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This paper aims to intend to ascertain whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) can serve as an effective promotional tool for the Malaysian halal certified companies in the era of Covid-19 pandemic. Starting from being nice to do, the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic has brought CSR to the forefront of businesses, forcing them to rapidly shift from profit maximisation to business preservation. Thus, it is practically crucial to ascertain whether CSR could be effectively used to promote halal brands in this era.

To achieve the stated aim, a survey questionnaire was developed and used to collect data from 295 participants who are familiar with the concepts of CSR and halal in Malaysia. The data collected were analysed using both descriptive and inferential statistics.

The findings reveal that the commitment to halal best practices, zakat and charitable donations, environmental responsibility, employee welfare and responsible dealings with clients are the most important CSR activities that can promote halal certified companies in the era of Covid-19. Whilst there is a positive relationship between halal economic responsibility and CSR as a promotional tool, such relationship is not significant. Nevertheless, the relationship between legal responsibility and CSR as a promotional tool is negative and insignificant.

Limitations are inevitable in any study where a convenient sampling technique is used. Respondents from Klang Valley in Malaysia make up a large proportion of the study’s sample. This may consequently limit the generalisability of the findings of this study. Hence, future research should adequately collect data from other cities in Malaysia. Moreover, this paper does not differentiate between perceptions of Muslims and non-Muslims or between male and female; this might have an effect, as Muslims are likely to favour most of the items in the questionnaire used to collect data for this study. Thus, future research may collect sufficient data to shed more light on this issue.

The researchers have revealed that CSR is an effective promotional tool for the Malaysian halal certified companies in the era of Covid-19 pandemic. Study of this nature is rare in academic literature.

One of the significant components of a firm's overall sustainability is establishing and nurturing governance. This study attempts to understand how politically connected firms maintain sustainability measures in terms of risk-taking strategies. This paper has two purposes. The first purpose is to provide empirical evidence on the politically connected (PC) firms' corporate risk-taking and performance. The second purpose is to investigate the moderating impact of PC firms' risk on corporate performance.

To conduct the analysis to test our hypothesis efficiently, data has been collected from Bloomberg and annual reports of all Malaysian PC and non-PC companies. The final sample comprises 561 firms over the investigation period 2010–2019. The methodology entails Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions of the impact of the PC firms on corporate risk-taking and performance. The authors also conduct t-tests of the equality of means of corporate risk-taking and performance between PC and non-PC companies.

The authors’ results show that politically connected firms undertake significant less corporate risk and relish higher financial performance than their counterparts. It implicatively insinuates that the presence of a politician on the board enables the management to mitigate the risk-taking, which makes the firms more profitable. The authors’ results corroborate network theory, suggesting that political ties alleviate the agency issue and safeguard the shareholders' interest.

The study's results were important as they highlighted the sustainable development of PC and non-PC companies, offering insights to researchers, policymakers, regulators, financial report users, investors, environmental unions, employees, clients and society.

This paper is novel since it is unique in evaluating sustainable practice in PC and non-PC firms.