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Driven by the anticipated global stagflation, this straightforward yet novel study examines the cost of inflation as a macroeconomic factor by investigating its influence on stock market growth. Thus, this paper aims to examine the impact of inflation on the probability of initial public offering (IPO) withdrawal decision.

The paper employs a large dataset that covers the period January 1995–December 2019 and comprises 33,536 successful or withdrawn IPOs from 22 nations with various legal and cultural systems. This study applies a probit model utilizing version 15 of Stata statistical software.

This study finds that inflation is substantially and positively correlated with the likelihood of IPO withdrawal. Results of this study show that the IPO withdrawal decision increases up to 90% when the inflation rate climbs by 10%. Multiple robustness tests provide consistent findings.

This study's implications are important for researchers, investment banks, underwriters, issuers, regulators and stock exchanges. When processing IPO proposals, investment banks, underwriters and issuers must consider inflation projections to avoid negative effects, as demonstrated by the findings. In addition, regulators and stock exchanges must be aware of the detrimental impact of inflation on competitiveness in attracting new listings.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to present convincing evidence of a major relationship between IPO withdrawal decision and inflation.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of key audit matters (KAMs) on the timeliness of financial statement reporting, measured as audit report lag (ARL), within the context of Kuwait's evolving financial market.

Using a sample of 136 unique firms and 841 firm-year observations over the period 2016–2022, the study employs a random effects model on a panel data set to examine the correlation between the number and type of KAMs disclosed in audit reports and the length of ARL. In addition, we employ sub-sample analysis and two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression to enhance overall reliability.

The results indicate a positive relationship between an increased number of reported KAMs and the length of ARL. Specific categories of KAMs, such as those related to investments and the implementation of new standards, also significantly impact the delay. Additionally, the findings reaffirm the importance of several determinants of ARL, which is consistent with prior research.

This study is among the first to offer new insights by examining the relationship between both the number and specific types and/or categories of KAMs on ARL in emerging markets.

Moving into digital transformation, the development and implementation of smart cities have gained global attention, including in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The aim of this chapter primarily rests on the innovation and sustainability of the implemented smart cities, considering the advantages and benefits gained from the utilization of the latest technologies. It also tackles the challenges faced by these countries in managing smart cities and the processes involved in addressing these challenges toward their resolution. The main contribution of this chapter is to highlight the innovative platforms initiated by Gulf nations on smart cities by modeling transformation and development toward Vision 2040. In the form of a narrative account, the contribution extends to assessing the present status of innovativeness and development through smart cities as a baseline for future development directions in the Gulf region. Documentary evidence was solicited from government reports, private agency documents and files, journals, and newspapers to address the chapter’s objectives. Findings revealed that sustainability issues are prevalent and may impact future management and control of its operations. Key recommendations include the intensification of policies and regulations toward smart cities through information and communication technology maximization in the areas of transportation, education, healthcare, government services, infrastructure, and urban planning. Heightened laws and policies to address privacy and security, water, energy, technological infrastructure, overcrowding and traffic congestion, and funding. More collaborative efforts should be made by the different stakeholders, such as the government, private companies, non-government organizations, and individual experts, to ensure the smart city’s sustainable operations.

This paper aims to analyse the weekday effect on the Nifty Shariah indices as per the Islamic calendar. The study is intended to know about the return and volatility of these indices during Ramadhan and non-Ramadhan days.

The study focuses on analysing the Nifty Shariah indices and Sensex daily returns collected from NSE India and BSE India, respectively, during the period of 1 August 2016 to 31 July 2022. Descriptive statistics are used to analyse the data, while the Ordinary Least Square method is used to determine the impact of weekdays on the Nifty Shariah indices. Additionally, the study applies the GARCH statistical model to examine the influence of Ramadhan on the returns and volatility of the Nifty Shariah indices.

All of the Nifty Shariah indices produced positive returns during the overall sample period. According to the study, Tuesday index returns outperform other weekdays. The GARCH model indicated that the coefficient values for the Nifty 50 Shariah and Nifty 500 Shariah indices were negative. Ramadhan has a strong negative effect on volatility, according to this study.

The outcomes of the research are beneficial for investors aiming to exploit daily or weekly price fluctuations, rather than pursuing extended investment periods. Furthermore, fund managers can employ these findings to shape trading strategies, and academics can examine the performance of Shariah indices in the Indian context. This enables devout investors to make significant financial choices, thus advancing ethical values in society and upholding standards of both public and private morality.

This paper aims to investigate the factors that affect the acceptance of distance learning systems by university academic staff and students in Jordan. To achieve this objective, it has been proposed to examine the distance learning experience of Jordanian Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) after the universities institution suspended face-to-face (traditional) courses delivery owing to novel Coronavirus’ (COVID-19) fears.

This study expands upon unified theory of acceptance and use of technology 2 by incorporating contextual variables such as trust (TR), autonomy (AUT) and compatibility (CMP). Data collection has been carried out through an online survey, which targeted participants at public and private universities during the crisis time of coronavirus. Structural equation modelling has been used to validate the proposed research model.

The outcomes revealed that performance expectancy, facilitating conditions, TR and AUT were the significant predictors of distance learning acceptance in both samples. By identifying the factors affecting the acceptance of distance learning systems, it will be more useful to offer better services of distance learning. This will also help to demonstrate that distance learning will be capable of delivering the educational aims of HEIs to areas where a pandemic outbreak in the Middle East.

Distance learning provides university students with quality education, engaging platforms and most significantly a safe teaching environment. The results and implications to both practice and theory are described.

The study aims to explore Greek libraries’ social media presence and library operation and social media use during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown.

Primary data were collected via an online questionnaire that was distributed to the Greek libraries. The final sample comprised 189 libraries of all types with the exception of school libraries.

Results indicated that Facebook is the most widely used platform, while social media are mainly used for sharing announcements about library operations and for the promotion of events. During the COVID-19 lockdown, libraries responded quickly to the new circumstances by taking many of their services online. However, they did not fully use social media for service provision but rather used social media as a static communication channel. Only a few of the libraries grasped the opportunity to highlight their role in the promotion of public health by providing timely and reliable information.

Library leaders who are looking to harness the power of social media for service promotion and outreach should build a strategy that takes platform popularity, current social media trends, patron preferences and the specific promotional objectives of their library into consideration.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the current research is the first which attempts to explore the social media presence of Greek libraries of all types and changes made to library operations and social media use in response to the COVID-19 lockdown.

Government employees have various challenges of adopting e-government which include administrative problems, technological challenges, infrastructural problems, lack of trust on computer applications, security concerns and the digital divide. The purpose of this paper is to identify the most salient factors that influence the employee adoption of e-government in India as perceived by government employees involved in e-government service delivery.

The paper first identifies different factors influencing the employee adoption of e-government on the basis of literature review and then finds their relative importance by prioritizing them using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The AHP is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) tool which combines all the factors into a hierarchical model and quantitatively measures their importance through pair-wise comparisons (Saaty, 1980). Eleven influencing factors of employee adoption of e-government have been identified, which are categorized under four main factors, namely, “employee’s personal characteristics”, “technical factors”, “organizational factors” and “trust”. The data pertaining to pair-wise comparisons of various factors and sub-factors related to the study is collected from ten senior government employees working with different departments and bodies of the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi.

Based on the results obtained, the findings reveal that “organizational factors” and “technical factors” are the two most important factors which influence the intention of government employees to adopt e-government. Moreover, “training”, “technical infrastructure”, “access speed”, “technical support” and “trust” in infrastructure are the top five sub-factors which are considered to be important for the employee adoption of e-government.

One of the limitations regarding the methodology used in the study is that the rating scale used in the AHP is conceptual. There are chances of biasing while making pair-wise comparisons of different factors. Therefore, due care should be taken while deciding relative scores to different factors. Also, some factors and sub-factors selected, for the model may have interrelationships such as educational level and training; computer skills and trust; etc., and these interrelationships are not considered by the AHP, which is a limitation of the present study. In that case, the analytic network process (ANP) can be a better option. Therefore, this study can be further extended by considering some other factors responsible for e-government adoption by employees and applying the ANP in the revised model.

The results of the study may help government organizations, to evaluate critical factors of employee adoption of e-government. This may help them in achieving cost-effective implementation of e-government applications by efficiently managing their resources. Briefly, the findings of the study imply that government departments should provide sufficient training and support to their employees for enhancing their technical skills so that they can use the e-government applications comfortably. Moreover, the government departments should also ensure fast access speed of the e-government applications so that the employees can carry out their tasks efficiently.

Most of the existing literature on e-government is focused on citizens’ point of view, and very few studies have focused on employee adoption of e-government (Alshibly and Chiong, 2015). Moreover, these studies have majorly used generic technology adoption models which are generally applicable to situations where technology adoption is voluntary. As employee adoption of e-government is not voluntary, the present study proposes a hierarchy of influencing factors and sub-factors of employee adoption of e-government, which is more relevant to the situations where technology adoption is mandatory. Also, most of the previous studies have used statistical methods such as multiple regression analysis or structural equation modelling for examining the significant factors influencing the e-government adoption. The present study contributes to this area by formulating the problem as an MCDM problem and by using the AHP as the methodology to determine the weights of various factors influencing adoption of e-government by employees.

The purpose of this paper is to use Twitter analytics for analyzing the startup ecosystem of India.

The paper uses descriptive analysis and content analytics techniques of social media analytics to examine 53,115 tweets from 15 Indian startups across different industries. The study also employs techniques such as Naïve Bayes Algorithm for sentiment analysis and Latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm for topic modeling of Twitter feeds to generate insights for the startup ecosystem in India.

The Indian startup ecosystem is inclined toward digital technologies, concerned with people, planet and profit, with resource availability and information as the key to success. The study categorizes the emotions of tweets as positive, neutral and negative. It was found that the Indian startup ecosystem has more positive sentiments than negative sentiments. Topic modeling enables the categorization of the identified keywords into clusters. Also, the study concludes on the note that the future of the Indian startup ecosystem is Digital India.

The analysis provides a methodology that future researchers can use to extract relevant information from Twitter to investigate any issue.

Any attempt to analyze the startup ecosystem of India through social media analysis is limited. This research aims to bridge such a gap and tries to analyze the startup ecosystem of India from the lens of social media platforms like Twitter.

This study aims to examine the linkages between digitalisation, public service delivery and corruption in Ghana using survey data from 121 respondents in Ghana. The authors also examine the mediating role public service delivery offers on corruption.

This study relied on the capability theory as its theoretical lens and partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) as the data analysis technique.

Results from the PLS-SEM analysis show that public service delivery significantly reduces corruption, whilst digitalisation does not. However, public service delivery significantly mediated the relationship between digitalisation and corruption.

This study’s limitation is that the data was collected from Ghana only. To enhance the generalisability of findings, future research could collect data from multiple countries. In addition, the study did not factor in the moderating effects of demographic variables such as information and communication technology (ICT) literacy. Future research could consider these variables, given the low ICT literacy level of individuals in developing countries. Finally, future researchers could triangulate results with interviews and focus groups to provide more value to the identified questionnaire-based data.

The findings of this study highlight the need for digitalisation to be included in Ghana’s national policy objectives and service delivery objectives. It is essential for the government to ensure broader public engagement with stakeholders, including citizens, to ensure that digitalisation goals are achieved. The study’s results indicate that digitalisation does not significantly influence corruption. This calls for the government of Ghana to consider raising the level of human capital for the successful planning and deployment of e-services. This includes raising citizen ICT literacy and adopting cutting-edge technology to fully realize the benefits of online services. Developing capabilities, e-government leadership, and public sector employees as enablers of online public services should go hand-in-hand. It is also important to build connected capacities in the country and enhance access to information and technology, along with increasing digital infrastructure.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine and offer a dual perspective on the role of digitalisation on public service delivery and corruption whilst considering the mediating role public service delivery offers on corruption.

This study aims to examine Malaysian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) Adoption of electronic government procurement (EGP) in the post-introduction phase as the portal was introduced in the early year 2000.

This study integrated electronic public services into two acceptance theories (the technology acceptance model [TAM] and unified theory of acceptance and use of technology [UTAUT] framework) and having a direct measurement of the criterion. Both TAM and UTAUT models measure the behaviour intention to use and indirectly measure the criterion of actual usage along with behavioural intention. Besides, this study conducted a systematic sampling survey in SMEs located in Klang Valley (the business hub in Malaysia).

The results confirm that effort expectancy, performance expectancy and social influences had a direct effect on the adoption of EGP in the private sector. Rather than the original UTAUT setup, the behavioural intention would influence user behaviour.

The implications and policy recommendations of these findings will be used by both SMEs and the government to improve the EGP delivery.

The gap with this study is at the time the Malaysian Government introduced e-procurement. The SMEs were quite new and had limited knowledge in the e-procurement during the introduction phase. Both SMEs and the government will use the implications and policy recommendations of these findings to improve the EGP delivery in the current post introduction phase.