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This study aims to explore the structural changes in food consumption expenditure in Indonesia before and during the COVID-19 pandemic using data from the 2020 and 2021 National Socioeconomic Survey by Statistics Indonesia.

The quadratic almost-ideal demand system analysis model is used to estimate changes in the share of food consumption and the demand and price elasticity of food commodities in Indonesia. A total of 15 food items are analyzed to determine changes in food consumption expenditure during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The results of this study show that during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an increase in the proportion of household expenditure related to the consumption of home-cooked food. Simultaneously, the proportion of expenditure on prepared food significantly decreased.

The pandemic has changed household food consumption in Indonesia. This study recommends that the government ensure the availability of supplies and stability of food prices and provide financial subsidies to maintain food consumption, especially for lower-income communities.

There has yet to be a study on the changes in household food consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia. Therefore, this research provides empirical evidence that there were changes in household food expenditure during the pandemic.

The aim of this study is to analyze which socioeconomic factors (economic, demographic, and political) most commonly affect the social expenditure of the European Union (EU) and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

A panel data fixed-effects model is employed for 34 OECD and 23 EU countries between 2000 and 2020.

Results indicate that, in all country groups, economic factors have the most significant influence on social expenditures, with income being the primary determinant, particularly in EU countries. The negative impacts of unemployment and inflation underscore the importance of counter-cyclical measures adopted by countries to maintain stability in their social expenditures. The most influential demographic factor is found as the old-age-dependency ratio. While the rule of law affects social expenditure positively, government effectiveness and female labor force participation affect it negatively. The positive effect of Konjunkturforschungsstelle (KOF) indexes shows the globalization effect, which can be attributable to the compensation hypothesis.

Governments enforce inclusive and sustainable policies to boost economic activities and GDP, thus combating inflation and unemployment and regulating the labor market and socioeconomic problems about aging populations and women’s economic participation to control social expenditures. The rule of law and institutional quality will also boost economic growth.

This study focuses on the effects of social expenditures in a broader view within the framework of the three main factors (economic, demographic, political) and attempts to determine the key factors that account for the differences in social expenditure between the OECD and EU countries.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-05-2023-0384

This study aims to investigate the relationship between financial inclusion and household expenditure behaviour among Ghanaian households, by taking into account both formal and informal financial inclusion channels.

Propensity score matching as well as instrumental variable techniques are applied to data from the Ghana Living Standard Survey to investigate the effect of financial inclusion on the share of total expenditure devoted to different categories, including food, health, education, housing, durables, temptation goods and other goods.

Informal financial inclusion seems to have no substantial effect on households’ consumption behaviour, whereas formal financial inclusion significantly affects it. The study finds that formal financial inclusion is inversely related to the budget share devoted to short-term expenditure (food, temptation goods and other goods such as transport and recreation). Conversely, financially included households spend more on long-term expenditure such as education, housing and consumer durables, thus, suggesting a diversion effect towards investment in long-term physical and human capital.

The investigation of the heterogeneous impact across households (male vs female headed, rural vs urban) has essential policy implications on how financial inclusion can be improved among the disadvantaged groups, and with what effects.

The study focuses on the importance of financial inclusion in Ghana, considering both formal and informal financial inclusion channels. Previous studies only examined the overall effects on household welfare, overlooking the impact on household expenditure composition and consumption shares. The analysis also considers the heterogeneous impact of financial inclusion on households based on the gender of the household head and the location where households reside (rural, urban).

This paper aims to examine the direct impacts of marketing resources and marketing activities on several business performance indicators in the banking industry and the indirect effects through customer-based brand equity.

We use a holistic empirical approach based on resource-based view and marketing productivity chain. The main study consists of a secondary analysis using quarterly data of fourteen banks over four years. We analyze the data using fixed-effect panel data regression, namely seemingly unrelated regressions.

We find that customer-based brand equity is one of the most influential factors on business performance. Moreover, the indirect effect through customer-based brand equity should be considered in improving business performance. Marketing-related financial resources positively impact customer-based brand equity and business performance. Regarding marketing activities, pricing strategies affect the bank preferences of customers, which in turn affect the growth of deposit volumes and churn rates. Additionally, the number of bank branches positively impacts business performance. Advertising spending on different media has differentiated impacts on the performance indicators; thus, the allocation of advertising budget and advertising planning are critical.

This study examines the inter-relationships among marketing resources, marketing activities, consumer response through brand equity and marketing performance. This study contributes to the literature by integrating the resource-based view and the marketing productivity chain to analyze the inter-relationships using panel data and several sector-related metrics. This study provides valuable insights to decision-makers in the banking industry.

This article aims to evaluate the informativeness of accruals on stock prices. Investors may misinterpret the information contained in accruals and produce accrual anomalies. Accruals accounting improves the quality of financial statements by providing useful information, although it also contains judgments and is less objective than operating cash-flows.

We employ data panel regression analysis to investigate the value relevance of financial information. Our study takes the object of companies listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange (NASDAQ) as the representative of the prominent stock exchange for technology-driven enterprises and entrepreneurs. Expanding the findings, we also use Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) data.

Our research finds that accruals are still relevant. However, firms with R&D expenditures reduce the ability of accruals to explain stock prices for non-technology firms and firms without intangible assets. After analyzing only tech firms (and firms with intangible assets), our tests show that R&D expenditures improve the relevancy of accruals. These findings apply to both Nasdaq and SSE.

Practitioners and the investment community get valuable insights into how the recognition and measurement of R&D expenditures affect the value relevance. Information about R&D increases relevancy only in firms with intangible assets and those that operate in the technology industry.

Our paper provides benefits by using R&D expenses to affect accruals' informativeness by comparing two countries with different recognition of R&D.

This study aims to analyse the deployment of mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) expenditure incurred by Indian corporate sector, under various development heads as specified by CSR statutes in India.

The thematic distribution of mandatory CSR expenditure is calculated on a large sample of top 500 Bombay Stock Exchange-listed companies in India over a time span of seven years from 2014 to 2015 till 2020–2021. The money spent on each of the specified stakeholders is extracted from the annual reports of the sampled companies to calculate the average expenditure under each of the development heads.

The findings indicate that the distribution of CSR expenditure by Indian companies into various development heads is unbalanced. Some of the heads such as “Education”, “Healthcare”, “Development Projects”, “Employment” and “Environment” attract more CSR contributions, whereas some other equally important heads such as “Art & Culture”, “Sports”, “Armed Forces” and “Technology Incubators” have comparatively received much less contributions in all the years of assessment. However, during the times of COVID, Indian companies proactively contributed to combat the virus so much so that “COVID-19 Relief” received all-time high contributions among all the development indicators.

The institutionalised back up has replaced the randomness in stakeholders’ approach followed by Indian companies. To ensure the balanced development of the country, the disproportionate contribution into various development heads in all the years of mandatory CSR era calls for further assessment of CSR guidelines issued by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MOCA).

This study gives significantly novel insights into the CSR literature by comprehensively analysing the deployment of mandatory CSR funds into various development heads as specified by MOCA in India.

This study investigates the finance-investment nexus in sub-Saharan Africa using data from 41 countries spanning the period from 2000 to 2022. The central question addressed is whether there is a “too little” or “too much” finance problem in the region.

This study employs a system-generalised method of moments (GMM) approach to analyse the association between finance and private investment. Additionally, a dynamic threshold regression model is used to uncover potential nonlinearities in this relationship.

Initially, the study identifies a negative correlation between increased finance and private investment. However, further analysis using the dynamic threshold regression model reveals a critical threshold level of finance. Specifically, the threshold is found to be 6.52% of domestic credit to the private sector and 23.18% using the financial development index. Below this threshold, finance negatively impacts private investment, while surpassing this threshold leads to positive growth in private investment. These findings indicate an issue of “too little” finance in the finance and private investment nexus in sub-Saharan Africa. The results are robust across different model specifications.

The implications of this study highlight the importance of identifying critical thresholds for financing to enhance investment expenditures in the region.

This study contributes to the literature by uncovering nonlinearities in the finance-investment nexus in sub-Saharan Africa. The identification of critical thresholds provides valuable insights for policymakers, emphasising the need to strengthen the financial sector in countries operating below these thresholds to promote private investment and economic growth.

This study quantitatively examines the relationship between economic fluctuations and government budget size in the context of China’s fiscal decentralization, drawing inspiration from theoretical predictions of the Keynesian view and empirical studies on other economies.

The panel comprises 31 provinces or equivalents in mainland China, spanning from 1994 to 2019. Diverse estimation strategies including two-way fixed effect regression, the generalized method of moments (GMM) and threshold regressions are, utilized.

The results suggest that under the “tax-assignment system”, neither the central government’s fiscal transfers nor the provincial budgetary revenues or expenditures help reduce economic volatility. Surprisingly, some regression outcomes suggest that government size measures destabilize business cycles.

While the study does not provide supportive evidence for the stabilizing effect of public budgets in Chinese provinces, it promotes a rethinking of the government’s intricate role in macroeconomic stabilization in the context of China’s fiscal decentralization.

Built upon customer engagement marketing theory and uses and gratification theory, this study examines the link between individual social media marketing (SMM) performance indicators and restaurant sales performance at the firm level. Moreover, the study investigates the moderating effect of advertising expenditure on this proposed relationship.

Random effect regression models were developed in Stata to examine the associations between SMM performance indicators, advertising expenditure, and restaurant firm revenue. Twelve years of SMM data from brands' Facebook pages were collected with a web scraper built in Python. Natural language processing was used to analyze the sentiment of user-generated content (UGC).

The results suggest that restaurant annual sales revenue increases as the volume of brand posts, “like”s, “share”s and positive comments on restaurants' Facebook pages increase. However, the total number of comments and the number of negative comments show non-significant associations with revenue. Firm advertising expenditure negatively moderates the relationships between sales revenue and the number of “like”s, “share”s, total comments and positive comments.

Restaurants benefit from making frequent posts on SNSs. Promotions that motivate online users to “like”, share, and comment on brand posts should be implemented. Firms with limited advertising budgets are encouraged to actively create buzz on SNSs due to evidenced stronger effects of UGC on sales performance than large advertisers.

This research bridges the gap by studying the effects of individual SMM performance indicators on restaurant financial outcomes. The findings support the effectiveness of SMM; and, for the first time, demonstrate that SMM could generate a more profound impact for firms with low advertising budgets.

The study examines how process/organizational innovation and R&D spending mediate the relationship between financial performance and the resource dependence theory in Fintech, providing insights into effective innovation strategies for achieving sustainable financial performance.

Data from 191 financial firms in Taiwan was collected from annual reports using the Taiwan Economic Journal (TEJ), a financial information provider. Content analysis was used to measure innovation activities and financial performance, with process and organizational innovation defined. R&D expenditures were also collected and used in statistical analysis to explore the relationship between variables.

This study on the financial services industry shows that process innovation and R&D expenditure positively impact firm performance, while organizational innovation may have a negative short-term effect but could have long-term benefits.

Limitations of this study include vulnerability to spurious effects and the use of data from only listed financial service firms. Future research should use more short-term performance data and include unlisted firms in the financial services industry to extend the study’s coverage.

This study extends resource dependence theory to financial services and explores the effects of process and organizational innovation on firm performance. Results show that internal process management boosts performance, while external collaboration with startups enhances Fintech innovation and efficiency, with positive short-term effects. The study highlights the importance of interacting with external organizations to access resources and improve performance in financial services.