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This paper examines the relationship between a prime contractor's financial health and its mergers and acquisitions (M&A) spending in the defense industry. It aims to provide models that give the United States Department of Defense (DoD) indications of future M&A activity, informing decision-makers and contributing to ensuring competitive markets that benefit the consumer.

The study uses panel data regression models on 40 companies between 1985 and 2021. The company's financial health is assessed using industry-standard financial ratios (i.e. measures of profitability, efficiency, solvency and liquidity) while controlling for economic factors such as national productivity, defense budgets and firm size.

The results show a significant relationship between efficiency and M&A spending, indicating that companies with lower efficiency tend to spend more on M&As. However, there was no significant relationship between M&A spending and a company's profitability or solvency. These results were consistent with previous research and the study's hypotheses for profitability and solvency. However, the effect of liquidity was the opposite of the expected result, possibly due to the defense industry's different view on liquidity compared to previous research.

The paper provides insights into the relationship between a prime contractor's financial health and its M&A spending, a topic with limited research. The findings can inform policymakers and regulators on the industrial base's future M&A activity, ensuring competitive markets that benefit the consumer.

We propose an alternative rationale for why some firms employ veterans, driven not solely by benevolence but also by the prospect of enhanced outcomes. Financially, hiring veterans could correlate with improved stock market performance for the hiring company while aligning with corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Our study centers on the stock market performance of companies hiring veterans. It aims to underscore a lesser-known facet of the veteran employment discourse and its connection to the hiring firm's financial performance.

This paper evaluates the stock market performance of three VETS portfolios (made of companies that hire veterans) compared to the benchmark SPDR S&P 500 ETF. Using a modular approach, we create three VETS passive indices: VETSEW (equal-weighted index), VETSPW (price-weighted index) and VETSVW (value-weighted index). The study analyzes the annual returns, portfolio allocations, risk-adjusted performance metrics and style analysis of the portfolios from January 1, 2020, to December 31, 2022.

The findings indicate that all three VETS portfolios outperformed the benchmark, with higher ending balances and superior risk-adjusted ratios such as the Sharpe and Sortino ratios. Notably, the portfolios demonstrated resilience during challenging periods, including the COVID-19 pandemic, subsequent recovery and an inflationary period.

Limitations include the paper's focus solely on stock returns, suggesting a need for broader financial and management ratios. Moreover, a deeper exploration into how veterans contribute during turbulent times is suggested for further investigation. Although the study touches upon the financial performance of veteran-focused companies during challenging economic times, it does not extensively delve into the specific ways in which veterans add value under such circumstances, presenting an opportunity for further exploration.

Firms that employ veterans amid the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate favorable risk-adjusted returns, underscoring the potential of veterans as valuable crisis-time assets. Our research further underscores the correlation between veteran hiring and enhanced financial prowess. These insights carry significant policy implications, including CSR initiatives for hiring veterans, skill translation and training and collaboration with veteran organizations.

The paper's findings suggest significant implications: (1) Policymakers could incentivize firms to hire veterans through tax benefits or grants, leveraging their skills for organizational resilience. (2) Collaborative efforts between policymakers and firms can promote responsible hiring, boosting a company's reputation through diversity and inclusion, positively impacting society. (3) Support for skill translation from military to civilian jobs is crucial. Programs certifying skills and tailored education aid veterans' successful transition into the workforce. (4) Collaborations between policymakers, veteran organizations and private sector entities can create networks, job placements and support systems for veterans' employment.

Numerous prior studies within the domain of corporate social responsibility have predominantly neglected the contributions veterans offer to businesses and the underlying reasons behind firms' decisions to employ them. Our research uniquely concentrates on the stock market performance of companies that choose to hire veterans.

This study aims to examine the impact of the beginning of the Russia–Ukraine war and the Wagner Group’s attempted military coup against Putin’s regime on the European defense sector, consisting of weapons manufacturers.

The authors use the event study methodology to quantify the impact. That is, the authors assume that markets are efficient, and abnormal stock returns around the event dates capture the magnitudes of the impacts of the two events studied on European defense sector companies. The authors use the capital asset pricing model and two different multifactor models to estimate expected stock returns, which serve as the benchmark necessary to obtain abnormal returns.

The start of the war on February 24, 2022, when the Russian forces invaded Ukraine, was followed by high positive abnormal returns of up to 12% in the next few days. The results are particularly strong if multiple factors are used to control for the risk of the defense stocks. Conversely, the authors find a negative impact of the rebellion initiated by the mercenary Wagner Group’s chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, on June 23, 2023, on the abnormal returns of defense industry stocks on the first trading day after the event.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of the impact of the Russia–Ukraine war on the defense sector. Furthermore, this is the first study to measure the financial implications of the military coup initiated by the Wagner Group. The findings contribute to a rapidly growing literature on the financial implications of military conflicts around the world.

This paper aims to reveal the green governance role played by stock connect in transition economies from the perspective of corporates’ environmental violations and provides implications for the coordination and optimization of subsequent stock market liberalization and green transformation policies in pursuit of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals.

With the data of Chinese listed enterprises, this paper takes the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect or Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect in China as a quasi-natural experiment and applies the multi-period difference-in-difference (DID) model to identify the impact of stock market liberalization on the corporates’ environmental violations.

The findings reveal that the stock market liberalization significantly restrains the corporates’ environmental violations. These findings are robust to a series of sensitivity tests, including excluding two-way effects, adjusting the year of policy implementation, replacing the core variables, introducing the regional fixed effects and excluding the interference effect of other relevant policies during the sample period. Furthermore, the stock market liberalization is beneficial for upgrading information disclosure quality, improving internal governance capability, strengthening environmental protection incentives, and thus restrains corporates’ environmental violations. Meanwhile, heterogeneity tests show that the inhibitory effects are more significant in those grouped samples which is large scale, state-owned nature, located in eastern region, with poor evaluation performances and heavy tax burden.

We make two marginal contributions to the current literature. First, this paper enriches the literature on the factors influencing corporate environmental violations by focusing on how the macro-level financial policy influences the micro-level corporate environmental violations. One the one hand, prior studies mainly focused on the consequences of corporate environmental violations; however, there is still a puzzle that the effect of stock market liberalization cannot be fully justified to influence corporate environmental violations. The findings help explain this puzzle by examining that stock market liberalization can restrain corporate environmental violations. Moreover, prior studies mainly focused on corporate share price (Yunsen Chen et al., 2022), market liquidity (Han Kim and Singal, 2000), information disclosure (Liang, Lin, and Chin 2012), corporate governance (Bae and Goyal, 2010) and corporate violations (Lingyun Xiong et al., 2021), but not on corporate environmental violations. We assume that the suppression effect of stock market liberalization on corporate environmental violations can help reduce corporate environmental violations, improve corporates’ awareness of environmental compliance. Second, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the literature on stock market liberalization by investigating the restraining effect of Stock Connect on corporate environmental violations from the perspective of information channel, corporate governance channel and motivation channel, which is of practical significance. Moreover, we investigate the differences in the inhibitory effects of stock market liberalization on different enterprises' environmental violations, from firm size, property rights, enterprise assessment results, tax burden to geographical location, which is conducive to the construction of a green financial system and the promotion of sustainable economic development. Our results show that firms which are large scale, state-owned nature, located in eastern region, with poor evaluation performances and heavy tax burden tend to compliance with environmental laws. These findings emphasize the importance and benefits of Stock Connect.

Nurse turnover in critical care units (CCU) significantly affects patient outcomes and health systems worldwide. To safeguard patient care quality, hospitals must address the underlying reasons for turnover and strategize to retain their skilled nursing workforce. The study proposes a prescriptive framework to reduce nurse turnover in CCUs.

In this study, the integrated methodology of Delphi-AHP-Entropy was used for the comparative prioritization of factors and subfactors that influence nursing staff turnover in CCUs.

Study findings reveal that “Organizational factors” and “Individual factors” dictate critical care nurse attrition rate. At the subfactor level, staffing policy, chronic fatigue, and perceived career are the leading concerns for the decision of nurses whether to work or leave.

This study is valuable for both researchers and healthcare professionals. It examines whether actions related to nurse retention align with existing theory and identifies areas requiring further theoretical or applied studies to enhance understanding in this area. This insight can bolster the field’s knowledge base and integrate theoretical and applied knowledge effectively. Additionally, for healthcare professionals, the study provides an overview of key factors conducive to retaining nursing staff in the CCU, offering valuable guidance for implementing effective strategies.

This study uniquely positions itself by presenting a comprehensive and prescriptive framework for critical care nurse retention in the UAE.

This paper aims to examine the strength characteristics of a stressful event (i.e. novelty, disruption, and criticality) as factors that drive people’s social media use for seeking different types of supportive resources (i.e. emotional, appraisal, informational, and instrumental support) to facilitate emotion-focused and problem-focused coping. We further assess the impact of different types of social support obtained via social media use on people’s coping effectiveness.

Our study uses an online survey collecting data at two points in time from 291 social media users during the COVID-19 pandemic. Structural equation modeling was used for data analysis.

Empirical results reveal the usefulness and limitations of social media use as a coping mechanism. All three event strength characteristics influence people’s social media use for both emotion-focused and problem-focused coping. Event novelty motivates people’s pursuit of informational support on social media, event disruption drives social media use for seeking all four types of support, and event criticality motivates social media use for seeking emotional and informational support. However, only emotion-focused resources – emotional support and appraisal support – are found to significantly affect people’s coping effectiveness.

Our study contributes to a better understanding of the role played by social media when people cope with a stressful event. Applying the three characteristics of event strength allows us to identify people’s need for different supportive resources depending on how they perceive the event. Our analysis of the main and mediating effects of the four types of social support shows that not all types of social support can significantly enhance users’ coping effectiveness.

The Operations and Maintenance (O&M) cost of a facility is typically 60–85% of the total life cycle cost of a building whereas its design and construction cost accounts for only 5–10%. Therefore, enhancing and optimizing the O&M of a facility is a crucial issue. In addition, with the increasing complexities in a building's operating systems, more technologically advanced solutions are required for proactively maintaining a facility. Thereby, a tool is needed which can optimize and reduce the cost of facility maintenance. One of the solutions is Augmented or Mixed Reality (AR/MR) technologies which can reduce repair time, training time and streamline inspections. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to establish contextual knowledge of AR/MR application in facilities operation and maintenance and present an implementation framework through the analysis and classification of articles published between 2015 and 2022.

To effectively understand all AR/MR applications in facilities management (FM), a systematic literature review is performed. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) protocol was followed for searching and describing the search strategies. Keywords were identified through the concept mapping technique. The Scopus database and Google Scholar were employed to find relevant articles, books and conference papers. A thorough bibliometric analysis was conducted using VOS Viewer and subsequently, a thematic analysis was performed for the selected publications.

The use of AR/MR within facilities O&M could be categorized into five different application areas: (1) visualization; (2) maintenance; (3) indoor localization and positioning; (4) information management and (5) indoor environment. After a thematic analysis of the literature, it was found that maintenance and indoor localization were the most frequently used research application domains. The chronological evolution of AR/MR in FM is also presented along with the origin of publications, which showed that the technology is out of its infancy stage and is ready for implementation. However, literature showed many challenges hindering this goal, that is (1) reluctance of the organizational leadership to bear the cost of hardware and trainings for the employees, (2) Lack of BIM use in FM and (3) system lagging, crashing and unable to register the real environment. A preliminary framework is presented to overcome these challenges.

This study accommodates a variety of application domains within facilities O&M. The publications were systematically selected from the existing literature and then reviewed to exhibit various AR/MR applications to support FM. There have been no literature reviews that focus on AR and/or MR in the FM and this paper fills the gap by not only presenting its applications but also developing an implementation framework.

This study mainly explores how ESG performance (ESG stands for Environment, Social, and Governance) affects corporate downside risk through innovation input and innovation output, thereby promoting sustainable development of enterprises.

Using Chinese A-share listed companies from 2014 to 2022 as research samples, a stepwise regression method is used to empirically test the impact of ESG performance on corporate innovation and downside risk by constructing multiple multivariate primary regression models.

ESG performance is beneficial for obtaining external resources and alleviating principal-agent problems. It can promote enterprises to increase innovation input and improve innovation output, thereby enhancing their core competitiveness, and suppressing their downside risk. This inhibitory effect is more significant in non-state-owned enterprises, non-high-tech enterprises, and enterprises where the chairman and the general manager are not combined in one. Further additional analysis has found that equity concentration weakens the inhibitory effect of ESG performance on corporate downside risk, equity balance strengthens the inhibitory effect of ESG performance on corporate downside risk, indicating that a mutually restrictive equity structure is conducive to promoting enterprises to actively fulfill ESG responsibility, thereby improving corporate innovation level and resolving their downside risk.

Enterprise managers, policy makers, and other practitioners can clearly see the benefits of implementing ESG measures, further strengthen their confidence in sustainable development, actively apply ESG concepts to the entire production and operation process of enterprises, increase attention and implementation of ESG elements, and promote the healthy and vigorous development of enterprises and macroeconomics.

The research conclusions reveal the inherent mechanism by which ESG performance empowers enterprises to improve their innovation level and reverse their performance decline, effectively expanding the theoretical achievements of ESG performance in enterprise innovation and risk management.

This paper aims to carry out a comprehensive overview of the academic debate on utilities’ non-financial reporting by highlighting the main issues and the emerging gaps.

Using a structured literature review, this study identifies the state of the art, maps the evolution of non-financial reporting in utility companies and reveals unexplored issues and aspects.

A critical analysis of the existing academic debate shows the development of utilities’ non-financial reporting literature and the focus of this debate. It provides insight into how utilities pay attention to non-financial reporting, what role this plays in corporate actions and relationships with stakeholders and what research gaps need further investigation.

This study provides some useful recommendations to practitioners and regulators to be more conscious of the weaknesses and criticalities of utilities’ non-financial reporting and to address them when building such reporting. However, this study considered only articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals.

A comprehensive literature review in the utilities’ non-financial reporting area is timely, given the increase in this type of reporting. The study has an original focus and develops an analytical framework highlighting the peculiarities of utilities.

One of the most cited literature in SHRM is Schuler and Jackson’s (1987) behavioural model. This model proposes that organisational performance is dependent on the extent to which HRM practices can be effectively connected to competitive strategy and desired employee behaviours. Importantly, this model recognises the salient role of employee behaviour in performance outcomes and, moreover that different competitive strategies imply both promulgation and reinforcement of different sets of employee skills and behaviours. Surprisingly, despite its significant influence on SHRM, studies rarely examine this model in its entirety. Motivated by the need to better understand this model’s arguments in contemporary settings, our study uses a multi-actor design to explore the connections between competitive strategies (cost reduction and differentiation), employee behaviours, and HRM practices in service environments.

Adopting a multi-level, multi-actor survey design, our exploratory deductive study assesses the utility of strategic HRM’s (SHRM) behavioural model. Drawing on data from a sample of service organisations and using univariate analyses, we compare operationalised HRM practices and employee behaviours across different strategy types.

Results lend provisional support for the behavioural model, particularly in the case of a differentiation strategy where notable differences in HRM practices and employee behaviours were observed. Findings suggest growing levels of memetic and competitive isomorphism may be occurring, with this likely attributable to the increased incidence of idea generation and information sharing about best practices occurring amongst practitioners, as well as a growing nuance in operating markets, managerial preferences, employee expectations, stakeholder objectives, and the like.

Our study suggests refinements to the behavioural model are needed. Some support for the model’s key tenets is found, but these appear context specific. Thus, the merit in developing a priori typologies linking strategy type to HRM practices and employee behaviours where organisations operate in environments which are particularised and tumultuous appears debatable.

This study highlights the behavioural model’s nuance to modern service organisations and, by doing so, practitioners are provided with a behavioural pathway for achieving competitive advantage through their HRM practices. Findings also suggest that increasingly competitive environments might be encouraging practitioners to engage in isomorphic behaviours.

The use of a comparative research design allowed our study to contribute much needed empiricism to the largely conceptually informed stylised typologies depicting the linkages between different competitive strategies, implied employee role behaviours and HRM practices, thereby supporting the need for model refinement.