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The purpose of this study is to examine the moderating effect of an exogenous corporate governance shock that curbs Chief Executive Officers’ (CEOs) power on the relationship between CEO narcissism and earnings management practices.

The authors performed a quasi-experiment using a differences-in-differences approach to examine Brazil’s duality split regulatory change on 101 Brazilian public firms during the period 2010–2022.

The main findings indicate that the introduction of duality split curtails the positive influence of CEO narcissism on earnings management, suggesting that this corporate governance regulation may act as a complementary corporate governance mechanism in mitigating the negative consequences of powerful narcissistic CEOs. Further robustness checks indicate that the results remain consistent after using entropy balancing and alternative measures of CEO narcissism.

In emerging markets, where governance systems are frequently perceived as less than optimal, policymakers and regulatory authorities can draw insights from this enforcement to shape governance systems, reducing CEO power and, consequently, improving the quality of financial reporting.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine whether a duality split mitigates the influence of CEO narcissism on earnings management. Thus, this study contributes to the corporate governance literature that calls for research on the effectiveness of external corporate governance mechanisms in emerging markets as well as the CEO narcissism literature that calls for research on moderating factors that could curtail negative consequences of narcissistic CEO behavior.

This study aims to develop a comprehensive insolvency model tailored to Islamic banks, ensuring alignment with Shariah principles throughout pre-insolvency, bankruptcy and post-bankruptcy stages.

The research adopts a qualitative research method, using a desktop research approach. Primary sources and secondary sources are examined to gather information and draw conclusions.

This study presents a comprehensive insolvency model designed for Islamic banks, rooted in Shariah principles. The model covers pre-insolvency, bankruptcy (taflis) and post-bankruptcy stages, incorporating key Shariah parameters to ensure adherence to Islamic finance principles. It addresses challenges such as adapting to dynamic financial landscapes and varying interpretations of Shariah principles. Notably, the model recognizes the separate legal personality of Islamic banks and emphasizes transparency, fairness and compliance with religious obligations. In the post-bankruptcy stage, directors are urged to voluntarily settle remaining debts, aligning with ethical and Shariah-compliant standards.

The study contributes to the stability and growth of Shariah-compliant financial systems by extending insolvency principles to Islamic banks, providing a foundation for future research and policymaking specific to this context.

Taking advantage of a unique measure of corporate culture obtained from advanced machine learning algorithms, this study aims to explore how corporate culture strength is influenced by board independence, which is one of the most crucial aspects of the board of directors. Because of their independence from the corporation, outside independent directors are more likely to be unbiased. As a result, board independence is commonly used as a proxy for board quality.

In addition to the standard regression analysis, the authors execute a variety of additional tests, i.e. propensity score matching, an instrumental variable analysis, Lewbel’s (2012) heteroscedastic identification and Oster’s (2019) testing for coefficient stability.

The results show that stronger board independence, measured by a higher proportion of independent directors, is significantly associated with corporate culture. In particular, a rise in board independence by one standard deviation results in an improvement in corporate culture by 32.8%.

Conducting empirical research on corporate culture is incredibly difficult due to the inherent difficulties in recognizing and assessing corporate culture, resulting in a lack of empirical research on corporate culture in the literature. The authors fill this important void in the literature. Exploiting a novel measure of corporate culture based on textual analysis, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to link corporate culture to corporate governance with a specific focus on board independence.

With the growing concern of various sectors of society regarding environmental issues and the promotion of sustainable development, green technology innovation is generally considered to be conducive to the long-term development of enterprises. However, because of the existence of agency problems, managers may have shortsighted behaviors. Then how will managers' shortsighted behaviors affect enterprises' green technology innovation?

This paper uses machine learning-based text analysis methods to construct a manager myopia index based on the data from A-share listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2015 to 2020. We examine the impact of manager myopia on green technology innovation in companies.

Our study finds that manager myopia significantly inhibits green technology innovation in companies. However, when multiple large shareholders coexist and the proportion of institutional investors' holdings is high, it can alleviate the inhibitory effect of manager myopia on green innovation. Heterogeneity tests show that the impact of manager myopia on green technology innovation is relatively significant in non-state-owned and manufacturing companies, as well as in the electricity industry. Robustness tests demonstrate that our conclusions remain valid after using propensity score matching to eliminate endogeneity problems.

From the perspective of corporate governance, this paper incorporates managers' shortsightedness, multiple large shareholders and institutional investors' shareholding ratios into the same logical framework, analyzes their internal mechanisms, helps improve corporate governance, enhances green innovation capabilities and has strong implications for the implementation of national innovation-driven development strategies and the achievement of “carbon peak” and “carbon neutrality” targets.

This study aims to investigate the effect of the virtual spokesperson type on the consumers' preference for new products. To meet the consumer needs of Generation Z, virtual spokespeople have become new assistants in brand marketing. However, how virtual spokespersons drive consumer preference for new products is minimally understood.

This research conducts three experiments to investigate the influence of virtual spokesperson type on consumers' preference for new products.

The research shows that, for radically new products, competent virtual spokespersons improve consumers' perception of self-efficacy and thus consumers' preference; for incrementally new products, warm virtual spokespersons improve consumers' perception of social connection and thus consumers' willingness to buy.

This study broadens research on brand spokespersons and virtual spokespersons. This research also enriches and expands research on the consideration of new product types in brand spokespersons.

This paper aims to examine the extent to which these reforms address the limitations of Saudi Arabia’s previous investment framework. Long viewed as a hostile environment in which to do business, the Saudi Government has enacted a broad sweep of measures aimed at restoring investor confidence in central aspects of the country’s evolving private law framework.

This paper offers a timely assessment of the raft of foreign investment reforms, both legislative and regulatory, that have been introduced in Saudi Arabia over the last decade.

The paper will proceed by outlining the perceived failings of the old investment regime before going on to reforms.

It will consider the remaining obstacles to the flow of foreign investment in Saudi Arabia in the context of the dual forces that have historically defined the Kingdom’s ambivalent investment law regime.

This study aims to analyze the relationships between cultural orientation and normative knowledge, in a direct and moderate way, on the whistleblowing intentions of accountants from Hispanic American countries.

This study used responses from a sample of 410 accountants, preparers and auditors of financial statements from Hispanic American countries. Descriptive statistics, nonparametric tests and structural equations with partial least squares algorithm were applied for data analysis.

The results emphasized the cultural positioning of horizontality, in which an individual perceives themselves as equals to their colleagues, allowing discussions on various aspects of individual behavior. The knowledge variable is proved to be important in explaining the intention to report and can also moderate the influence of cultural variables on intentions.

These findings contribute to the literature by offering a clearer definition the normative knowledge variable, and to organizations, which can explore the research’s evidence to improve their training and qualification programs, thereby generating significant knowledge for their employees.

Whistleblowing is the main tool for identifying organizational frauds, but it is differently perceived in several cultural contexts. The results demonstrated the ethical cultural positioning of these Hispanic American professionals in relation to cultural aspects of other countries. Some studies highlight knowledge as a relevant factor in the organizational environment, but this study innovates by testing and demonstrating its impact on whistleblowing and culture.

This study aims to explore the relationship between the degree of state-owned enterprises’ (SOEs) mixed reform and the environmental response of enterprises, against the background of actively promoting the reform of mixed ownership in China.

The study is conducted on a sample of A-share listed manufacturing companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen of China, investigated for the period 2015 to 2020. The baseline regression results are robust to a series of robustness and endogeneity tests. To deal with the issue of endogeneity, the technique of instrumental variable method has been applied.

The study confirms the U-shaped effect of the depth and restriction of mixed ownership on SOEs’ environmentally responsive behaviour in the manufacturing industry, especially for lower environmental regulation and higher level of risk-taking firms. The findings indicate that the government, shareholders and other stakeholders of enterprises should not simply consider that the mixed reform is directly promoting or reducing the environmental response behaviour of enterprises.

SOEs should improve their shareholding structures to undermine performance enhancement at the expense of the environment and increase environmentally beneficial behaviours. Regulators and governments should improve the institutional mechanism of environmental regulation and make efforts to promote corporate awareness of the environment.

Although the adoption and implementation of environmentally friendly policies are costly, improved environmental response and other social responsibilities are helpful to corporate long-term growth and reputation and obtain more capital market attention. Therefore, firms would benefit from improving their environmental response to protect nature, as well as to enjoy the economic and social benefits of a better environmental response.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is a lack of studies focussing on the environmental behaviour of SOEs of mixed reform. As the mixed reform in China has come to a climax phase in recent several years, SOEs of mixed reform is an ideal environment for research. The study focusses on manufacturing firms as these firms are more susceptible to contribute to environmental pollution, exploitation of natural resources and labour concerns.

The purpose of our study is to study the impact of chief executive officer (CEO) optimism and narcissism on the company's capital structure.

(1) The authors opt for regression, machine learning and text analysis to explore the impact of narcissism and optimism on the capital structure. (2) We analyze CEO interviews and employ three methods to evaluate narcissism: the dictionary proposed by Anglin, which enabled us to assess the following components: authority, superiority, vanity and exhibitionism; count of first-person singular and plural pronouns and count of CEO photos displayed. Following this approach, we were able to make a more thorough assessment of corporate narcissism. (3) Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) technique helped to find the differences in the corporate rhetoric of narcissistic and non-narcissistic CEOs and to find differences between the topics of interviews and letters provided by narcissistic and non-narcissistic CEOs.

Our research demonstrates that narcissism has a slight and nonlinear impact on capital structure. However, our findings suggest that there is an impact of pessimism and uncertainty under pandemic conditions when managers predicted doom and completely changed their strategies. We applied various approaches to estimate the gender distribution of CEOs and found that the median values of optimism and narcissism do not depend on sex. Using LDA, we examined the content and key topics of CEO interviews, defined as positive and negative. There are some differences in the topics: narcissistic CEOs are more likely to speak about long-term goals, projects and problems; they often talk about their brand and business processes.

First, we examine the COVID-19 pandemic period and evaluate how CEO optimism and pessimism affect their financial decisions under specific external conditions. The pandemic forced companies to shift the way they worked: either to switch to the remote work model or to interrupt operations; to lose or, on the contrary, attract clients. In addition, during this period, corporate management can have a different outlook on their company’s financial performance and goals. The LDA technique helped to find the differences in the corporate rhetoric of narcissistic and non-narcissistic CEOs. Second, we use three methods to evaluate narcissism. Third, the research is based on a set of advanced methods: machine learning techniques (random forest to reveal a nonlinear impact of CEO optimism and narcissism on capital structure).

Previous studies have shown how the nature of businesses and the strategies pursued by their owners are affected by the personality traits of their owners. These personality traits can be formed in the early stages of life due to experiences and the surrounding context, where religion is a particularly important aspect of this context. This study aims to explore how religion affects entrepreneurial activities through the personality traits created.

This study uses interviews with 43 Muslim entrepreneurs in Scotland to examine the role played by religion. This ensures that the national institutional context is kept consistent but also allows an in-depth examination of relationships, which are likely to be interlinked and recursive.

The traits created influence the nature of the entrepreneurial activities undertaken with the potential to harm and support the entrepreneurial endeavours. It is the combination of personality traits that are formed which have the greatest effect. As such, it is found that Muslim entrepreneurs display less openness and creativity associated with new ideas, but this does not reflect risk aversion rather hard work in itself is valued, and patience combined with an external locus of control mean entrepreneurial behaviours are not altered to boost poorly performing business activities.

For Muslim entrepreneurs in Scotland, their traits explain why growth may not be a foremost consideration of these entrepreneurs rather they may value hard work and meeting the ideals of formal and informal institutions associated with religion. For those seeking to support minority groups through the promotion of entrepreneurship, either they must seek to overcome these ingrained traits or alter support to complement the different objectives held by Muslim entrepreneurs.