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The primary purpose of this exploratory paper is to propose a novel analytical framework for examining corruption from a behavioral perspective by highlighting multiple issues associated with consumerism.

This paper examines the relationship between excessive consumption activities and corrupt acts, drawing upon existing literature on corruption, consumerism and consumption, as well as multiple reports and cases of corruption and money laundering in Indonesia. With regard to corruption networks, this paper analyses the associated behavioral patterns and social dynamics by using the Fraud Triangle and the Fraud Elements Triangle frameworks to examine the phenomenon of living beyond one’s means. This paper also addresses the notion of sacredness in the context of consumer activities and how such sacredness plays a role in causing otherwise honest individuals to engage in corrupt acts.

The author established that corruption represents a complex societal issue that extends across several dimensions of society, encompassing both horizontal and vertical aspects. Consequently, addressing this problem poses significant challenges. Excessive consumption has been identified as one of the various behavioral concerns that are implicated in the widespread occurrence of corruption in many nations. Individuals who partake in excessive consumption play a role in shaping ethical norms that serve to legitimize and rationalize immoral behavior, therefore fostering a society marked by corruption. The act of engaging in excessive consumption is also associated with cases of money laundering offenses that are connected to corruption and several other illicit activities. The lifestyle of corrupt individuals is one of the primary behavioral concerns associated with corruption, as “living beyond means” is the most common behavioral red flag among occupational fraud offenders worldwide. The phenomenon of consumerism may also shape the minds of individuals as if it were an “implicit religion” due to the fact that it may generate human experiences that elicit highly positive emotions and satisfy certain sacredness-associated characteristics. The pursuit of transcendental experiences through the acquisition and consumption of sacred consumption objects may heighten the incentive to commit fraudulent acts such as corruption.

This self-funded exploratory study uses document analysis to examine the corruption phenomenon in Indonesia. Future studies will benefit from in-depth interviews with former offenders and investigators of corruption.

This exploratory study contributes to advancing corruption prevention strategies. It does this by introducing a novel analytical framework that allows for the examination of several behavioral issues associated with consumerism, which have the potential to foster the proliferation of corruption.

This exploratory study highlights the importance of comprehending the intricacies of consumerism, namely, its adverse effects on the proliferation of corruption.

Institutional trust is vital for social and economic activity and crucial in reducing uncertainty for entrepreneurs and society. To shed light on the role of institutional trust on productive entrepreneurial activity, this paper analyses the impact of six urban entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) using the contexts of the transition economies of Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia. This study aims to pursue the research question: what role does institutional trust play in the relationship between formal institutions and productive entrepreneurship in the EEs of transition economies? This paper aims to posit that the development and enforcement of formal institutions and institutional trust enhance productive entrepreneurship.

In this study, the authors apply a mixed-method approach. The authors’ dataset includes 657 respondents (ecosystem stakeholders) from six city-level entrepreneurial ecosystems in the transition economies of Georgia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, as well as 51 semi-structured interviews from EE representative stakeholders to examine the validity of the findings.

Institutional trust in many cities has been negatively affected by institutionalised corruption and continuous non-transparent reforms, furthering prior research in developing and transition economies. The authors’ findings suggest that institutional trust can be investigated not as a country phenomenon but as a regional phenomenon extending prior research towards understanding the institutional trust – productive entrepreneurship research domain at the city EE level.

The authors apply the institutional trust perspective to the EEs in cities in order to examine how institutional trust affects productive entrepreneurship in challenging institutional environments. The authors contribute to the literature on institutions and entrepreneurship by using a mixed-method analysis to examine the relationship between formal institutions and institutional trust in the context of EEs in transition economies.

This study aims to examine the determinants of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) violations and consequences of FCPA enforcements.

This paper uses publicly available data from Compustat, I/B/E/S and Thomson Reuters databases, combined with Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) cases, to extract insights on FCPA violations and enforcements using econometric approaches.

The main determinants of FCPA violations appear to be firm size, multinational structure, country corruption and Sarbanes-Oxley Act control weaknesses. Traditional misreporting risks (F-score and M-score) do not predict FCPA violations. This study discovers significant differences between FCPA violations by motivation, as in, sale generation, rent extraction or cost evasion. Bribes motivated by sale generation or rent extraction are partially driven by the extent of the firm’s global operations, whereas bribes motivated by cost evasion relate to internal influences. This study also finds that enforcement is more salient for criminal violations (DOJ enforcement), compared to civil violations (SEC enforcement).

This research provides new insights into the determinants of FCPA violations while underscoring the need for effective measures to combat bribery and promote ethical business practices. This research contributes to the ongoing efforts to curtail bribery, offering valuable insights into the characteristics of firms more likely to engage in bribery and contexts in which these activities occur. It provides critical implications for regulatory bodies, highlighting the differential responses of firms to varying types of enforcement, namely, criminal versus civil, as the authors observe greater decreases in internal control weaknesses following DOJ enforcement compared to SEC enforcement.

For enforcement agencies, the findings underscore the importance of rigorous criminal enforcement against FCPA violations, highlighting the improved control environments prompted by DOJ actions. Managers will find this research relevant, as it demonstrates that a firm’s entry into international markets substantially elevates the risk of its representatives engaging in bribery with foreign officials. In addition, the results are of interest to regulators, revealing that the underlying motivations driving a firm’s activities can significantly alter the factors to consider that might lead to an FCPA violation.

This paper is the original work of the authors and explores the determinants and consequences of FCPA violations and enforcement actions since 2002. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first to explore bribe determinants by their motive and documents industry-wide benefits arising from criminal enforcement.

This study aims to build on the well-documented case of the Olympus scandal to dissect how social networks and corporate culture enabled corporate elites to commit fraud across multiple generations of leaders.

A flexible pattern matching approach was used to identify matches and mismatches between behavioural theory in corporate governance and the patterns observed in data from diverse sources.

The study applies the behavioural theory of corporate governance from different perspectives. Social networks and relationships were essential for the execution of the fraud and keeping it secret. The group of corporate elites actively created opportunities for committing misappropriation. This research presents individuals committing embezzlement because the opportunity already exists, and they can enrich themselves. The group of insiders who committed the fraud elaborated the rationalizations to others and asked outside associates to help rationalise the activities, while usually individuals provide rationalizations to themselves only.

The social processes among actors described in this case can inform the design of mechanisms to detect these behaviours in similar contexts.

This study provides both perspectives on the fraud scandal: the one of the whistle-blowers, and the opposing side of the transgressors and their associates. The extant case studies on Olympus presented the timeframe of the scandal right after the exposure. The current study dissects the events during the fraud execution and presents the case in a neutral or a negative light.

This study aims to observe people’s decisions to commit fraud. This study is important in the current time because it provides insights into the development of fraudulent intentions within individuals.

The information used in this study is derived from semi-structured interviews, conducted with 16 high-ranking officials who are employed in Indonesian local government positions.

The study does not have strong evidence to support prior studies assuming that situational factors or social enablers have direct effects on fraud intentions. As suggested, individual factors which are related to moral reasoning (moral judgment and rationalisation) emerge as a consequence of social enablers. The significant role of that moral reasoning is to rationalise any fraud attempt as permissible conduct. As such, when an individual is capable of legitimising his/her fraud attempt into appropriate self-judgement, s/he is more likely to engage in fraudulent behaviours.

This study offers practical prescriptions in guiding the management to develop strategies to curb fraudulent behaviours. The study suggests that moral cognitive reasoning is found to be a parameter of whether fraud is an acceptable option or not. So, an understanding of observers’ moral reasoning is helpful in predicting the likelihood of fraud within an organisation or in detecting it.

This study provides a different perspective on the psychological pathway to fraud. It becomes a complement work for the fraud triangle to explain fraudulent behaviours. Specifically, it provides crucial insights into the underlying motivations that lead individuals to accept invitations to engage in fraudulent activities.

This study aims to minimize the cost and time of blood delivery in the whole blood supply chain network (BSCN) in disaster conditions. In other words, integrating all strategic, tactical and operational decisions of three levels of blood collection, processing and distribution leads to satisfying the demand at the right time.

This paper proposes an integrated BSCN in disaster conditions to consider four categories of facilities, including temporary blood collection centers, field hospitals, main blood processing centers and medical centers, to optimize demand response time appropriately. The proposed model applies the location of all permanent and emergency facilities in three levels: blood collection, processing and distribution. Other essential decisions, including multipurpose facilities, emergency transportation, inventory and allocation, were also used in the model. The LP metric method is applied to solve the proposed bi-objective mathematical model for the BSCN.

The findings show that this model clarifies its efficiency in the total cost and blood delivery time reduction, which results in a low carbon transmission of the blood supply chain.

The researchers proposed an integrated BSCN in disaster conditions to minimize the cost and time of blood delivery. They considered multipurpose capabilities for facilities (e.g. field hospitals are responsible for the three purposes of blood collection, processing and distribution), and so locating permanent and emergency facilities at three levels of blood collection, processing and distribution, support facilities, emergency transportation and traffic on the route with pollution were used to present a new model.

Illicit financial flows are targeted by the United Nations’ (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs). However, these illicit flows are not entirely understood. Furthermore, they can benefit from economic norms, laws and regulations that lack mechanisms to detect and penalize them. This paper aims to investigate whether a recent test, the embezzler test, can be used to identify regulatory architectures that facilitate illicit financial flows and related financial crimes.

This paper develops a more advanced version of the embezzler test in terms of definitions and practical implementation methodology.

In this test, the definition of embezzlement can be understood to be the occurrence of illicit financial flows crossing the boundaries of organizations and/or countries. This is a multistage test, which intentionally simulates illicit financial flows to observe how well equipped is the regulatory architecture to deal with other financial offences that are related with these flows, such as theft, money laundering, fraud, corruption, market manipulation and tax evasion.

Future research can use the version of this test to stress test a large range of economic norms, laws and regulations.

This test’s new version can assist achieve the UN SDGs’ illicit financial flow reduction target. Furthermore, it can be used to study both existing and proposed norms, laws and regulation.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first explicit test that has been presented to identify norms, laws and regulations that facilitate illicit financial flows and related financial crimes.

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 explores the relationship between economic freedom and gender ideologies on the allocation of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries. Opportunity entrepreneurship is typically understood as one’s best option for work, whereas necessity entrepreneurship describes the choice as driven by no better option for work. Specifically, we examine how economic freedom (i.e. each country’s policies that facilitate voluntary exchange) and gender ideologies (i.e. each country’s propensity for gendered separate spheres) affect the distribution of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries.

We construct our sample by matching data from the following country-level sources: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s Adult Population Survey (APS), the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index (EFI), the European/World Value Survey’s Integrated Values Survey (IVS) gender equality index, and other covariates from the IVS, Varieties of Democracy (V-dem) World Bank (WB) databases. Our final sample consists of 729 observations from 109 countries between 2006 and 2018. Entrepreneurial activity motivations are measured by the ratio of the percentage of women’s opportunity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship to the percentage of female necessity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship at the country level. Due to a first-order autoregressive process and heteroskedastic cross-sectional dependence in our panel, we estimate a fixed-effect regression with robust standard errors clustered by country.

After controlling for multiple macro-level factors, we find two interesting findings. First, economic freedom positively affects the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship. We find that the size of government, sound money, and business and credit regulations play the most important role in shaping the distribution of contextual motivations over time and between countries. However, this effect appears to benefit efficiency and innovation economies more than factor economies in our sub-sample analysis. Second, gender ideologies of political equality positively affect the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship, and this effect is most pronounced for efficiency economies.

This study offers one critical contribution to the entrepreneurship literature by demonstrating how economic freedom and gender ideologies shape the distribution of contextual motivation for women’s entrepreneurship cross-culturally. We answer calls to better understand the variation within women’s entrepreneurship instead of comparing women’s and men’s entrepreneurial activity. As a result, our study sheds light on how structural aspects of societies shape the allocation of women’s entrepreneurial motivations through their institutional arrangements.

This paper aims to offer the first known synthesis of peer-reviewed literature on trade-based money laundering (TBML). Given the topic is in its nascent stage yet gaining prominence across scholarship and practice, this foundation is pertinent for future TBML research.

A systematic literature review was undertaken with a formulaic search string. Both qualitative (thematic) and quantitative (meta) analysis methods were used to illustrate the findings.

The systematic literature review, using qualitative and quantitative synthesis, led to a thematic categorization of extant TBML literature into four categories: TBML risk assessment, TBML detection, the role of professionals and understanding of TBML. Due to the limited number of studies, insights that can be drawn from the extant literature on the best way to combat TBML are also limited.

As the first systematic literature review on TBML, this study identified that the existing TBML literature has focused on increasing the understanding of the phenomenon in terms of its definition and mechanisms, detection, linkage with other crimes, such as organized crime and terrorism financing, and risk assessment frameworks. The originality of these findings lies in identifying areas future researchers might explore to broaden the academic literature.