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The purpose of this paper is to reveal the benefits of organized voluntary emergency services (OVES) in the case of flood events, since such information is mostly not available, but needed to analyze the total effects of disasters and respective responses. Moreover, the efficient allocation of scarce public resources for emergency and risk management should be based on empirical data.

Based on a qualitative framework describing the benefits of OVES, the authors develop different tools for monetizing tangible as well as intangible benefits and apply them for case studies in Austria.

The benefits of volunteer efforts for emergency management cannot be monetized easily, since they are often of intangible character. Nevertheless, we show that the benefits of OVES could be substantial.

As the authors analyze case studies, the results cannot be directly transferred to other regions, but illustrate the empirical dimension of the benefits of OVES. Further research should be undertaken to assess the benefits of avoided losses by OVES using single-object data.

Since many emergency service institutions are involved during/after natural hazards, data availability and exchange should be improved. Objective decisions for investment in emergency services should be based on data of recent hazard events and case studies.

The paper develops a toolbox to evaluate the benefits of OVES and is thus highly valuable for emergency managers, which are responsible for deploying volunteers and non-volunteers in emergency management.

This paper aims to appraise the roles of whistleblowing policy as a tool for combating corruption in Nigeria. Methodologically, it examines how the policy could be strengthened to effectively address the challenges of corruption in Nigeria.

This paper is essentially a desk research with reliance on the secondary source of data. Relevant materials were collected in an eclectic manner from official documents, statutes and other published outlets such as books, journal publications, online articles, news reports and newspaper articles. Its scope is limited to issue and content analysis relating to the use of whistleblowing policy as a tool to combat corruption.

The paper finds that whistleblowing policy is an effective anti-corruption instrument that has facilitated discovery and recovery of looted public resources and prosecution of culprits in Nigeria.

This paper demonstrates how whistleblowing as an anti-corruption mechanism could be strengthened in Nigeria when the legislator finally passed the Whistleblower Protection Bill into law.

This study aims to explore the perceptions of investors regarding the risks associated with funding renewable energy projects in India, as well as the various factors that influence these perceptions. The investigation is limited to debt providers and seeks to pinpoint the primary risks that bankers perceive and the drivers that shape these perceptions.

This study draws on interviews and surveys of Indian bank executives, investigating how finance providers perceive risks in the Indian context and the factors driving such perceptions. Qualitative interviews have been used for operationalizing “risk perception” within the renewable energy domain, followed by a quantitative survey and exploratory factor analysis.

The authors find that experience and capacity are the most important factors that account for 30% of the overall variance. The second factor, which accounts for 15% of the variance, includes the perceived risks in funding renewable energy projects as compared to infrastructure projects. Among individual risks, the authors find that bankers perceive technological risk to be the lowest (5%) and contractual and regulatory risks as the highest (66%) in renewable energy projects.

The study contextualizes risk perception toward renewable energy investments in the Indian context by drawing from the risk perception literature and qualitative interviews with senior bankers. It presents empirical evidence on the decision-making behavior of bankers, who are important stakeholders of the renewable energy ecosystem. The main limitation of the study is the relatively small sample, and generalizing the results to the broader population might require a larger sample. This will facilitate the use of confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling, which can facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of risk perceptions in renewables financing.

Insights gained can be used to provide policy recommendations for improving the financing ecosystem of renewable energy projects. The research significantly contributes to the extant literature within the renewable energy financing domain for emerging economies.

In this study, we investigated the dilemma of devising an operational family business definition in the SME context. The existing family business literature mostly agrees with the validity of a theoretical model called F-PEC, which identifies family businesses by evaluating three dimensions: power, experience, and culture. Nonetheless, empirical studies on family SMEs still use just one or a few elements with many different thresholds to operationally define family SMEs, highlighting an unsolved definitional divergence among scholars, which limits the possibility of investigating the potential effects of family attributes on firms’ goals, structures, processes, and performance.

Employing ancestry searching, online databases, and issue-by-issue searches from two decades (1990–2019), we analyzed 255 empirical studies that specified a family business’s operational definition (despite posing different research questions) and used a sample of small-sized and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Results showed ownership and governance/management are the most used elements in the operational definitions provided in the literature to date, but that there still is not a universally adopted operational definition of family SMEs in use today.

This paper is one of the first to comprehensively analyze and review the operationalized use of family SME definitions in the literature.