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The amount of current assets and the structure of their financing within working capital management define the level of risk, liquidity and profitability of any company. This chapter identifies the type of working capital investment and financing policies and reveals their influence on the financial performance of Czech firms.

The type of investment policy was defined, based on the structure of current assets and the working capital-to-sales ratio, followed by the share of different liabilities in assets, used to determine the financing policy. The Orbis database provided the chapter with indexes of manufacturing, agricultural, construction and trade companies for the period of 2012–2021.

The results obtained revealed the liquidity and financial independence of all selected industries. Flexible investment and conservative financing policies in agriculture were accompanied by low profitability. The decrease of the working capital-to-sales ratio and the attraction of the current debts for assets financing provided a higher return on assets in the manufacturing, agricultural and trade sectors.

Over the last decade, the sustainability concept has progressively enticed both practitioners and researchers around the world. Despite the research interest in the role of sustainability in mergers and acquisitions (M&As), a number of critical questions remained unanswered. The aim of this chapter is to review and synthesize the existing research on sustainability and M&As in the fields of management, international business, finance, accounting, and economics and identify avenues for further research. The literature review has been organized according to the process perspective of M&As, that is, the pre-M&A and post-M&A phases. The review of the literature revealed that most of the existing literature used proxies of sustainability such as environment, social, and governance (ESG) rating or corporate social responsibility (CSR) and attempted to examine the relationship between ESG/CSR performance with stock market reaction and returns. While a small but growing number of studies examined the role of sustainability in M&As, there are scopes for further research. This chapter puts forward a research agenda that calls for a more granular examination of the role of sustainability in pre-M&A phases such as the target selection process, that is, due diligence and negotiation process in domestic and cross-border M&As. Moreover, future studies should investigate the role of sustainability during the post-M&A phase, for example, integration of sustainability practices during the post-M&A stage.

In our studies of daily newspapers and news websites in small and medium-sized cities in Brazil, we view these enterprises as firms endowed with specific strengths and weaknesses reflecting the characteristics of the localities in which they operate. In addition, we use references from urban geography and the industrial economy to investigate their structure, conduct, and performance. This chapter presents our observations about the structure of these firms and the journalistic business in non-metropolitan cities of the State of Rio de Janeiro. The results point to greater consolidation of newspapers, despite their traditional way of operating; the low performance of news websites and their restricted source of revenue; and the existence of a potential regional market little explored by these media.

Research and development (R&D) is a vital strategy for firms to sustain their competitive locus and profitability in the global marketplace. Therefore, the existing research is engrossed in the correlation between firm performance (FP) and R&D intensity (RDI) meta-analysis. It also examined the ‘Type of Firm’ as a moderator in this relationship.

This study is motivated by its potential to address existing knowledge gaps, guide decision-making, influence policy and contribute to advancing theoretical and practical insights in the domain of business, economics and innovation.

This study is based on the secondary data. The researcher uses ‘Meta- Essentials 1.5’ for meta-analysis covering the studies of developed and emerging economies from 1985 to 2022.

The outcome conveys a small effect of magnitude between RDI and FP. It also indicates the positively significant linkage between them, directing that investing in R&D projects leads to improvement in the performance of companies. It also points out that private firms engaging in R&D activities have a negative while public firms have a positive correlation with their performance.

Understanding this linkage is imperative as it aids managers in making strategic decisions, the government in funding research-related schemes and investors in choosing R&D projects for investment.

This is an acceptable fact that firms put efforts to maximize shareholders wealth but there is growing demand that firms are also accountable to various stakeholders associated directly or indirectly with the firms' business activities. Investors now evaluate firm's performance not only from financial perspective but also consider environment, social, and governance (ESG) factors when taking investment decision. ESG is not visible in firm's annual financial reports but investors do not deny its significance when valuing firms. There are increasing interests in ESG by communities, professionals, and government bodies, and all are interested to keep it as part of firms' regular activity and have to relate it with firm performance and efficiency that affects firm value. Still, there are difficulties in integration of ESG factors into investment decision-making, but efforts are being put to overcome all the issues. Firms which consider ESG are in a good position to achieve their long-term financial goals as they are likely to attract capital, lower borrowing costs, mitigate risks, and maximize shareholders value.

With the historic rise in globalisation, there is more contact between countries and businesses than ever. Not only due to globalisation, technological change, and shorter product life cycles lead entrepreneurs to adopt internationalisation strategies. Internationalisation is a creative activity conducted by global entrepreneurs who seek to operate part of their businesses in international markets. Entrepreneurs, economists, policymakers, and researchers have long observed that international business success depends upon global entrepreneurial activity.

Over the past 30 years, diversity in the global market has been among the most researched topics in international business literature. However, since the entrepreneurship system consists of interwoven elements, such as an entrepreneur, management system, culture, market, region, customers and workers, diversification in one piece directly or indirectly affects the other components within the system. Therefore, diversity in global entrepreneurship should be examined by considering the dynamics of every element within the system.

In this chapter, the author reviewed and commented upon the development of the literature on diversity, global entrepreneurship, internationalisation, and multinational organisations. In an overview of previous studies, this study aims to analyse the nexus between diversity and global entrepreneurship, the importance of this connection in the international business domain and how this connection can evolve in the future.

Introduction: Historically, the corporate governance (CG) framework was designed primarily to safeguard the economic interests of shareholders, as a result of political and legal interventions, developing into an effective instrument for stakeholders and society in general.

Purpose: The core objectives of the study include: identifying journals/publications responsible for publishing CG studies in India, key CG issues covered by CG researchers, the amount of high-impact CG literature across different time periods, sectors/industries covered by CG researchers and different research instruments (quantitative or qualitative) used in CG studies in India.

Design/methodology: The chapter used a sample of 130 corporate governance studies that fulfil the selection criteria, drawn from the repository of over 100 reputed journals that are either recognised by the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) or indexed by SCOPUS. A systematic literature review has been carried out pertaining to CG issues in India, based on various statistical tools, data, industries, research outlets & citations, etc.

Findings: The results show an overwhelming number of studies have assessed the relationship between CG variables and firm performance, which could be measured through a variety of performance metrics such as ROA and ROI. Apart from empirical analysis, many conceptual studies use repetitive basic statistical tools like descriptive statistics or regression analysis. The chapter offers insights into current achievements and future development.

Originality/value: This bibliometric study is a useful guide for policymakers, corporate leaders, research organisations and management faculty to draw insights from work produced by eminent researchers in GC in India.

This study explores the short- and medium-term effects generated by the Milan Expo 2015, adopting a microeconomic approach. The focus is on the hospitality sector. The study embraces nine years, identifying three intervals: pre- (2011–2014), during- (2015) and post-Expo (2016–2019). The time span does not include the Covid-19 pandemic period, which started in 2020. The dataset is composed of daily data. Three research questions are explored. First, an overall evaluation of the short- and medium-term effects is performed. Second, the seasonal effects are measured. Finally, the impacts for different classes of hotels are considered. The findings are supportive for the legacy generated by the Milan Expo. The results confirm the ability of the Milan Expo to strengthen the leisure segment. Positive results have been observed for all classes of hotels, relevantly augmenting the real revenue per available room (RevPAR). Luxury hotels achieved the highest increase of RevPAR, while economy class hotels registered the highest percentage of increase of RevPAR.