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This paper aims to identify the effect of environmental management systems (EMSs), commitment to stakeholders and gender diversity on corporate environmental performance (CEP) and the extent to which an economic crisis moderates these relationships.

A regression analysis was conducted on a sample of 14,217 observations from 1,933 firms from 26 countries from 2002 to 2010. The estimator used is ordinary least squares with heteroscedastic panel-corrected standard errors (PCSEs), which allows us to obtain consistent results in the presence of heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation.

The results show that EMSs and stakeholder engagement are mechanisms that drive CEP but lose their effectiveness in times of crisis. However, the presence of women on boards has a positive effect on CEP that is not affected by an economic crisis.

The study has some limitations that could be addressed in the future. We present board gender diversity as a governance mechanism because its role is strongly related to non-financial performance. Future studies could focus on other corporate governance mechanisms, such as the presence of institutional or long-term investors. In addition, other mechanisms could be found that can counteract poor environmental performance in times of crisis. Finally, it might be useful to contrast these results with the crisis generated by the coronavirus pandemic.

The results obtained have important practical implications at the corporate and institutional levels. At the corporate level, they highlight, as essential contributions, that environmental management systems and stakeholder orientation are not effective in times of economic crisis, except for with the presence of women on the board.

Following the crisis, the European Commission has promoted gender diversity on boards as a mechanism to improve the governance of entities – improving, among other aspects, sustainability. In this sense, another one of the practical implications of the study is support for the policies that the European Union has implemented over the last two decades.

The paper analyses how a crisis affects the moral and cultural institutional mechanisms that promote CEP. Gender diversity on the board of directors not only promotes environmental performance but also appears to be a governance mechanism that ensures this performance in times of crisis when the other mechanisms lose their effectiveness. The study proposes specific policies that help maintain environmental performance in an economic crisis.

The study examines the association between board gender diversity and Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) disclosure from an international and longitudinal perspective. It also investigates the role of the Sustainability Committee (SC) as a possible factor that can mediate the relationship between board gender diversity and SDG disclosure.

The authors focused on the annual Communication on Progress (CoP) prepared annually by a sample of 526 companies from 39 countries and ten industry sectors along the 2017–2020 period to evaluate the SDG disclosure. Baron and Kenny's (1986) three-step model is estimated to test the impact of the presence of an SC on the SDG disclosure level and the mediating effect exerted by the SC on the relationship between board gender diversity and SDG disclosure.

Findings shed light on the usefulness of the CoP as an alternative reporting tool to communicate progress against SDGs achievement, especially regarding SDGs 13 and 8. This study evidences that board gender diversity positively influences SDG disclosure. The relationship between board gender diversity and SDG disclosure is not only direct but also mediated by the presence of an SC.

Companies need to consider the role of women in enhancing the effectiveness of their governance mechanisms and their ability to meet stakeholder information needs. Establishing a specific SC represents a valid mechanism that ensures greater transparency about corporate actions tackled to contribute toward SDGs and enhances the relationship between board gender diversity and SDG disclosure among International companies.

The study's findings offer stimuli for policy-makers and regulators to reflect on the relevance of the CoP as a possible alternative communication tool to provide SDGs information and overcome the limitations of the Sustainability Reports.

This is the first study that examines companies' SDG disclosure practices focusing on CoPs. Further, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that tests the relationship between gender diversity and SDG disclosure, considering the mediating effect of an SC committee.

By merging good countryside and rural capitals frameworks, a model for reimagining the island's development is formulated, which is then applied to the female perspective to provide valuable insights from a group that is often marginalized in rural areas. As Croatian islands are highly tourism-oriented, this study finds it important to explore possibilities for future island development that can provide balanced and vibrant settlements on the islands.

The present paper synthesizes Shucksmith's (2018) model of a good countryside, which serves as a goal, with Gkartzios et al.'s (2022) capitals framework, which is viewed as a means of attaining a good countryside, specifically a good island. The research is delimited to the island of Brac, Croatia. By conducting interviews with female respondents, this study aims to capture the female perspective on envisioning potential futures of “good” island living, a perspective that is frequently underestimated despite its significant contributions to the creation of an ideal locale.

The results demonstrate that there is a substantial amount of socio-cultural rural capital that is leveraged to strengthen relatedness and rights as development objectives. However, low levels of economic, built and land-based rural capital pose challenges to achieving repair and re-enchantment, which are crucial for settlements that rely on tourism.

These findings bear immense implications for policymakers and planners, underscoring the imperative to account for the perspectives and needs of diverse social groups, including women, in the design and implementation of development strategies for islands. By doing so, a sustainable and equitable future, rich in tourism potential, can be cultivated on the island.

This study aims to investigate the synergies between the economic environment and the smart living dimension embedded in the current smart city initiatives, focusing on the localization of female entrepreneurship in contemporary cities. This interaction is under-investigated and controversial as it includes cities' practices enabling users and citizens to develop their potential and build their own lives, affecting entrepreneurial and economic outcomes. Building upon the perspective of the innovation ecosystems, this study focuses on the impact of smart living dimensions and R&D investments on the localization of female entrepreneurial activities.

The study uses a Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) and a panel dataset that considers 30 Italian smart city projects for 12 years to demonstrate the relationship between smart living practices in cities and the localization of female entrepreneurship. The complementary effect of public R&D investment is also included as a driver in the “smart” city transition.

The study found that the advancement of smart living practices in cities drives the localization of female entrepreneurship. The study highlights the empirical results, the interaction over the years and a current overview through choropleth maps. The public R&D investment also affects this relationship.

This study advances the theoretical discussion on (1) female entrepreneurial intentions, (2) smart city advancement (as a context) and (3) smart living dimension (as a driver) and offers valuable insight for governance and policymakers.

This study offers empirical contributions to the preliminary academic debate on enterprise development and smart city trajectories at the intersection between human-based practices and female entrepreneurship.

This study offers empirical contributions to the preliminary academic debate on enterprise development and smart city trajectories at the intersection between human-based practices and female entrepreneurship. The findings provide valuable insights into the localization of female entrepreneurship in the context of smart cities.

Driving economic development at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) is an enduring global challenge. While the market-based approach places hope on entrepreneurship as a major impetus to drive the underdeveloped economy, the performance of entrepreneurial businesses and their impact on poverty reduction are sometimes below expectations. This paper seeks to examine the factors that may be hindering entrepreneurship within the BOP context. This paper presents preliminary answers and provides research suggestions related to this question.

In order to identify the reasons behind the underperformance of entrepreneurship at the BOP, a comprehensive literature review was conducted to see what is already known about this puzzle.

By reviewing extant literature, four clusters of factors were found to shape entrepreneurial activities at BOP: (1) Individual-level factors may be restraining entrepreneurial activities within BOP context, (2) gender inequality at BOP is hindering female entrepreneurship, (3) insufficient institutional support is holding back entrepreneurial activities in BOP and (4) business development initiatives are making multi-faceted impacts on entrepreneurial activities in BOP.

This paper contributes to theory in that it is the first comprehensive review of literature on constraints of entrepreneurship in the context of BOP. In investigating influential factors of entrepreneurial success in the BOP context, the authors recognize four major influential forces that are shaping entrepreneurial processes at the bottom of the pyramid and further propose three directions of future research that are worthy for further exploration.

While the economic literature mostly tackled discrimination looking at labour costs, this work focuses on its relation to labour productivity, arguing that discrimination may worsen the performance of female employees. In this view, it represents a source of allocative inefficiency, which contributes to reducing output.

Female discrimination is both a social and an economic problem. In social terms, consolidated gender stereotypes impose constraints on women’s behaviour, worsening their overall well-being. In economic terms, women face generally worse labour market conditions. Using long-run Italian data spanning from 1861 to 2009, the authors propose a novel measure of female discrimination based on the observed frequency of discriminating epithets. Following social capital theory, the authors distinguish between structural and voluntary discrimination, and use Data Envelopment Analysis for time series data to assess the extent of inefficiency that each component of discrimination induces in the production process.

The results draw the trajectory of female discrimination in Italy and provide evidence in favour of the idea that female discrimination reduces productive efficiency. In particular, the structural component of female discrimination, although less sizeable than the voluntary component, plays a major role, especially in recent years, where more stringent beauty standards fuel looks-based discrimination.

The contribution of this work is twofold. First, based on contributions from social sciences different from economics, it proposes a novel theoretical framework that explores the effect of discriminatory language on labour productivity. Second, it introduces a novel and direct measure of female discrimination at the country level, based on the bidirectional link between language and culture. The indicator is easily understood by policymakers and may be used to evaluate the effectiveness of anti-discrimination policies.

This paper aims to analyse the impact of the European Union (EU) Directive on the quality of sustainability reporting under the institutional theory lens. Specifically, the authors evaluate what kind of institutional pressure has the highest impact on the quality of corporate disclosure on sustainability issues.

The authors build a quality index based on the content analysis of sustainability information disclosed, before and after the transposition of the Directive, by Italian and Spanish companies belonging to different industries. The authors use an OLS regression model to analyse the effect of coercive, normative and mimetic forces on the quality of the sustainability reports.

The results highlight that normative and mimetic mechanisms positively affect the quality of sustainability reporting, whereas there is no evidence regarding coercive mechanisms, indicating that the new requirements do not provide a significant contribution to the development of better reporting practices, at least in the two analysed countries.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the few studies assessing the quality of sustainability reporting through an analysis involving the period before and after the implementation of the EU Directive. It enriches the literature on institutional theory by analysing how the different dimensions of isomorphism affect the quality of information disclosed by companies according to the EU requirements. It contributes to a better understanding of the impact of the non-financial information Directive, and the results of this paper can be relevant for regulators, practitioners and academia, especially in view of the adoption of the new Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive proposal.

Digitalization accelerates the need of tourism and hospitality ecosystems to reframe business models in line with a data-driven orientation that can foster value creation and innovation. Since the question of data-driven business models (DDBMs) in hospitality remains underexplored, this paper aims at (1) revealing the key dimensions of the data-driven redefinition of business models in smart hospitality ecosystems and (2) conceptualizing the key drivers underlying the emergence of innovation in these ecosystems.

The empirical research is based on semi-structured interviews collected from a sample of hospitality managers, employed in three different accommodation services, i.e. hotels, bed and breakfast (B&Bs) and guesthouses, to explore data-driven strategies and practices employed on site.

The findings allow to devise a conceptual framework that classifies the enabling dimensions of DDBMs in smart hospitality ecosystems. Here, the centrality of strategy conducive to the development of data-driven innovation is stressed.

The study thus developed a conceptual framework that will serve as a tool to examine the impact of digitalization in other service industries. This study will also be useful for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) managers, who seek to understand the possibilities data-driven management strategies offer in view of stimulating innovation in the managers' companies.

The paper reinterprets value creation practices in business models through the lens of data-driven approaches. In this way, this paper offers a new (conceptual and empirical) perspective to investigate how the hospitality sector at large can use the massive amounts of data available to foster innovation in the sector.

Employees facing challenges in their careers – i.e. female, migrant, elderly and lower-educated employees – might expect job searches to have a low likelihood of success and might therefore more often stay in unsatisfactory positions. The goal of this study is to discover inequalities in job mobility for these employees.

We rely on a large sample of Dutch public sector employees (N = 30,709) and study whether employees with challenges in their careers are hampered in translating job dissatisfaction into job searches. Additionally, we assess whether this is due to their perceptions of labor market alternatives.

Findings show that non-Western migrant, elderly and lower-educated employees are less likely to act on job dissatisfaction than their advantaged counterparts, whereas women are more likely than men to do so. Additionally, we find that although they perceive labor market opportunities as limited, this does not affect their propensity to search for different jobs.

This paper is novel in discovering inequalities in job mobility by analyzing whether employees facing challenges in their careers are less likely to act on job dissatisfaction and therefore more likely to remain in unsatisfactory positions.

As a consequence of global changes, the landscape of immigration is changing. This brings opportunities for researching more nuanced aspects related to immigrant entrepreneurship in new contexts. The purpose of this paper is to establish the extent to which Africa-to-African immigrants leverage their social capital and human capital towards improving the success of their entrepreneurial ventures.

First-generation immigrant entrepreneurs within the Johannesburg area in South Africa were surveyed (n = 230). Instrument validity and reliability was first established, and then the hypotheses were tested using multiple regression analyses.

Hypotheses are supported insofar African immigrant entrepreneurs in South Africa rely on their structural and resource-related dimensions of social capital to achieve entrepreneurial success. Furthermore, human capital in terms of both work experience and entrepreneurial experience was found to be a significant predictor of entrepreneurial success.

There is value in developing policies that promote African immigrant entrepreneurs with higher levels of human and social capital. These African immigrants have the potential to increase the national skills base and knowledge required for successful entrepreneurship development in South Africa.

While both human capital and social capital have been associated significantly with the generic entrepreneurship literature, this paper provides an empirical contribution by focusing on the relevance of these constructs in the context of immigrant entrepreneurship from an African emerging market perspective.