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This paper aims to study the impact of geopolitical uncertainty on corporate cost of debt and the moderating role of information asymmetry between creditors and borrowing firms.

This study uses 5,223 firm-quarter observations on German-listed firms spanning 2010:Q1–2021:Q4. This study regresses the cost of debt financing on the geopolitical risk, accounting quality and other control variables. Information asymmetry is measured using the performance-matched Jones-model discretionary accrual and the stock bid-ask spread. It uses interaction terms to check if information asymmetry moderates the impact of geopolitical uncertainty on the cost of debts and control for the moderating role of business risk. For the sake of robustness check, it uses long-term cost of debt and bond spread as alternative dependent variables. In addition, this study executes instrumental variables regression and propension score matching to control for potential endogeneity problems.

Estimation results show that geopolitical uncertainty exerts a positive impact on the cost of debt. This impact is found to be more important on the cost of long-term debts. Information asymmetry is found to exacerbate the positive impact of geopolitical risk on the cost of debt. These results are robust to the change of the dependent variable and to the mitigation of potential endogeneity. At high levels of information asymmetry, this impact is more important for firms belonging to “Transportation”, “Automobiles and auto parts”, “Chemicals”, “Industrial and commercial services”, “Software and IT services” and “Industrial goods” business sectors.

Geopolitical uncertainty should be seriously considered when setting strategies for corporate financial management in Germany and similar economies that are directly exposed to geopolitical risks. Corporate managers should design a comprehensive set of corporate policies to improve their transparency and accountability during increasing uncertainty. Policymakers are required to implement innovative monetary and fiscal policies that take into consideration the heterogeneous impact of geopolitical uncertainty and information transparency in order to contain their incidence on German business sectors.

Despite its relevance to corporate financing conditions, little is known about the impact of geopolitical uncertainty on the cost of debt financing. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is still no empirical evidence on how information asymmetry between creditors and borrowing firms shapes the impact of geopolitical uncertainty on the cost of debt. This paper tries to fill this gap by interacting two measures of information asymmetry with geopolitical uncertainty. In contrast with previous studies, this study shows that the impact of geopolitical uncertainty on the cost of debt is non-linear and heterogeneous. The results show that the impact of geopolitical uncertainty does not exert the same impact on the cost of debt instruments with different maturities. This impact is found to be heterogeneous across business sectors and to depend on the level of information asymmetry.

The paper’s purpose is to consider, using a transaction cost economics (TCE) framework, the mechanisms used by space agencies to encourage private investment in the commercial spaceflight sector.

The authors conducted a content analysis of 554 pages of news articles, relating to issues pertaining to partnerships between national government-based space agencies and private space travel providers, published over a 20-year period. Leximancer was used to initially screen the data and then the authors manually analysed the content to identify themes.

The data analysis revealed three themes, relating to: the uncertainty of space travel; National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) stimulating innovation in the private sector; and risk, insurance and regulation. These themes informed by TCE reveal the “hierarchical” organisational forms used to achieve human spaceflight and then the “hybrids”, insurance and regulations used to stimulate private sector investment and innovation.

This paper contributes to the accounting literature by answering the calls of Alewine (2020) and Tucker and Alewine (2022a, b) for more research into accounting in the space context. Specifically, the paper contributes by identifying mechanisms used by NASA to stimulate private investment in the space travel sector, as well as issues that have affected the implementation of these mechanisms. The paper also contributes to the literature by, based on the analysis, identifying a series of reflections designed to stimulate further management accounting research in the space context.

This study examines the relationship between economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and managers' ex ante strategic choice on firms’ fixed and variable costs structure, i.e. cost rigidity and the moderating effect of government contracts and political connections.

Using a sample of 4,162 US firms during 2003–2019 and EPU measure from Baker et al. (2016), the authors examine the association between EPU and cost rigidity using multivariate regression analysis. The authors also examine the moderating effects of government customers and political connections using the subsampling method.

This study finds that increases in EPU leads to higher cost rigidity, suggesting that managers tend to look ahead and make an ex ante commitment to invest more in fixed costs to avoid congestion costs in anticipation of future product demand during EPU. The study also finds that the presence of government customers and political connections moderates the need for adopting greater cost rigidity.

This study measures firms' cost rigidity based on archival data. Future studies could utilize managers' cost structure choices using firms' internal management cost structure forecasts data to measure cost rigidity to examine the relationship between cost rigidity and EPU.

This study demonstrates that managers tend to make a proactive commitment to invest in fixed inputs when facing demand uncertainty from EPU to avoid congestion costs. This study also highlights the value of having government contracts and political connections by demonstrating that managers are less concerned about the congestion costs, hence weakening the impact of EPU on cost rigidity when they have government as major customers and/or political connections.

This study extends the management accounting literature by documenting that cost rigidity is related to EPU and that the relationship between cost rigidity and EPU also depends on whether the firm has government as major customers and/or political connections or not.

The increasing prevalence of a wide range of infectious diseases, as well as the underwhelming results of vaccination rates that may be traced back to problems with vaccine procurement and distribution, have brought to the fore the importance of vaccine supply chain (VSC) management in recent years. VSC is the cornerstone of effective vaccination; hence, it is crucial to enhance its performance, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where immunization rates are not satisfactory.

In this paper, the authors focus on VSC performance improvement of India by proposing supply contracts under demand uncertainty. The authors propose three contracts – wholesale price (WSP), cost sharing (CS) and incentive mechanism (IM) for the government-operated immunization program of India.

The authors' findings indicate that IM is capable of coordinating the supply chain, whereas the other two contracts are inefficient for the government. To validate the model, it is applied to a real-world scenario of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in India, and the findings show that an IM contract improves the overall efficiency of the system by 23.72%.

Previous studies focused mainly on the influenza VSC industry within developed nations. Nonetheless, there exists a dearth of literature pertaining to the examination of supply contracts and their feasibility for immunization programs that are administered by the government and aimed at optimizing societal benefits. The authors' findings can be beneficial to the immunization program of India to optimize their VSC cost.

This paper aims to determine new-normal uncertainty considerations stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic to consider within transaction-cost analysis for pharmaceuticals. It also aims to propose new-normal market entry strategies to address the uncertainty as a result of COVID-19's implications and provide for lack of knowledge and information in an uncertain business environment by way of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem for pharmaceutical market entry.

In this paper, we focus on the uncertainty facet within transaction-cost analysis consideration and utilise a descriptive three-case study approach taking in Johnson and Johnson (J&J), GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Novartis to present an ADO (Antecedent-Decisions-Outcomes) understanding of their usual market entry approach, the approach undertaken during the pandemic and the outcomes thereafter facilitating new-normal uncertainty considerations to factor in. Further with this insight, we develop a conceptual framework addressing the transaction-cost analysis implications of uncertainties toward lack of knowledge and information for a new-normal market entry approach and operating strategy for pharmaceuticals applicable due to IoT (Internet of Things).

Uncertainty (external and internal) is different now in the new-normal business environment for pharmaceuticals and boils down to acute shortage of knowledge and information impact to make an appropriately informed decision. Therefore, considering the changed factors to consider, pharmaceuticals need to be able to undertake market entry with vaccines and medicines by way of IoT thereby enabling, the filling of the gap via real-time data access and sharing, including enhancing predictive analysis for sustenance.

The paper's findings have many theoretical implications highlighted in the manuscript.

The paper's findings have many practical implications highlighted in the manuscript.

This is the first study to our knowledge that throws light on transaction-cost analysis theory's uncertainty facet for pharmaceuticals. It is also the first study that provides a new-normal market entry strategy for pharmaceutical companies built on interoperability of real-time IoT.

Uncertainty management (UM) in projects has been a point of attention for researchers for many years. Research on UM has mainly been aimed at uncertainty analyses in the front-end and managing uncertainty in the construction phase. In contrast, UM components in the design phase have received less attention. This research aims to improve knowledge about the key components of UM in the design phase of large road projects.

This study adopted a literature review and case study. The literature review was used to identify relevant criteria for UM. These criteria helped to design the interview guide. Multiple case study research was conducted, and data were collected through document study and interviews with project stakeholders in two road projects. Each case's owners, contractors and consultants were interviewed individually.

The data analysis obtained helpful information on the involved parties, process and exploit tools and techniques during the design phase. Johansen's (2015) framework [(a) human and organisation, (b) process and (c) tools and techniques)] was completed and developed by identifying relevant criteria (such as risk averse or risk-taker, culture and documentation level) for each component. These criteria help to measure UM performance. The authors found that owners and contractors are major formal UM actors, not consultants. Empirical data showed the effectiveness of Web-based tools in UM.

The studied cases were Norwegian, and this study focussed on uncertainties in the project's design phase. Relevant criteria did not cover all the criteria for evaluating the performance of UM. Qualitative evaluation of criteria allows further quantitative analysis in the future.

This paper gave project owners and managers a better understanding of relevant criteria for measuring UM in the owners and managers' projects. The paper provides policy-makers with a deeper understanding of creating rigorous project criteria for UM during the design phase. This paper also provides a guideline for UM in road projects.

This research gives a holistic evaluation of UM by noticing relevant criteria and criteria's interconnection in the design phase.

The present study aims to develop a risk-supported case-based reasoning (RS-CBR) approach for water-related projects by incorporating various uncertainties and risks in the revision step.

The cases were extracted by studying 68 water-related projects. This research employs earned value management (EVM) factors to consider time and cost features and economic, natural, technical, and project risks to account for uncertainties and supervised learning models to estimate cost overrun. Time-series algorithms were also used to predict construction cost indexes (CCI) and model improvements in future forecasts. Outliers were deleted by the pre-processing process. Next, datasets were split into testing and training sets, and algorithms were implemented. The accuracy of different models was measured with the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and the normalized root mean square error (NRSME) criteria.

The findings show an improvement in the accuracy of predictions using datasets that consider uncertainties, and ensemble algorithms such as Random Forest and AdaBoost had higher accuracy. Also, among the single algorithms, the support vector regressor (SVR) with the sigmoid kernel outperformed the others.

This research is the first attempt to develop a case-based reasoning model based on various risks and uncertainties. The developed model has provided an approving overlap with machine learning models to predict cost overruns. The model has been implemented in collected water-related projects and results have been reported.

Utilizing transaction cost economics (TCE) theory as the theoretical underpinning, this article aims to describe the costs of interpersonal helping and governing mechanisms that individuals may use to alleviate helping costs.

A theoretical analysis was performed by drawing upon TCE and related research.

Through the lens of TCE, the authors propose the following: First, as the costs of helping increase, interpersonal helping shifts from being triggered by an autonomous motivation to being regulated by contextual contingencies. Second, the helper is likely to utilize reciprocity to mitigate helping costs by acquiring specific assets possessed by the recipient when asset specificity is high. Third, the helper is likely to utilize organizationally sanctioned procedures and rules to mitigate helping costs by eliminating unwanted resource consumptions when outcome uncertainty is high. Finally, the helper is likely to utilize group norms to mitigate helping costs by involving others in helping or discouraging requests for recurrent help when the frequency of helping is high.

From a theoretical standpoint, this article complements previous research that focuses on the dark side of interpersonal helping. Practically, the authors offer several implications that help managers minimize the costs of helping in the organization.

The primary objective of this study is to explore consumers' non-adoption intentions towards meta-commerce (or metaverse retailing). Utilizing the Innovation Resistance Theory (IRT) as the theoretical foundation, this study investigates the impact of diverse barriers on non-adoption intentions within the meta-commerce context.

A total of 356 responses were gathered to test the proposed hypotheses. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) with SmartPLS 4 software was used to examine these hypotheses.

The findings of this study show that perceived cyber risk, perceived regulatory uncertainty, perceived switching cost and perceived technical uncertainty are significantly linked to non-adoption intention towards meta-commerce. Furthermore, the study suggests that the moderating influence of technostress on these connections is more pronounced for consumers with high technostress compared to those with low technostress.

This study makes a significant contribution to the current body of literature by providing valuable insights into the fundamental barriers that consumers encounter when contemplating the adoption of meta-commerce. This contribution is particularly noteworthy as it fills a gap in the existing literature, as no prior study has comprehensively examined the primary obstacles that shape consumer intentions towards meta-commerce adoption. This novel perspective offers scholars, businesses and policymakers a foundation for developing strategies to address these barriers effectively.

This research aims to examine the moderating role of the existence of risk management committee between risk-taking behavior and companies’ performance.

Research sample includes 383 manufacturing company-year that listed on the Indonesian Stock Exchange period of 2017–2020. The risk-taking behavior includes the use of leverage, capital intensity, research and development intensity, and earnings uncertainty. The hypothesis test uses company fixed-effect regression.

The result shows that risk management committee moderates the effect of risk-taking behavior on companies’ performance. This research also finds the similar result when risk management committee and risk-taking behavior are examined on the future performance. In the further analysis, the result also finds that the expertise of risk management committee moderates the effect of risk-taking behavior on companies’ performance.

This research contributes to fill the previous gap of risk-taking behavior and companies’ performance by considering the existence of risk management committee to promote oversight role on risk-taking behavior. This research also contributes to give new evidence in Indonesia about the role of risk management committee to improve the benefits or to reduce the costs of risk-taking behavior.