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The COVID-19 pandemic has sped up the digital shift in finance, leading to more people having access to financial services and presenting new opportunities and challenges. This chapter looks at how digital finance has changed during the pandemic, focusing on how it’s made financial services more accessible, helped lessen gender disparities, boosted digital financial understanding, and dealt with potential risks. Since the pandemic, the use of digital financial services has grown rapidly, helping to overcome geographical limitations and increase financial inclusion. This change has been especially helpful for marginalized groups and women, significantly reducing the gender gap in financial inclusion. Meanwhile, understanding digital finance literacy has become crucial for effectively using digital financial services. However, the move towards digitization brings its own challenges, especially new financial risks. These risks require increased consumer awareness, better education, and stricter regulation. The chapter concluded by saying that the path of digital finance after the pandemic is a mix of opportunities and challenges. As a result, we need a careful and balanced approach to increase financial inclusion while also protecting against potential financial risks, ultimately aiming for a fairer, more stable, and more inclusive financial landscape.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has already changed the financial industry by increasing the accessibility and inclusiveness of financial services. While acknowledging the challenges posed by AI, this chapter provides insights into the positive impact of AI in promoting financial inclusion. AI has greatly enhanced credit scoring and risk assessment through the use of non-traditional data sources, enabling individuals with limited credit histories and low incomes to access loans and financial products. In addition, the implementation of AI-powered customer identification and verification systems has enhanced security measures while reducing the risk of fraudulent activity. However, the digital divide still remains a challenge to achieve wide financial inclusion. Limited access to technology and digital skills keeps some people from fully benefiting from AI-powered financial services. Access to loans through AI systems may seem convenient, but it also raises concerns about excess borrowing and the resulting unsustainable debt levels. In the age of digital finance, privacy and data security are still key issues. The chapter concludes by highlighting that more research is needed to address these challenges. By fully understanding the potential of AI, as well as its limitations, the power of technology can be harnessed to create more inclusive economic opportunities for everyone, especially those living in poorer areas.

Digital transformation misalignment refers to disparities in digital transformation levels between suppliers and buyers across the production and operation process. It has negatively affected supply chain stability. However, the existing research concerning the economic consequences has not been adequately addressed. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate whether such digital transformation misalignment increases supplier financial risk and to identify the factors influencing this relationship.

This paper examines binary combinations of suppliers and buyers listed on China’s A-share market between 2011 and 2021. This group constitutes a sample to empirically test the influence of digital transformation misalignment on the supplier’s financial risk, as well as the moderating effect of the geographical and organizational distances.

The paper’s findings demonstrate that digital transformation misalignment has indeed a significant increase in the supplier’s financial risk. Moreover, the impact is more intense when the geographical or organizational distance between the supplier and the buyer is relatively large.

The existing literature rarely explores the potential risks arising from digital transformation misalignment between supply chain partners. Therefore, this paper fills a notable gap as it is the first to study the impact of digital transformation misalignment on the supplier’s financial risk and the specific applied mechanisms. The contribution significantly improves the field of corporate digital transformation, particularly, within the context of supply chain management.

This article analyzes the moderating role of investment opportunities, business risk and agency costs in shaping the nexus between excess cash and corporate performance.

This research uses dynamic regression models (two-step system generalized method of moments) to analyze the data related to 200 Turkish companies listed on Borsa Istanbul (BIST) for the years between 2009 and 2020.

The findings indicate that when excess cash increases, the financial performance deteriorates only for firms with lower investments compared to firms with more investments. In addition, investment contributes to better financial performance for firms that hold cash surplus, whereas the influence of investment is insignificant for firms that have insufficient cash. Agency costs of equity exacerbate the adverse impact of excess cash on financial performance while agency costs of debt mitigate this effect. Excess cash reduces the financial performance of highly leveraged firms. However, this impact becomes insignificant when debt ratio decreases. The findings also show that investment has more significant role than business risk in building the precautionary motive to hold cash.

The findings of this article are limited to the Turkish market. Future research is still needed in other emerging markets to compare the results and reveal more about the effect of excess cash on firm performance, and how other factors can change this effect.

The findings verify the increased significance of excess cash in the presence of investment opportunities and difficulties in accessing external funds. Nevertheless, the role of the equity related agency problem in reducing the benefits of cash surplus confirms the necessity of policies that support corporate governance, especially in emerging markets.

This article, according to the knowledge of author, is the first to examine the role of agency costs associated with debt and equity, and the compound effect of investment opportunities and business risk on the nexus between excess internal funds and corporate financial performance in emerging markets.

This study examines how bilateral international trade among mandatory International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adopter countries moderates the relation between IFRS adoption and firms’ financial reporting quality.

The authors use data from 2007 to 2015 and focus on publicly listed firms from non-European Union countries that adopted IFRS on a mandatory basis.

The authors find that the interaction between mandatory IFRS adoption and a country’s bilateral trade with other countries using IFRS is negatively and significantly related to accruals-based earnings management, which is an inverse measure of financial reporting quality. This result is driven by firms in less developed countries. The improvement in accounting quality is for firms located in countries that both fully and partially adopt IFRS. The authors also find a significant and negative coefficient for the relation between real earnings management and the interaction between mandatory IFRS adoption and a country’s bilateral trade with other IFRS countries in the post-global financial crisis period.

Overall, the authors’ results are consistent with the notion that the mandatory adoption of IFRS creates a positive externality where firms improve their accounting quality because increased financial statement comparability means that foreign customers and suppliers can monitor the quality of earnings more easily.

Financial inclusion and digital finance go side by side and help enhance agricultural activities; however, the magnitude of digital financial services varies across countries. In line with this argument, this study aims to examine whether financial inclusion enhances agricultural participation and decompose the significance of the difference in determinants of agricultural participation between financially included – not financially included households and digital finance – no digital finance households.

This study uses Pakistan’s household integrated economic survey 2018/19 to test hypotheses. The logit model is used to examine the effect of financial inclusion on agriculture participation. Moreover, this study employs a nonlinear Fairlie Oaxaca Blinder technique to investigate the difference in determinants of agricultural participation.

This study reports that financial inclusion positively influences agricultural participation, meaning households may have access to financial services and participate in agricultural activities. The results suggest that the likelihood of participating in agriculture in households with mobiles and smartphones is higher. Moreover, household size, income, age, gender, education, urban, remittances from abroad, fertilizer, pesticides, wheat, cotton, sugarcane, fruits and vegetables are the significant determinants of agricultural participation. To distinguish the financially included – not financially included households’ gap, this study employs a nonlinear Fairlie Oaxaca Blinder decomposition and finds that differences in fertilizer explain the substantial gap in agricultural participation. Likewise, this study tests the digital finance – no digital finance gap and finds that the difference in fertilizer is a significant contributor, describing a considerable gap in agricultural participation.

Empirically identified that various factors cause agricultural participation including financial inclusion and digital finance. Regarding the research limitation, this study only considers a developing country to analyze the findings. However, for future research, scholars may consider some other countries to compare the results and identify their differences.

The accessibility of fertilizer can reduce the agricultural participation gap. However, increased income level, education and cotton and sugar production can also overcome the differences in agriculture participation between digital finance and no digital finance households.

This is the first study to decompose the difference in determinants of agricultural participation between financially and not financially included households.

Focusing on micro-level indicators, we investigate financial inclusion levels in rural China, examining its determinants and impact on household welfare. We construct a financial inclusion index of four essential financial services: savings, digital payments, credit and insurance. We identify factors influencing financial inclusion among Chinese rural households and assess the effects of financial inclusion on household welfare.

With the entropy method, we use data from the 2019 China Household Finance Survey to assess financial inclusion levels in rural China. Determinants and their impact on welfare are analyzed through probit and ordinary least squares models, respectively. Propensity scoring matching is applied to address potential endogeneity.

We reveal that rural households exhibit limited usage of formal financial services, with notable regional disparities. The eastern region enjoys the highest financial inclusion and the central region lags behind. Household characteristics such as family size, education level of the household head, income, employment status and financial literacy significantly influence financial inclusion. Financial inclusion positively impacts household welfare as indicated by household consumption expenditure. The use of different types of financial services is crucial with varying but significant effects on household welfare.

This study offers valuable insights into China’s rural financial inclusion progress, highlighting potential barriers and guiding government actions.

This study aims to examine the impact of extensible business reporting language (XBRL) technology and its functionality on various aspects of financial reporting and its overall quality.

To conduct this study, data was collected from a variety of professionals, including accountants, auditors, tax advisors and others. A structured research instrument was developed, and the collected data were analysed using structural equation modelling and mediation analysis techniques.

The study’s results showed that XBRL technology and its functionality have a noteworthy impact on different aspects of financial reporting. Moreover, the various aspects of financial reporting positively affect the overall quality of financial reporting.

This study solely relied on the opinions of various professionals regarding the current issue under investigation and did not empirically assess the reporting practices of companies by examining their XBRL-based reports. Additionally, it concentrated solely on financial reporting aspects and did not account for non-financial aspects. The main theoretical contributions of this paper to technology in financial reporting, XBRL and accounting literature are that it sheds light on the influence of the use of technologies in the business reporting process and their influence on various aspects of business reporting, which has only received confined focus from earlier studies so far.

This study’s findings could provide valuable insights to the managerial teams of organizations seeking to digitize their business reporting practices, specifically in areas such as regulatory compliance, integrated reporting and timely dissemination of reports in a sustainable way. Furthermore, it could help these teams reap the benefits of technology for various regulatory compliance matters.

This study could assist business organizations and regulatory authorities in adopting and implementing technology such as XBRL for accounting and business reporting. Furthermore, the study’s findings can aid in enhancing financial reporting practices by considering emerging aspects such as ESG and sustainability aspects.

This study aims to examine the correlation between the readability of financial statements and the likelihood of future stock price crashes in nonfinancial companies listed on the Egyptian Stock Exchange. It further explores the possible moderating effect of audit quality on this relationship.

The study uses ordinary least squares regression, generalized least squares estimation and two-stage least squares methodology to examine and validate the research hypotheses. The sample comprises 107 nonfinancial companies registered on the Egyptian Stock Exchange from 2016 to 2019.

The results reveal a significant negative association between the readability of financial statements and stock price crash risk. This suggests that companies with more complex financial statements tend to experience higher future crash risks. Additionally, the study identifies audit quality as a significant moderating factor. Higher audit quality, often indicated by engagements with Big-4 audit firms, strengthens the influence of financial statements readability on stock price crash risk. This implies that while high audit quality enhances investor confidence and market stability, it also accentuates the negative consequences of complex financial statements.

The findings of this paper have significant implications for regulators and standard-setting bodies in Egypt. They should consider refining and revising existing standards to emphasize the importance of enhancing the readability of financial reports. Additionally, auditing firms should actively engage in efforts to ensure clearer and more transparent financial reporting. These actions are vital for boosting investor confidence, strengthening Egypt’s capital market and mitigating potential risks associated with information opacity and complexity.

This study represents a pioneering endeavor within the Arab and Egyptian financial environments. To the best of the author’s knowledge, it is the first examination of the association between the readability of financial statements and stock price crash risk in these contexts. Furthermore, it explores factors such as audit quality that may influence this connection.

This study examines the effects of financial literacy and financial risk tolerance on investor behavior by introducing social stigma as a mediator and emotional intelligence as a moderating factor.

Data is collected from 761 financially independent individual investors, with a minimum age of 25 years, a minimum of five years of stock market experience and residing in five selected major Indian cities. The collected data is subsequently analyzed using SmartPLS. Homogeneous purposive sampling followed by snowball sampling was employed.

The findings of the study demonstrate a strong and noteworthy impact of financial literacy on investor behavior. The research reveals that social stigma acts as a partial mediator and emotional intelligence plays a significant moderator with direct effects and indirect effects between financial literacy, financial risk tolerance, social stigma and investor behavior.

Exploring emotional intelligence in financial decisions enriches academic programs by integrating it into financial education. Collaboration between academia and financial institutions yields practical tools, infusing emotional intelligence into services. This prompts systemic shifts, reshaping education and societal discourse, fostering inclusive, emotionally intelligent financial landscapes, aiming to redefine both academic teachings and real-world financial practices.

Integrating emotional intelligence into government-led financial literacy programs can transform societal perspectives on financial decision-making. Customized services, destigmatizing workshops and collaborative efforts with academia foster an emotionally intelligent financial landscape, reshaping traditional paradigms.

Promoting open societal discussions about finances combats stigma, fostering a supportive space for risk-taking. Emphasizing emotional intelligence in awareness campaigns cultivates inclusivity and confidence. Normalizing financial talks empowers individuals, enhancing their well-being. Elevating both financial literacy and emotional intelligence enhances overall financial health, nurturing a community adept at navigating financial journeys.

This study marks a notable contribution to behavioral finance and social stigma theory by examining their intersection with emotional intelligence. It uniquely introduces social stigma as a mediator and emotional intelligence as a moderator, unexplored in this context. This novelty underscores the research’s significance, offering practical insights into financial well-being.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-08-2023-0626