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The aim of the paper is to investigate the risk-hedging and/or safe haven properties of environmental, social and governance (ESG) index during the COVID-19 in China.

This paper employs the DCC, VCC, CCC as well as Newey–West estimator regression.

The findings provide empirical evidence of the risk hedging properties of ESG indexes as well as of the environmental, social and governance thematic indexes during the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis. The results also support the superior risk hedging properties of ESG indexes over cryptocurrency. However, the authors do not find any safe haven properties of ESG, Bitcoin, gold and West Texas Intermediate (WTI).

The paper offers therefore, practical policy implications for asset managers, central bankers and investors suggesting the pandemic risk-hedging opportunities of ESG investments.

The study represents one of the first empirical contributions examining safe-haven and hedging properties of ESG indexes compared to traditional and innovative safe haven assets, during the eruption of the COVID-19 crisis.

Some controversial cases of bail-in in the emerging countries have raised the question about whether for those countries to have in place a regulation for the bail-in is appropriate or not. To assess appropriateness, this paper investigates bail-in credibility among investors, as crucial condition for the credibility’s smooth implementation, by measuring the yield spread between bailinable and non-bailinable bonds.

The authors compare the yield spread of banks located in emerging countries that have in place a framework for the bail-in to the comparable yield spread measured for banks located in emerging countries without such framework. The comparison permits to detect whether there is a significant difference between the two spreads, which would suggest that bail-in regulation has been deemed credible by market participants where enforced, or not, which in this case would signal a problem of credibility.

The authors' results point out a significantly higher yield spread for banks located in emerging countries that have adopted a framework for the bail-in of creditors. Bail-in regulation has, therefore, being deemed credible in the adopting emerging countries, thus ensuring a crucial condition for bail-in regulation's smooth application. The authors also point out bank size and country's gross domestic product (GDP) growth as crucial moderators of bail-in expectations of market participants that can guide the implementation of bail-in rules in emerging countries.

This paper contributes to the literature on the credibility of bail-in with a new perspective from the emerging countries.

This study aims at investigating the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) on corporate financial performance (CFP) in firms headquartered in developed versus emerging countries. Drawing upon stakeholder and legitimacy perspectives, the authors argue that the CSR/CSI–CFP relationship differs depending on the home-countries’ level of economic development as this reflects their different sensitivity to sustainability. Indeed, as emerging economies are normally characterized by weaker regulations, they are likely to place lower pressures on companies for superior CSR practices. Therefore, the authors expect the effect of CSR on CFP to be more positive for firms headquartered in advanced than in emerging countries. At the same time, the authors propose a more negative relationship between CSI and CFP for firms headquartered in developed countries due to the higher overall sustainability expectations required to gain legitimacy. The empirical analyses, run on a sample of 1,971 publicly listed firms between 2010 and 2020 from developed and emerging economies, support the expectations, thus confirming that country-specific contextual factors do play a role in shaping both the positive and the negative impact of CSR and CSI on CFP, and that the reactions of stakeholders to responsible and irresponsible behavior are stronger when their sensitivity to sustainability is higher.