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The purpose of this study is to provide a firsthand perspective on the challenges and risks that can arise in arbitration proceedings.

To investigate the concrete methods money launderers use, a qualitative study was conducted with 10 alleged money launderers and 18 prevention experts. The results were then tested quantitatively, and it was concluded that among money launderers, the highly regulated financial sector is less popular than other sectors.

Money launderers relocate to unregulated sectors or offshore banks to avoid being questioned by compliance officers. Therefore, it is necessary for arbitrators involved in commercial or investor–state arbitration to have the expertise to readily identify the issues raised by these criminal law concepts and provide answers.

This paper examines the intersection between the areas of international commercial arbitration and money laundering, bribery, as well as embezzlement. At the same time, it draws attention to the need to analyze compliance issues in arbitration proceedings.

This study aims to highlight the risks and threats posed by crowdfunding. It also looks at the new European Union regulation on crowdfunding, which is intended to give participants confidence that there will be specific minimum regulatory standards to protect parties against mis-selling issues affecting some platforms.

This paper is based upon a thorough literature review.

Crowdfunding is an essential alternative for financing commercial and non-commercial projects. Although it is a fast-growing digital financial tool, it can also be considered extremely risky. It can be an ideal platform for money laundering and can facilitate the financing of terrorism and fraud.

Crowdfunding is still in its infancy, so the literature has not yet sufficiently addressed the compliance risks of crowdfunding. As a result, there is a significant research gap. Thus, this study aims to analyse and propose suggestions to mitigate the risks that all crowdfunding stakeholders may face when deciding to participate in a crowdfunding activity or when they want to set one up.

The purpose of this article is to revisit the concepts of city singularity and identity, as well as the concept’s related topics (i.e. place identity, place attachment and place dependence). The aim is to investigate the impact of development projects on people's preferences for old and contemporary features in modern cities. The evidence for this can be seen mainly at historical sites such as Heliopolis in Cairo, Egypt.

The authors investigated how development projects affect place identity and city singularity through a three-step process. As a first step, an online questionnaire was administered to experts to assess the characteristics that shape the identity of local districts. In the second and third steps, interviews were conducted, followed by online surveys directed at Heliopolis residents and non-residents. The weight of people’s preferences was determined using multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM).

The results highlighted people's preferences to consider when developing projects at historical sites. Based on these preferences, the authors’ concluded remarks provide insight into some considerations for developing projects in historic places.

The added value here is surveying people’s preferences about development projects in historical places. The physical and social components interplay contributes to city identity and singularity. Based on these preferences, this investigation offers valuable insights into enhancing historical site development.

The purpose of this study is to develop a domain independent, cost-effective, time-saving and semi-automated ontology generation framework that could extract taxonomic concepts from unstructured text corpus. In the human disease domain, ontologies are found to be extremely useful for managing the diversity of technical expressions in favour of information retrieval objectives. The boundaries of these domains are expanding so fast that it is essential to continuously develop new ontologies or upgrade available ones.

This paper proposes a semi-automated approach that extracts entities/relations via text mining of scientific publications. Text mining-based ontology (TmbOnt)-named code is generated to assist a user in capturing, processing and establishing ontology elements. This code takes a pile of unstructured text files as input and projects them into high-valued entities or relations as output. As a semi-automated approach, a user supervises the process, filters meaningful predecessor/successor phrases and finalizes the demanded ontology-taxonomy. To verify the practical capabilities of the scheme, a case study was performed to drive glaucoma ontology-taxonomy. For this purpose, text files containing 10,000 records were collected from PubMed.

The proposed approach processed over 3.8 million tokenized terms of those records and yielded the resultant glaucoma ontology-taxonomy. Compared with two famous disease ontologies, TmbOnt-driven taxonomy demonstrated a 60%–100% coverage ratio against famous medical thesauruses and ontology taxonomies, such as Human Disease Ontology, Medical Subject Headings and National Cancer Institute Thesaurus, with an average of 70% additional terms recommended for ontology development.

According to the literature, the proposed scheme demonstrated novel capability in expanding the ontology-taxonomy structure with a semi-automated text mining approach, aiming for future fully-automated approaches.

As of now, the digitization of corporate finance presents a paradigm shift in business strategy, innovation, financing and managerial capability around the globe. However, the prevailing finance scholarly works hardly document the impact of the digitalization of corporate finance on firm performance with global evidence and analysis. Hence, the contemporary debate on whether firm performance is genuinely stimulated because of the digitalization of corporate finance or not has been a pressing issue in the relevant literature. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify a data-driven, concise response to an unaddressed finance issue if the performance of high-digitalized firms (HDFs) outperforms that of their counterpart peers for wealth maximization.

The first stage test models examine the firm performance of relatively high-digitalized firms as opposed to low-digitalized firms based on the system GMM. The second stage test of the probabilistic (logit) model infers that the probability of being HDFs explores because of better performance. Then, the authors execute robust checks based on the different quantile regressions and Z-score-based system GMM. In addition, the authors recheck and present the test results of the fixed effect and random effect to capture time-invariant individual heterogeneity. Finally, the supplementary test findings of firms’ credit strength by using Altman five- and four-factor Z-score models are presented.

By using cross-country panel analysis as 15 years’ test bed for HDFs and low digitalized firms (LDFs), the test results indicate that the overall firm performance of a digitalized firm is significantly better than that of a non-digitalized firm. The global evidence documents that HDFs are exposed to higher values and are financially more persistent as compared to their counterparts. The finding is remarkably concomitant across several possible subsample analysis, such as country–industry–size–period analysis.

This study can be remarkably effective in encouraging managers, policymakers and investors to acknowledge the need for adopting the required digitalization. Overall, this original study addresses a core research gap in the corporate finance literature and remarkably provides further direction to rethink the assumptions of firm digitalization on additive value and thereby identify optimal decisions for wealth maximization. The findings also imply that investors require an additional risk premium if they invest in relatively LDFs, which have relatively lower market value and weaker firm performance.

From an investors point of view, the academic novelty contributes to an innovative and unsettled issue on the impact of digitization of corporate finance on firm performance because there is a new question of high or low digitization of corporate finance in the global market. Hence, this academic novelty contributes to sharing global evidence of the digitalization of corporate finance and its effect on firm performances. In addition, an intensive critical review analysis is conducted based on the most recent and relevant scholarly works published in the top-tier journals of finance and business stream to fix the hypothesis. Overall, this study addresses a core research gap in the corporate finance literature; notably provides further direction to rethink firm digitalization; and thereby identifies optimal decisions for shareholders’ wealth maximization.

Recognizing novel entrepreneurial opportunities arising from a crisis is of paramount importance for firms. Hence, understanding the pivotal factors that facilitate firms in this endeavor holds significant value. This study delves into such factors within a representative empirical context impacted by a crisis, drawing insights from existing literature on opportunity recognition during such tumultuous periods.

The authors conducted a qualitative inspection of 14 Italian firms during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The authors collected a rich body of multi-source qualitative data, including 34 interviews (with senior managers and entrepreneurs) and secondary data (press releases, videos, web interviews, newspapers, reports and academic articles) in two phases (March–August 2020 and September–December 2020).

The results suggest the existence of a process model of opportunity recognition during crises based on five entrepreneurial influencing factors (entrepreneurial knowledge, entrepreneurial alertness, entrepreneurial proclivity, entrepreneurial personality and entrepreneurial purpose).

Various scholars have highlighted that, in times of crises, it is not easy and indeed very challenging for entrepreneurs to identify novel entrepreneurial opportunities. However, recent research has shown that crises can also positively impact entrepreneurs and their capacity to identify new entrepreneurial opportunities. Given these findings, not much research has analyzed the process by which entrepreneurs identify novel entrepreneurial opportunities during crises. This study shows that some entrepreneurial influencing factors are very important to identify new entrepreneurial opportunities during crises.

The case examines the development and launch of an exchange-traded fund (ETF) based on JUST Capital's socially responsible corporate ranking methodologies. The case provides a market overview of Environment, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) and socially responsible investing (SRI), what has driven growth in those areas worldwide, and several best-practice investment approaches. Following the overview, the case describes the founding and development of JUST Capital, explores JUST Capital's ranking methodologies, and presents the decision point faced by the CEO: requisite selection of one of three strategies in order for JUST Capital to generate “self-sustaining” revenue.

In response to growing concerns over the negative consequences of Internet addiction on adolescents’ mental health, coupled with conflicting results in this literature stream, this meta-analysis sought to (1) examine the association between Internet addiction and depressive symptoms in adolescents, (2) examine the moderating role of Internet freedom across countries, and (3) examine the mediating role of excessive daytime sleepiness.

In total, 52 studies were analyzed using robust variance estimation and meta-analytic structural equation modeling.

There was a significant and moderate association between Internet addiction and depressive symptoms. Furthermore, Internet freedom did not explain heterogeneity in this literature stream before and after controlling for study quality and the percentage of female participants. In support of the displacement hypothesis, this study found that Internet addiction contributes to depressive symptoms through excessive daytime sleepiness (proportion mediated = 17.48%). As the evidence suggests, excessive daytime sleepiness displaces a host of activities beneficial for maintaining mental health. The results were subjected to a battery of robustness checks and the conclusions remain unchanged.

The results underscore the negative consequences of Internet addiction in adolescents. Addressing this issue would involve interventions that promote sleep hygiene and greater offline engagement with peers to alleviate depressive symptoms.

This study utilizes robust meta-analytic techniques to provide the most comprehensive examination of the association between Internet addiction and depressive symptoms in adolescents. The implications intersect with the shared interests of social scientists, health practitioners, and policy makers.

Digital transformation (DT) harnessing the potential of emerging technology creates opportunities and challenges for organizations worldwide. Senior executives view DT as a key initiative for future competitiveness, a view shared by academic researchers. What may challenge the organization is that the vision may be present while preparedness may be lacking. Organizational preparedness depends on managers and employees charged with implementing DT and their perceptions on preparedness are often not aligned with senior executives.

In this research, the authors explore the perceptions of managers and employees on DT preparedness in an organization by gathering data from 579 participants. This study uses an innovative approach to qualitative data analysis using interactive topic modeling.

Findings in this qualitative study provide valuable insights on the perceptions of these individuals and helps understand (a) how they view DT preparedness and (b) may behave in this context. In general DT is well understood, however managers are not keen to change work processes to take advantage of the new digital tools and there appears that generational gap is a barrier to successful DT.

Senior executives play a central role communicating the DT vision necessary to inspire managers and employees. As organizations continue to invest large sums of money to explore value creation for customers and stakeholders by leveraging digital technologies, the information systems (IS) discipline can take the lead by asking the question, what can be done to improve the understanding of DT implementation in an organization?

This study aims to develop a conceptual framework for the role of chief financial officer (CFO) in an ever-changing environment. As previous research focused on responding to specific crises, there have been theoretical and practical gaps in the role of CFO. The study's goal is to fill a critical gap by developing a comprehensive and integrated set of roles to assist the CFO in a constantly changing environment.

Using a grounded theory approach, semi-structured interviews and observations were conducted with 21 CFOs from various industries in Thailand, including foreign multinational corporations and domestic companies with international operations. CFOs were asked how they frame their roles in the face of an ever-changing environment and how they prepare for the future.

The iCFO model is developed, which identifies the critical “core” roles of the CFO in securing the business foundation, as well as the “future opportunities” roles that function as growth engines for long-term business strength. The research delves into the importance of integrity, ethical mindset and corporate governance in the role of the CFO. The iCFO model is designed to help guide future research and provide practical applications for CFOs in both domestic and international contexts. The term “core” refers to the CFO’s primary responsibilities, which include driving profitability, managing risks and optimizing business performance. The “future opportunities” component focuses on the roles that CFOs can play in strengthening the future of business by optimizing investment efficiency, driving digital transformation and being the CEO’s business partner. The findings also emphasized “integrity,” which must encompass all decisions, actions or recommendations made by the CFO.

The study offers unique perspectives on an emerging economy, providing new insights. Through interviews with 21 CFOs, it contributes empirical evidence on the development of roles in accounting and finance, emphasizing good governance practices. The findings highlight the integrated role of the CFO and their self-reflection on their value within the company. Significantly, the study's implications are relevant and applicable to a global audience, particularly in developing economies that prioritize growth. Future studies could incorporate integrated thinking into the iCFO model to address social, environmental and economic factors, making it more universally relevant. Additionally, exploring the adoption of the chief value officer context in developing markets could enable CFOs to expand their focus beyond financial metrics, embracing a comprehensive approach to value creation. By integrating these concepts into the iCFO model, CFOs can effectively drive sustainable and impactful business outcomes on a global scale.