Search results

This study aims to explore the Facebook communication strategies of Spanish hospitals during health emergencies, focusing on their role in crisis management and public information dissemination.

Automatic topic modelling and deep learning sentiment analysis were applied to analyse 151,738 posts from 274 hospital Facebook pages (March 2020–Feb 2022). Regression analyses were used to explore the relationships between topics, sentiment scores and hospital characteristics.

The analysis revealed nine main topics, with the three most prevalent related to COVID-19: vaccine information, security measures and situational updates. This indicates that Spanish hospitals significantly relied on Facebook to manage the emergency. The communication strategies dynamically adapted to the intensity of the pandemic and varied across hospital types. Sentiment analysis showed a negative tone for posts about security measures and situational updates. These findings align with the Agenda-Setting Theory, suggesting that hospitals influenced public discourse. Vaccine information posts were more positive, resonating with the Uses and Gratifications Theory by fulfilling the audience’s need for reassurance and guidance.

Using replicable machine learning techniques, this study elucidates the communication strategies employed by Spanish hospitals to manage healthcare emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights factors that potentially influence these strategies and provides theoretical justifications for them. The variation in communication strategies on Facebook among different hospital categories underscores the imperative for stricter guidelines and regulations to guarantee consistent and reliable communication during emergencies. This research provides valuable insights for practitioners and policymakers aimed at developing effective health communication strategies on social media.

This paper develops novel proxies for labour tax avoidance (LTAV) and tests their validity within a sample of 189 labour tax-avoidant offending firms (LTAOFs) accused of evading social security contributions (SOCs) by public authorities.

LTAV proxies are based on abnormal values of SOCs paid, reported in the income statements of a sample of 857,790 Spanish firm-years for the period 2001–2015, estimated through two-stage least square panel data regressions with firm fixed effects.

The results reveal that proxies specifically built to signal both conforming and non-conforming LTAV can provide evidence of abnormally low SOCs as expenses within the sample of LTAOFs. Furthermore, firm-specific financial variables as well as macroeconomic variables significantly influence LTAV.

This study could foster further research on the efficacy of the LTAV proxies and on the drivers and sustainability implications of LTAV for firms and their stakeholders in different socio-economic and institutional contexts.

These LTAV proxies could integrate other methods applied to estimate the undeclared work and its trends. Furthermore, they may assist tax authorities to direct their inspections, detect labour tax evasion and then strengthen the social protection of the employees from employers' illegal exploitation practices, as well as reducing tax revenue shortfalls and related sustainability concerns in the social security systems.

This study proposes a novel methodology to examine LTAV and its determinants through accounting information. This methodology may support researchers to provide a more comprehensive picture of tax planning strategies pursued by companies, that include LTAV, and in this way integrate the extant mature literature on income tax avoidance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how accounting is used to disguise and carry out money laundering activities in specific socio-economic and political contexts and whether discretionary accruals can provide evidence of such illicit practices performed through legally registered Mafia firms (LMFs).

The study is based on a sample of 224 Italian firms identified as LMFs, due to having been confiscated by judicial authorities because of their owners being accused of Mafia-type association. Using a multivariate regression model, specifically developed discretionary accrual proxies for LMFs are compared with those of a population of lawful firms (LWFs).

The results reveal that in the pre-confiscation years, LMFs manage aggregate, revenue and expense accruals more than LWFs do, in order to smooth earnings and disguise/carry out money laundering. In contrast, in the post-confiscation years, there is no significant difference in the level of accrual management between LMFs and LWFs, as a consequence of the effective intervention of legal administrators.

This study adopts discretionary revenue and expense accrual proxies that provide additional insight into the simultaneous manipulation of revenues and expenses, linked to money laundering, which may not be fully detected by traditional aggregate accrual models. Furthermore, it suggests that the incentive for LMFs to manage accruals may be fostered by the irrelevance of their financial statements to trades with stakeholders. Finally, this paper may provide regulators with financial accounting signals which could be included in risk assessment models aiming to detect money laundering activities within firms.

This study aims to investigate how the village government implements internal control, accountability, transparency and participation in the good governance practice for corruption prevention and detection in Indonesia.

This study is qualitative research by conducting a semi-structured interview with village staff, village consultative council members and auditors.

The findings highlight three major issues contributing to poor governance and the failure to prevent and detect corruption.

The regulator should urgently provide accounting standards, audit standards and internal control regulations for the village to create good governance for eradicating corruption.

This paper is a ground-breaking study that investigates the governance practice in the village as an anchor to solve the chronic corruption problem and offers a new direction of research in the village government.

Drawing on social exchange theory and the expectancy–value model, this study has two objectives. First, it sought to explore the mediating role of nurses’ self-concept and affective commitment between perceived organizational support (POS) and three different targets (organization, co-workers and patients) of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Second, it aimed to develop a better understanding of how nurses´ self-concept and affective commitment mediate the influence of POS on OCB directed toward different targets through sequential mediation.

A cross-sectional study was conducted with 229 nurses. This sample was representative of the nursing population based on several demographic characteristics. Data analysis was performed using partial least squares analysis.

The study revealed that nurses´ self-concept plays a mediating role between POS and OCB directed toward the organization, co-workers and patients, while affective commitment has a mediating effect between POS and OCB directed toward the organization and co-workers. Finally, the indirect influence of POS on OCB through nurses´ self-concept and affective commitment was significant only at the organizational level.

This study contributes to the extant literature by identifying the mediating role of nurses´ self-concept among social exchange constructs such as POS, affective commitment and OCB directed toward different targets.

This chapter investigates whether earnings management activities increase the likelihood of receiving a qualified audit report. We have carried out this study with a sample of Spanish companies for the period 2001–2009. Previous research on the issue is not only scarce but also suffers from methodological pitfalls. In all cases, researchers have followed a matched sample approach without considering the implications of such approach for the statistical analysis. Despite its great popularity among researchers in accounting, the use of matched-based sampling is susceptible to produce technical errors in the statistical analysis. The main problem consists in the generalization of results obtained with a nonrandom sample to the whole population of firms. Our results do not show a significant relationship between EM and qualified audit reports. We have also addressed whether the international financial crisis has affected our results and concluded that Spanish companies seem to have used EM during the crisis to push down earnings, probably expecting to take advantage of the positive earnings surprises during the postcrisis period. Nevertheless, the financial crisis has not changed the nature of the EM-qualified opinions relationship.

The annual general meeting (AGM) constitutes, at least in theory, one of the main instruments to ensure good corporate governance. It also involves the release of corporate information to the financial market. We have examined the effects of the AGM on the volatility of stock returns and on the volume of shares traded. We have investigated the informative role of the AGM in the Spanish stock market during the period 2003–2009. This chapter constitutes the first investigation of the issue in a civil-law country. Extant research is scarce and limited to two common-law countries: the United States and the United Kingdom, where the AGM has been found to involve the release of relevant information to the market. Nevertheless, since the influential paper by La Porta, López de Silanes, Shleifer, and Vishny (1998), evidence reported in common-law countries cannot be automatically extrapolated to countries with a different legal tradition. As expected our results indicate that the information content of the AGM is lower in Spain than in common-law countries. In fact, no relevant information is released during the AGM in the Spanish stock market. This result is robust to company characteristics like size and the level of insider shareholders within its capital. Our findings support that the AGM plays a less significant role in ensuring good corporate governance in civil-law compared with common-law countries.