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There is still an ongoing debate on the value relevance of capital structure and its determinants. Recently the issue has been explored in family firms after being explored in mature firms. This paper investigates the role of institutional investors and the firm's innovation activity in influencing the firm's decision and ability to acquire debt capital.

A large sample of 700 privately-held family firms in Italy from 2010 to 2019. Two analysis techniques are used: panel analysis and path analysis. The value of debt and the debt ratio are used as leverage measures. The value of patent (as a proxy for innovation) and institutional investor are the explanatory variables.

The results show that institutional investors have no relationship with financial leverage measures except when controlling for an interaction variable (Institutional investors × Lombardy region). The patent value is positively correlated with debt; however, the ratio patent-to-asset is negatively related to financial leverage indicating higher risk exposure. The nonlinearity test demonstrates a turning point when the relationship between patent value and debt inverts.

Firms should monitor their innovation activity since excessive innovation increases risk exposure and affects financing opportunities and value. The involvement of institutional investors does not always enhance value.

Existing literature focuses separately on family firm innovations and financial leverage as outcome variables, emphasizing the role of institutional investors in both fields by adopting agency theory and socioemotional wealth framework. In this study, the authors go further by merging both relationships, investigating the dynamics of the institutional-family firm innovation relationship in influencing the firm's capital structure. The authors contribute to the ongoing debate by providing original findings on capital structure, governance and innovation, supported by rigorous methods to enhance family firms' decision-making.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of corporate dividend policy on the capital structure in the Korean stock market. To distinctly discern the voluntariness of changes in corporate dividend policy, we analyze companies that, following a substantial increase, do not reduce dividends for the subsequent two years or, after a significant decrease, do not raise dividends for the following two years. Our empirical findings indicate that companies that increase dividends experience a significant decrease in both book and market leverage, even after controlling for variables such as target leverage ratios. This result suggests that a large increase in dividends can effectively reduce information asymmetry, leading to a lower cost of equity. On the contrary, after a decrease in dividends, both book leverage and market leverage significantly increase, revealing a symmetric relationship between dividend policy and capital structure. In conclusion, large dividend increases in Korean companies not only reduce information asymmetry but also lower the cost of equity capital, resulting in observable changes in the leverage ratio.

We develop a credit-risk model to study the informational role of investment in an economy susceptible to large liquidity shocks. Firms' investment decisions carry information about their asset quality, thereby mitigating informational frictions when firms enter bankruptcy. An increase in aggregate investment can reduce the informational value of investment, depressing firms' recovery values. Therefore, policies boosting investment can decrease debt and firm values by reducing the informational value of investment. The presence of debt overhang may enhance firm value by making firms' investment decisions more informative. We present suggestive empirical evidence consistent with model predictions on the relation between firms' investments and recovery rates.

Given the many activities of Nigerian investors in the crypto ecosystem, this paper investigates the level of their awareness, attitudes, risk tolerance, experience, reasons for investing and level of financial literacy.

The research approach is based on a self-administered questionnaire. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) permitted the use of its reliable and validated survey instrument, administered in Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam in 2019. The results are tabulated and analyzed.

The key results include the participation of respondents, who are generally young males, not fully financially literate but risk-averse. Many held the false view that investing in global markets is a higher risk than in national markets. Their reasons for investing in crypto include the fear of missing out on good opportunities and the desire to have fun. The results also revealed that social media, conversations with non-experts and online articles are among the most used investment information sources, highlighting the role of digital platforms and informal discussions in shaping perceptions and knowledge about cryptocurrencies. Investments in cryptos are financed through savings, regular monthly budgets or borrowed from friends or family. As for specific attitudes to risk, the results suggest that for most respondents, preserving their invested capital is of paramount importance.

The importance of this research also resides in the possibility of comparing the crypto ecosystem in Asia with Nigeria because the same OECD data instrument is employed in data collection. Moreover, this study is the most comprehensive research about Nigerian investors in cryptocurrencies.

Drawing insights from institutional theory, this paper aims to examine whether and to what extent banks have reconfigured their management control systems (MCSs) in response to growing institutional pressures towards sustainability, understood as environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.

The authors conducted an exploratory study at the three largest Italian banking groups to shed light on changes made in MCSs to account for ESG issues. The analysis is based on 12 semi-structured interviews with managers from the sustainability and controls areas, as well as from other relevant operational areas particularly concerned with the integration process of ESG issues. Additionally, secondary data sources were used. The Malmi and Brown (2008) MCS framework, consisting of a package of five types of formal and informal control mechanisms, was used to structure and analyse the empirical data.

The examined banks widely implemented numerous changes to their MCSs as a response to the heightened sustainability pressures from regulatory bodies and stakeholders. In particular, with the exception of action planning, the results show an extensive integration of ESG issues into the five control mechanisms of Malmi and Brown’s framework, namely, long-term planning, cybernetic, reward/compensation, administrative and cultural controls.

By identifying the approaches banks followed in reconfiguring traditional MCSs, this research sheds light on how adequate MCSs can promote banks’ “sustainable behaviours”. The results can, thus, contribute to defining best practices on how MCSs can be redesigned to support the integration of ESG issues into the banks’ way of doing business.

Overall, the findings support the theoretical assertion that institutional pressures influence the design of banks’ MCSs, and that both formal and informal controls are necessary to ensure a real engagement towards sustainability. More specifically, this study reveals that MCSs, by encompassing both formal and informal controls, are central to enabling banks to appropriately understand, plan and control the transition towards business models fully oriented to the integration of ESG issues. Thereby, this allows banks to effectively respond to the increased stakeholder demands around ESG concerns.

The transition to green growth goals requires the concerted efforts of the whole society. Enterprises, as important players in the market, play a key role in promoting green and sustainable development. The rise of the concept of sustainable development has enabled more enterprises to disclose environmental, social and governance (ESG) information, and ESG behaviour is regarded as a positive strategic behaviour to implement the new development concept. This paper aims to explore the influence of ESG performance on enterprise green innovation.

This study applies a fixed effect model and the regulation effect of empirical analysis to explore the influence of ESG performance on enterprise green innovation. The object of investigation is 2014–2021 Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies.

The results of an empirical analysis outline the following conclusions: (1) ESG performance has a significant effect on enterprise green innovation, mainly by easing the pressure of the financing enterprise, fitting stakeholders’ environmental protection concept and obtaining employee organizational identity that influences enterprise green innovation. (2) Government regulation positively regulates the role of ESG performance in promoting the green innovation of enterprises. (3) Heterogeneity analysis found that the strengthening role of ESG performance on the green innovation of enterprises is stronger in green invention patents, state-owned enterprises and nonheavily polluting industries.

Despite the valuable findings, this study has a few limitations. Thus, it is necessary to extend the object of investigation by adding other Asian countries, which allows for comparison analysis and allocating best practices for promoting green innovation. Besides, innovation and ESG performance depend on the quality of institutions. In this case, the future study should incorporate the indicators that reveal the quality of institutions (corruption, transparency, digitalisation, voice, accountability, etc.).

According to the above conclusions, this paper proposes suggestions at the level of enterprises, government and investors. At the enterprise level, ESG responsibility should be strengthened, ESG information should be consciously disclosed and the quality of ESG disclosure should be improved. Government departments should play the role of supervisors, improve the construction of ESG information disclosure systems and promote the formation of ESG systems. At the social level, investors should improve the ESG information status and pay more attention to the ESG performance of enterprises.

This study fills the scientific gaps in the analysis impact of ESG performance on the green innovation of enterprises. This paper contributes to the theoretical landscape of ESG efficiency by developing approaches based on two empirical models: testing the impact of enterprise ESG performance on green innovation and testing whether government regulation plays a regulatory role in the relationship between ESG performance and green innovation. Besides, this study analysed the ESG performance and green innovation within the following categories: heavy and nonheavy polluter industries; state and nonstate-owned enterprise groups.