value added (EVA) using NSE-listed 331 companies' data from 2015 to 2020, forming 1986 firm-year observations.

Our study is based on panel data; hence, we use a system GMM panel regression model to confirm whether the BGD moderates ESG and EVA. We also address the endogeneity issues.

Overall, our study reported a positive moderating effect of BGD between ESG and EVA. Similar results were observed across the chemical and financial services industries. However, in the case of the healthcare and consumer goods industries, we did not find support for the moderating effect.

The implications of our results are considerable and relevant for regulators, governing bodies, and corporate managers. It helps them understand how BGD plays a vital role in influencing the effect of ESG on a firm's EVA.

No existing research has explored the moderating effect of BGD between ESG and EVA, to the authors' best knowledge. Therefore, our study extends the existing literature and further supports resource dependency, agency, and stakeholder theories of corporate governance.

This study introduces a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the foreign direct investment (FDI) literature by multinational corporations (MNCs) focusing on emerging economies to identify the most influential authors, journals and articles in FDI research and reveals the fields' conceptual and intellectual structures. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

The study analyzed 533 articles published between 1974 and 2020 in 226 academic journals indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases. We used the R language for statistical computing to map author collaboration, co-word and develop a conceptual and intellectual map of the field.

The results show that, although the FDI literature has many authors, few dominate the field. The International Business Review (IBR) and International Journal of Emerging Markets (IJoEM) are the main sources of the publications. Moreover, bibliometric laws show that our dataset follows the Lotka law of scientific productivity and Bradford law of scattering, identifying the core journals. Finally, FDI by MNCs in emerging economies research is divided into four sub-research themes related to (1) FDI determinants, (2) entry mode, (3) MNCs and FDI performance and (4) the internationalization process.

The current article provides several starting points for practitioners and researchers investigating FDI. It contributes to broadening the vision of the field and offers recommendations for future studies.