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Understanding the context surrounding a brand's role is paramount to knowing what drives consumers to want what they want. The purpose of this paper is to highlight eight mega‐trends that are currently influencing the consumers' world and, in turn, how marketers deliver brand messages.

The integrated brand development and marketing firm, Hiebing, conducted secondary research to help define and identify the eight mega‐trends referenced in this paper. Since 1981, Hiebing has helped hundreds of clients find, design and deliver powerful communications that have increased brands' impact and profits.

Consumers drive the universe. Not brands. Not products. Not businesses. And today's consumers are more sophisticated than ever at tuning out messages that do not resonate immediately with their own desires or needs. Relevancy – the role that a particular brand plays in consumers' lives – is what it is all about. Unless your brand plays a role that consumers value, you are wasting your time.

This paper identifies and elaborates on eight mega‐trends that are critical for marketers to understand. Staying current with them is the first step toward creating powerful communications between your targets and a brand that will withstand the test of time.

Marketing today requires gaining deeper understanding – beyond traditional insight‐gathering techniques –of the “whys,” “whens” and “hows” of human behavior. This article aims to explore how deep you must go, while revealing market‐savvy ways to make your product or brand better serve the needs of your target consumer.

The article is based on Hiebing's more than 25 years of integrated brand development and marketing experience, which has helped hundreds of clients find, design and deliver powerful strategies and communications that have increased brands' impacts and profits.

Gaining true consumer understanding before developing strategies and crafting communications – or even the brand itself – is critical for success. The profusion of consumer options means marketers must delve deeper than ever before to truly understand the target's underlying motivation for purchase and usage of products.

This article challenges the belief that traditional market research alone is enough to succeed in today's world. It is equally important to understand the complexities of consumer motivation and decision making.

The world economy has experienced several economic downturns, and each phase emphasised that no industry is immune to inappropriate risk-management practices. Against the backdrop of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, which had far more effects than a financial crisis, the existing paper reviewed the state of current research in the realm of corporate governance and risk-management practices.

This study rigorously followed a systematic approach in identifying, selecting and critically synthesising the existing literature on corporate governance and risk management. The review was carried out on the Web of Science and Scopus database until December 31, 2022. In total, 72 research works were examined and reviewed.

This systematic literature review showed that companies with strong governance mechanisms are less exposed to corporate risks. Several attributes, such as higher institutional ownership stakes, concentrated family ownership structures, lower CEO compensation and duality, higher presence of females in the management, better board dynamics in terms of independent boards and gender diversity are all strong mechanisms for mitigating risk. Additionally, socially responsible companies are better positioned to mitigate corporate risks. Furthermore, several themes emphasising the governance risk link have been identified to understand this domain further.

By analysing and synthesising existing corporate governance and risk-management themes, this study ascertained various research gaps that can be addressed in future studies. Furthermore, drawing on this paper's essential cues, researchers can significantly differentiate their work from existing ones in the field.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between debt maturity structure and stock price crash risk in Australia.

The authors employ panel data estimation with industry and year fixed effects. The paper uses a sample of 1,548 publicly listed Australian firms (8,661 firm-year observations) covering the 2000–2015 period.

Stock price crash risk is positively and significantly associated with the long-term debt maturity structure of firms. In addition, this positive association is more pronounced for firms with a more opaque information environment.

This is the first study to examine stock price crash risk in Australia. The findings are value relevant as it uncovers how debt maturity structure affects shareholders' wealth protection.

This study aims to examine the association between predictive accounting downside risk measures and changes in credit spreads. Building upon the earnings downside risk (EDR) measure developed in prior literature, this paper introduces cash flow downside risk (CFDR).

This study modifies an existing empirical framework (root lower partial moment) to calculate CFDR and applies it to a sample of firms between 2002 and 2013 for which credit default swap data are available.

After validating the measure, this study identifies a positive association between CFDR and changes in credit spreads. This paper further shows the association between CFDR and credit spread changes is stronger than that between EDR and credit spread changes. Financial stability moderates the relationship between CFDR and credit spreads.

This study proposes a novel measure of accounting downside risk, CFDR and demonstrates a negative association between this measure and future cash flow and a positive association between this measure and future credit spreads.

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the rationale for and structure of organizational networks in support of traffic safety programming. It outlines the operational considerations and approaches important to both understanding network-based partnerships and improving their functionality. The chapter draws on conceptual and empirical studies of organizational networks in order to enhance the effectiveness of networks and integrate network-based approaches with the cultural orientation already present in traffic safety research and practice.

This chapter proceeds from the premise that, increasingly, efforts to impact traffic safety behaviors will be interconnected with other concerns, and that traffic safety initiatives will require engagement with organizations focused on concerns other than traffic safety. The implication of the ideas examined in this chapter is that traffic safety agencies will need to focus not just on traffic-related behaviors, but also on the strategic and operational coordination with other organizations. Doing so has the potential to create synergies that would be unachievable if agencies operation in isolation.

This paper provides a quantitative review of the literature on the repercussions of idiosyncratic information on firms’ cost of equity (CoE) capital. In total, I review the results of 113 unique studies examining the CoE effects of information Quantity, Precision and Asymmetry. My results suggest that the association between firm-specific information and CoE is subject to moderate effects. First, the link between Quantity and CoE is moderated by disclosure types and country-level factors in that firms in comparatively weakly regulated countries tend to enjoy up to four times greater CoE benefits from more expansive disclosure—depending on the type of disclosure—than firms in strongly regulated markets. Second, a negative relationship between Precision and CoE is only significant in studies using non-accrual quality proxies for Precision and risk factor-based (RFB)/valuation model-based (VMB) proxies for CoE. Third, almost all VMB studies confirm the positive association between Asymmetry and CoE, but there is notable variation in the conclusions reached when ex post CoE measurers are used.

García Lara et al. (2011) argue that there is a conservatism-related priced risk factor in US stock returns. To put this to the test, the authors aim to analyze whether the conditional conservatism effect comes from the loading on a conditional conservatism-related factor-mimicking portfolio (systematic risk) or the conservatism characteristic itself.

The authors form characteristic-balanced portfolios from dependent sorts of stocks on the firm’s degree of conservatism and the firm’s loading on the conservatism-related factor-mimicking portfolio as proposed by Daniel and Titman (1997) and Davis et al. (2000).

The tests indicate that it is the conditional conservatism characteristic rather than the factor loading that explains the cross-sectional differences in average stock returns. Consequently, they do not find evidence for a conservatism-related priced risk factor.

This finding suggests that investors misvalue the conservatism characteristic and casts doubt on the rational risk explanation as proposed by García Lara et al. (2011).

This paper aims to provide an overview of different issues related to jurisdictional arbitrage found in general regulatory arbitrage literature and their projection to the specific area of cryptoasset regulation.

By distinguishing any parallel, analogous and neighbouring concepts, this paper attempts to clarify the notion of jurisdictional arbitrage. By discussing certain aspects and effects of three regulatory regimes, BitLicense, 5th Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD5) and the European Commission’s Proposal for a Regulation on Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCa), it makes clear that national/State/regional policymakers have already failed to create arbitrage-proof regulatory frameworks by acting exclusively within their jurisdictional limits. Against this background, this paper discusses briefly regulatory competition and international harmonisation as alternative solutions to inappropriate and ineffective national/regional legislative approaches.

Based on a structured theoretical analysis, this paper reaches three important findings. First, academics, international bodies and other commentators use inaccurately the general concept of “regulatory arbitrage” to refer to the specific problem of jurisdictional arbitrage creating in this way an interpretative confusion; second, commentators confuse jurisdictional conflicts with jurisdictional arbitrage; third, the solutions to this regulatory problem can actually be found in its underlying causes.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first specific-issue paper on jurisdictional arbitrage in the context of cryptoasset regulation and aims to trigger further academic discussion on this evolving phenomenon and inform the development of future cryptoasset regulation combatting this problem.