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This chapter uses panel data techniques to analyze the impact of corporate governance and competition on performance of the firms operating in Muslim and non-Muslim economies. Also analyzed the corporate data of 3,158 firms operating in five non-Muslim economies and 1,785 firms operating in five Muslim economies. It is observed from the results that most of the firm-level variables have similar behavior with firm performance irrespective of ownership structure. It is also found that direct majority-owned firms are more profitable as compared to independent firms irrespective of the operating region. Further, it is also observed that operating environment, specifically governance system, has significant impacts on firm performance.

This article investigates the role of the state auditor in Alberta. An analysis of the Office of the Auditor General of Alberta’s annual reports shows that the role of the Office has significantly changed to promote and encourage the implementation in the public sector of a particular type of accountability informed by new public management. The authors argue that the Office has increased its power to influence politicians and public servants about the merits of its specific understanding of what accountability should be. However, as the Office becomes more powerful, it also becomes more vulnerable to complaints about a lack of independence from the executive. Indeed, the Office is now so closely associated with new public management that we believe that it is difficult for the Office to sustain the claim that it is able to provide independent assessments of public‐sector administration.

During the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic lockdowns, stay at home or work from home, many have argued that the westernised non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) do not provide remedial in low-income countries like Nigeria, where informal job seekers, street traders, informal labourers and artisans depend mainly on the informal economy. By applying social solidarity (SS) and community-based approach (CBA), the authors evaluate individual acts (trust, altruism and reciprocity) during the lockdown and how these practices evolve from individual approaches to collective actions.

This study reflects on pragmatism research paradigm that enables researchers to maintain both subjectivity in their reflections and objectivity in data collection and analysis. The authors adopt a qualitative method through purposeful and convenience sampling procedure. Data were analysed thematically to identify elements of SS, individual acts, collective or community actions and perceptions.

The findings reveal that COVID-19 had a disproportionate impact (lack of food and a fall in daily income) on workers, informal job seekers, informal businesses operators and the poor households. As such, the study developed a reflective model of solidarity exhibited by individual acts and collective acts (practices of resource pooling, information sharing, women empowerment, distribution of palliatives and donations) within trusted circles that helped people cope with the lockdown experiences.

Solidarity represents beliefs, practices of values and norms. The SS exhibited by people through NPI would have implications on planning and monitoring the effectiveness of public health programmes during a pandemic in the future.

The findings of citizens and community actions have implications related to the process of building communities – coming together – and solidarity that enhances social development with implications on community health policy agenda during disasters, emergencies and health pandemic.

This is one of the first studies to analyse the relationship between trust, altruism, reciprocity, SS and CBA during the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, it seems reasonable to clarify the concept of SS given the lack of clarity about the definitions from previous studies.

Nucleic acid testing is an effective method of accurate prevention and control and a key measure to block the spread of the epidemic. However, the fraud in nucleic acid testing occurred frequently during epidemics. This paper aims to provide a viable scheme for the government to strengthen the supervision of nucleic acid testing and to provide a new condition for the punishment for the negative act of the government and the upper limit of the reward for nucleic acid testing institution of no data fraud.

This paper formulates an evolutionary game model between the government and nucleic acid testing institution under four different mechanisms of reward and punishment to solve the issue of nucleic acid testing supervision. The authors discuss the stability of equilibrium points under the four distinct strategies and conduct simulation experiments.

The authors find that the strategy of dynamic reward and static penalty outperforms the strategies of static reward and static penalty, dynamic reward and static penalty, static reward and dynamic penalty, dynamic reward and dynamic penalty. The results reveal the appropriate punishment for the negative act of the government can enhance the positivity of the government's supervision in the strategy of dynamic reward and static penalty, while the upper limit of the reward for nucleic acid testing institution of no data fraud cannot be too high. Otherwise, it will backfire. Another interesting and counterintuitive result is that in the strategy of dynamic reward and dynamic penalty, the upper limit of the penalty for data fraud of nucleic acid testing institution cannot be augmented recklessly. Otherwise, it will diminish the government's positivity for supervision.

Most of the existing evolutionary game researches related to the reward and punishment mechanism and data fraud merely highlight that increasing the intensity of reward and punishment can help improve the government's supervision initiative and can minimize data fraud of nucleic acid institution, but they fall short of the boundary conditions for the punishment and reward mechanism. Previous literature only study the supervision of nucleic acid testing qualitatively and lacks quantitative research. Moreover, they do not depict the problem scenario of testing data fraud of nucleic acid institution regulated by the government via the evolutionary game model. Thus, this study effectively bridges these gaps. This research is universal and can be extended to other industries.

Local landfills in communities across the US are the battlegrounds in the conflict between our desire to consume goods at an extraordinary rate and our inability to deal with waste that is a by-product of this consumption. Despite efforts to reduce the amount of wastes generated through source reduction, in 2003, US residences, businesses, and institutions produced more than 236 million tons of municipal solid waste (trash and garbage), approximately 4.5 pounds of waste per person per day (EPA, 2003a). Also in 2003, 16,694 generators of regulated hazardous waste accounted for more than 30 million tons of hazardous wastes, more than half a pound of hazardous wastes per person per day (EPA, 2003b).

The substantial cost of employee cyberloafing to organizations calls for research into exploring the factors that influence such behavior. Drawing upon social cognitive theory, the authors develop a theoretical model that unpacks when and why leader forgiveness induces employee cyberloafing. Specifically, the authors identify moral disengagement as a linking mechanism and employee empathic concern as a key boundary condition in the association between leader forgiveness and employee cyberloafing behaviors.

The authors conducted multilevel analyses to examine the authors' hypotheses by utilizing a sample of 71 supervisors and 306 direct reports.

Results showed that leader forgiveness encouraged employee cyberloafing via moral disengagement among employees with low empathic concern, whereas the indirect effect was not present among those with high empathic concern.

The authors contribute to the literature on cyberloafing and leader forgiveness. First, this study extends the cyberloafing research by considering leader forgiveness as an enabler, challenging the dominant notion that positive leader behaviors (e.g. leader mindfulness) constrain employee cyberloafing while negative leader behaviors (e.g. abusive supervision) elicit it. Second, although past studies have predominantly concentrated on the positive outcomes of forgiveness, the current research contributes to the balanced and comprehensive understanding of leader forgiveness by linking leader forgiveness with employee cyberloafing.

This study examines how bilateral international trade among mandatory International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adopter countries moderates the relation between IFRS adoption and firms’ financial reporting quality.

The authors use data from 2007 to 2015 and focus on publicly listed firms from non-European Union countries that adopted IFRS on a mandatory basis.

The authors find that the interaction between mandatory IFRS adoption and a country’s bilateral trade with other countries using IFRS is negatively and significantly related to accruals-based earnings management, which is an inverse measure of financial reporting quality. This result is driven by firms in less developed countries. The improvement in accounting quality is for firms located in countries that both fully and partially adopt IFRS. The authors also find a significant and negative coefficient for the relation between real earnings management and the interaction between mandatory IFRS adoption and a country’s bilateral trade with other IFRS countries in the post-global financial crisis period.

Overall, the authors’ results are consistent with the notion that the mandatory adoption of IFRS creates a positive externality where firms improve their accounting quality because increased financial statement comparability means that foreign customers and suppliers can monitor the quality of earnings more easily.