Search results

This study aims to examine the association between audit partner busyness and audit quality. Moreover, this research investigates whether boardroom gender diversity moderates the relationship between audit partner busyness and audit quality in Australia.

The study sample consists of all public companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange from 2005 to 2014. The data is obtained from SIRCA and the Morning Star databases. The study uses fixed effects and logistic regression techniques to test the relationship between audit partner busyness, boardroom gender diversity and audit quality.

The collected empirical evidence shows that audit partner busyness is negatively associated with audit quality. In contrast, boardroom gender diversity moderates the relationship between audit partner busyness and audit quality. More specifically, the results suggest that board gender diversity mitigates the negative impact of audit partners’ busyness on the audit quality. The results are robust to endogeneity and alternative definitions of audit partner busyness, boardroom gender diversity and audit quality.

The study’s findings will be of interest to policymakers, regulators and investors in the Australian market. The results show the importance of gender-diverse boards in companies’ audit functions, particularly in the presence of busy audit partners, and hence support the call for more women on corporate boards in Australia. Moreover, the results call for a cap or upper limit on the number of clients an audit partner can take on based on their capacity.

The authors contribute to the growing literature on board gender diversity, audit partner busyness and audit quality. Although a plethora of prior literature suggests a negative association between audit partner busyness and audit quality, the results suggest that women in the boardroom positively moderate the relationship between audit partner busyness and audit quality.

This study aims to investigate the mental health impacts of this disaster, focusing on the psychological resilience and vulnerability of displaced individuals. The study explores the mental health outcomes, including anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that have emerged as a result of the sudden loss of homes, livelihoods and social networks.

The research employed a phenomenological approach, conducting 20 in-depth interviews with adult residents of Kiteezi who were displaced by the landslide. The interviews, conducted in English and transcribed for analysis, focused on three primary phenomena: landslides, displacement and mental well-being.

Findings reveal that the collapse of the Kiteezi landfill had profound mental health impacts on the displaced residents, with widespread reports of anxiety, depression and PTSD. The loss of homes and livelihoods, coupled with the uncertainty surrounding resettlement, exacerbated these mental health challenges.

The study’s implications are significant for disaster response and mental health intervention strategies. The findings underscore the need for comprehensive mental health support for displaced individuals, emphasizing the importance of addressing both immediate psychological needs and long-term resilience-building.

This study is original in its focus on the specific context of the Kiteezi landfill collapse, contributing to the limited literature on the mental health impacts of environmental disasters in Uganda. It provides valuable insights into the complex interplay between environmental disasters, displacement and mental well-being, offering practical recommendations for improving disaster response and recovery efforts in similar settings.

This study aims to identify critical determinants of sovereign credit risk by examining the influence of oil prices, gold prices, geopolitical risk, market volatility, exchange rates, inflation and non-performing loans on Türkiye’s credit default swap (CDS) spreads. This analysis provides a comprehensive understanding of how economic uncertainty and political risk impact Türkiye’s financial stability, as reflected in its CDS market. This study investigates the importance of ex ante proxies in explaining changes in CDS spread by financial and economic indicators in Türkiye.

This research explores the connections between critical financial and economic indicators and the credit risk of Türkiye between 2009 and 2022 by using advanced econometric techniques such as ARDL bound tests, fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS), dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS), Johansen co-integration tests and VECM Granger causality analyses.

ARDL bound test results reveal significant negative impacts of BIST and non-performing loans on CDS, and positive associations with inflation, VIX and geopolitical risk on CDSs. The short-term results show that BIST, INFL, NPL, USD, VIX and GPRT have negative coefficients. Johansen co-integration, FMOLS and DOLS results reinforce the ARDL findings. Moreover, BIST is a significant Granger cause of CDS.

This study is significant, as it jointly considers economic and political risk factors, thereby integrating multiple econometric models to provide more robust, meaningful and comparable results. By examining these factors together, the analysis offers a more comprehensive understanding of risk dynamics, yielding insights relevant to Türkiye. Although the findings are specific to Türkiye, they have broader implications, enriching the understanding of emerging economies. Türkiye’s status as a key representative of emerging markets strengthens the study’s value, as the results can serve as a reference point for other countries with similar economic structures. The importance of this study is also underscored by its potential to inform risk management strategies, guide policy decisions and offer insights to investors and financial analysts. By elucidating the intricate relationships among a broad spectrum of macroeconomic variables, this research contributes to a more comprehensive risk assessment framework. It equips stakeholders with a more informed perspective on the factors influencing credit risk in Türkiye’s economic landscape.

The purpose of this study is to examine the audit efficiency and timeliness of Big 4 auditors relative to non-Big 4 auditors, where audit efficiency is defined as the auditor’s ability to conduct an audit more quickly or with fewer resources while still achieving effective outcomes.

The authors use audit report lags (also referred to as audit delay) as a proxy for audit timeliness and efficiency, controlling for audit quality and audit fees (audit input). The authors use a propensity-score matching (PSM) approach to construct a pseudorandom sample in which each non-Big 4 client is matched with a similar Big 4 client based on their characteristics and audit quality, to control for potential endogeneity related to self-selection bias in this setting.

The authors find that non-Big 4 auditors are associated with shorter audit delays than Big 4 auditors. Additional analysis of the matched sample reveals that non-Big 4 auditors charge lower fees than Big 4 auditors do after controlling for the Big 4 premium. These findings do not support the notion that Big 4 auditors conduct audits more efficiently than non-Big 4 auditors do.

These results could be of interest to the management of public firms, audit committees, investors and regulators; provide valuable insights into the performance of audit firms in varying client environments; and contribute to a better understanding of audit timeliness and efficiency.

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of venture capital (VC) in supporting corporate growth and innovation through participation in private placements. While VC provides essential financial support to companies, it remains unclear whether this involvement serves a strategic investment role or a purely financial one. This study seeks to elucidate the role of VC by analyzing changes in the price discount of private placements following VC participation.

The authors take the private placement events of China A share listed companies from April 2005 to January 2023 as the sample, and examine the influence of VC subscriptions on price discount rate.

VC subscriptions to private placements increase information asymmetry, consequently raising the discount rate. This relationship is influenced by the transaction characteristics and information environment. Specifically, VC subscriptions further elevate the discount rate when VC are geographically dispersed from the issuers, possess industry expertise in the issuers’ sector, allocate raised funds for asset restructuring or non-digital investments and when the issuers are in their growth stages. Moreover, the positive correlation between VC subscriptions and the discount rate is more pronounced under conditions of lower internal control quality and weaker external media supervision. Higher discount rates in VC-subscribed private placements result in lower R&D investment and investment efficiency by the issuers, leading to larger-scale VC sell-offs and ultimately diminishing the market and financial performance of the issuers.

The issuers should diligently assess the behaviors and motives of VC and selectively choose issuance targets and methods to manage risks associated with price deviations in private placements. Additionally, this study recommends that regulatory authorities develop a more detailed regulatory framework that considers transaction characteristics and the information environment. This strategy should help optimize external regulatory measures like media coverage and protect the interests of small and medium-sized investors.

This study extends research on the “name chasing” motive and certification effect of VC in private placements, enriches the literature on the mechanisms forming discount rates and provides insights for refining regulatory policies on private placements.

The purpose of this paper is answering two research questions: What are the trajectories of persistence in exporting followed by different groups of firms? What factors relate to each trajectory of persistence in exporting? The authors propose and test a framework that links operational and marketing firms’ capabilities to different trajectories of persistence in exporting.

Using a dataset of 2,913 firms over 14 years from the annual manufacturing survey in Colombia (AMS), the authors explored the trajectories of persistence in exporting. The authors applied data envelopment analysis to measure operational and marketing capabilities and group-based trajectory modeling to discover and link such trajectories to firms’ capabilities.

The authors identified four trajectories of persistence in exporting. Also, the authors found that while the interplay between marketing and operational capabilities relates positively to the non-exporting trajectory and negatively to the persistent trajectory, operational capabilities relate positively to the erratic trajectory and negatively to the slow growth trajectory of persistence in exporting. Meanwhile, marketing capabilities do not relate to any trajectory.

Policymakers should help firms develop marketing and operational capabilities to compete globally to motivate them to export and persist in exporting. Policymakers should avoid stimulating firms to reinforce learned and familiar capabilities that cannot leverage desirable trajectories of persistence in exporting.

The authors introduce the trajectories of persistence in exporting, providing a fresh perspective for analyzing exporting behavior over time. The authors have also proposed and tested a unique framework that links operational and marketing firms’ capabilities to these trajectories, thus contributing to the existing body of knowledge on exporting behavior by firms from emerging markets.

This paper examines the organizational resilience of audit firms during the early stages of COVID-19. The unexpected restrictions placed on travel and on-site working created unanticipated barriers for auditors in Hong Kong. The authors expect that auditors with greater organizational resilience can respond to unexpected situations and restore expected performance levels relatively quickly.

The authors utilize a sample of 1,008 companies listed on Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) with a financial year-end of December 31. The authors identify five proxies contributing to organizational resilience: auditor size, industry specialization, diversity, geographic proximity to the client and auditing a new client. The authors use audit report timeliness as this study's main dependent variable.

This study's full-sample results suggest that larger auditors, industry specialists and auditors with closer relationships to clients issued more timely audit reports during the pandemic. The analysis of a subsample of companies that initially published unaudited financial statements reveals that industry expertise and longer auditor-client relationships significantly reduced the need for year-end audit adjustments. Finally, the authors find that larger auditors were more likely to offload clients, whereas industry specialists were more likely to retain clients.

The results of the paper suggests that audit firm characteristics associated cognitive abilities, behavioral characteristics and contextual conditions are associated with audit firm organizational resilience and, consequently, helps auditors respond unexpected changes in the audit environment.

The findings of the paper are informative for those involved in audit firm management or auditor hiring and retention decisions.

This study is the first to link organizational resilience to the performance of audit firms in a time of unexpected events. The authors connect three auditor and two auditor-client dimensions to the organizational resilience of the audit firms.

The concept of honor, a tension and balance between a focus on the internal and the external for validation of one’s sense of worth and standing in a social group, captures the attention of scholars because it offers a way of understanding the motivations of proud and often violent people belonging to these cultures. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how this focus has led to conceptual and empirical path dependence in the study of honor that has dramatically limited our understanding of this important phenomenon in workplaces and other social interaction contexts, and to suggest a number of alternative paths forward.

The author draws on extant work on honor and related concepts independent of violence, aggression or conflict, to posit that honor be conceptualized more broadly – and less negatively – as a culturally influenced system of behavioral guidelines to determine what is acceptable and moral in a given context. This conceptual paper presents a novel, understudied approach to honor research in international and cross-cultural studies.

The study discusses critical implications of this useful rebalancing for theory, measurement and practice going forward.

By reconceptualizing and rebalancing the historical path-dependent trajectory of honor research, this analysis adds relevant nuance to our understanding of an influential cultural difference and helps explore new implications of honor for research and practice.

The purpose of this study is to review the literature on the adoption determinants of mobile health (M-health) applications for health behavior change following a systematic methodology.

This review systematically identified 134 peer-reviewed studies out of 10,687 from Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) published between 2010 and 2021. This review used a thematic analysis to produce the main themes conceptualizing a holistic framework of the investigated M-health application adoption factors.

Despite the exploration of multifaceted adoption determinants and behaviors, the current publications exhibit limitations. The studies not only show a lack of representation of multiple health behaviors and medical conditions but also fail to involve data from low- and middle-developing countries, where M-health application utilization is crucial. Findings revealed that there is a considerable absence of a solid theoretical foundation that unveils a gap in interpreting the adoption factors effectively. Understanding cultural and demographic variances and exploring financial factors and healthcare provider involvement is essential for tailoring M-health application interventions. Continuous assessment of technological factors and evaluation of the actual impact of M-health application usage on behavioral changes and health outcomes will further enhance the effectiveness and adoption of these technologies.

This review is one of the first comprehensive reviews of determinants of M-health application adoption targeting health behavior change for the general public and patients.

This paper aims to establish a comprehensive structural framework for smart stadiums, examining their integration as key elements of smart tourism destinations and investigating their impact on visitors' intention to visit.

The study reviews existing literature and corporate sources to identify emerging smart tools and determine key dimensions of smart stadiums. A research model was developed, and partial least square-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed to analyze the relationships between these dimensions and their impact on visit intention.

The proposed framework identifies key components such as sustainability, commercial opportunities, safety and security, customer service, entertainment and engagement and operational efficiency. The analysis indicates that sustainability has the highest impact on visit intention, followed by commercial opportunities and safety and security. Customer service and entertainment significantly enhance the visitor experience, while operational efficiency, though important, has a lower direct impact on visit intention.

Implementing this framework can improve fan engagement, resource management and sustainability in stadium operations, thereby enhancing the overall tourism appeal of host cities.

This study offers a structured approach to incorporating smart technologies in stadiums, emphasizing their role in advancing smart tourism destinations and providing empirical insights into the factors influencing visit intention.