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The paper aims to find an accurate analytic solution (series solution) for the micropolar flow in a porous channel with mass injection for different values of Reynolds number.

In this paper, the homotopy analysis method (HAM) with different numbers of unknown convergence-control parameters has been used to derive accurate analytic solution for micropolar flow in a porous channel with mass injection. The possible optimal value of convergence-control parameter determined by minimizing the averaged residual error.

The results obtained from HAM solution with two parameters are compared with numerical results and that obtained from HAM solution with only one parameter. The results show that this method gives an analytical solution with high order of accuracy with a few iterations. As shown in this paper, by minimizing the averaged residual error, the authors can get the possible optimal value of the convergence-control parameters which may give the fastest convergent series.

The HAM with different numbers of unknown convergence-control parameters can be used to obtain analytic solutions for many problems in sciences and engineering.

This paper fulfils an identified need to evaluate the accurate analytic solution (series solution) of practical problem.

Purpose – This chapter provides details of research that attempts to relate traffic operational conditions on uninterrupted flow facilities (e.g., freeways and expressways) with real-time crash likelihood. Unlike incident detection, the purpose of this line of work is to proactively assess crash likelihood and potentially reduce the likelihood through proactive traffic management techniques, including variable speed limit and ramp metering among others.

Methodology – The chapter distinguishes between the traditional aggregate crash frequency-based approach to safety evaluation and the approach needed for real-time crash risk estimation. Key references from the literature are summarised in terms of the reported effect of different traffic characteristics that can be derived in near real-time, including average speed, temporal variation in speed, volume and lane-occupancy, on crash occurrence.

Findings – Traffic and weather parameters are among the real-time crash-contributing factors. Among the most significant traffic parameters is speed particularly in the form of coefficient of variation of speed.

Research implications – In the traffic safety field, traditional data sources are infrastructure-based traffic detection systems. In the future, if automatic traffic detection systems could provide reliable data at the vehicle level, new variables such as headway could be introduced. Transferability of real-time crash prediction models is also of interest. Also, the potential effects of different management strategies to reduce real-time crash risk could be evaluated in a simulation environment.

Practical implications – This line of research has been at the forefront of bringing data mining and other machine-learning techniques into the traffic management arena. We expect these analysis techniques to play a more important role in real-time traffic management, not just for safety evaluation but also for congestion pricing and alternate routing.

Social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp etc. are most commonly used medium for sharing news, opinions and to stay in touch with peers. Messages on twitter are limited to 140 characters. This led users to create their own novel syntax in tweets to express more in lesser words. Free writing style, use of URLs, markup syntax, inappropriate punctuations, ungrammatical structures, abbreviations etc. makes it harder to mine useful information from them. For each tweet, we can get an explicit time stamp, the name of the user, the social network the user belongs to, or even the GPS coordinates if the tweet is created with a GPS-enabled mobile device. With these features, Twitter is, in nature, a good resource for detecting and analyzing the real time events happening around the world. By using the speed and coverage of Twitter, we can detect events, a sequence of important keywords being talked, in a timely manner which can be used in different applications like natural calamity relief support, earthquake relief support, product launches, suspicious activity detection etc. The keyword detection process from Twitter can be seen as a two step process: detection of keyword in the raw text form (words as posted by the users) and keyword normalization process (reforming the users’ unstructured words in the complete meaningful English language words). In this paper a keyword detection technique based upon the graph, spanning tree and Page Rank algorithm is proposed. A text normalization technique based upon hybrid approach using Levenshtein distance, demetaphone algorithm and dictionary mapping is proposed to work upon the unstructured keywords as produced by the proposed keyword detector. The proposed normalization technique is validated using the standard lexnorm 1.2 dataset. The proposed system is used to detect the keywords from Twiter text being posted at real time. The detected and normalized keywords are further validated from the search engine results at later time for detection of events.

The authors investigate the impact of disclosure tones and financial risk on the readability of annual reports in the banking sector. The authors also examine the moderating effect of banks' financial risk on the tone–readability relationship.

This study relies on the agency theory and the social psychology theory to formulate its testable hypotheses and explain the empirical findings. It uses a sample of 390 bank-year observations from banks listed in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Stock Exchanges during the period 2014–2019. It also employs random effect regressions to analyze the data and to examine the reverse causality/endogeneity in order to obtain robust findings.

This study’s results demonstrate that easy (difficult) to read annual reports is significantly associated with positive (negative) tone. Bank managers characterized as “too positive/optimistic” and banks with higher financial risks publish less readable annual reports. The results also show that the interaction between negative tone and a bank's financial risk is inversely associated with reading difficulty, indicating that managers prepare easy text to clarify causes of their banks’ high risks, yet they communicate this easy text with a negative tone that reflects their feelings/emotions towards the financial risks of their banks.

This study’s findings call for the use of a plain English text that bears a neutral tone and urge financial analysts to go beyond the financial aspects of annual reports. They also stimulate policymakers to draft policies, which ensure the presence of audit committee members who possess a broad expertise to uncover the linguistic issues embedded in the annual reports.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study dedicated to exploring the tone–readability association in the GCC's banking sector.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the influential and intellectual aspects of the literature on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region's banking activities.

This study undertakes a bibliometric meta-analysis review of the GCC region banking literature, covering 199 articles published between 2004 and 2022, extracted from the Web of Science (WoS) database, followed by a content analysis of highly cited papers.

This paper identifies the influential aspects of the GCC region banking literature in terms of journals, articles, authors, universities and countries. The paper also identifies and discusses five major research clusters: (1) bank efficiency; (2) corporate governance (CG) and disclosure; (3) performance and risk-taking; (4) systemic risk, bank stability and risk spillovers and (5) intellectual capital (IC). Finally, it identifies gaps in the literature and highlights some important research issues that provide directions for future research.

This paper is limited to the articles indexed in the WoS database and written in English. Though the WoS database encompasses a wide range of multidisciplinary journals, there is a chance that some relevant articles are not included in the WoS database or written in another language.

This study provides regulators, practitioners and academics with valuable insight and an in-depth understanding of the banking system of the GCC region.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first review paper on GCC region banking literature. This study provides regulators, practitioners and academics with valuable insight and an in-depth understanding of the banking system of the GCC region.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework emerged as a guidepost for the transition to sustainable development. To achieve this transition, companies are encouraged to integrate these goals into their business strategies, processes and corporate reporting cycle. The purpose of this paper is to review and critique the corporate SDGs reporting literature, develop insights into the state of this research field and identify a future research agenda.

Using a structured literature review (SLR) methodology, the paper reviews 65 empirical papers published in this field to identify how the current research is developing, offers a critique and identifies future research avenues to advance this field.

Corporate SDGs reporting is developing as a research area of great importance. The findings reveal that current SDGs reporting literature lacks theorisation, overly focusses on publicly listed companies and succinctly describes organisations’ engagement with the SDGs as superficial. Surprisingly, regions such as North America, the UK and other emerging economies have received less attention from scholars. Further, only a few authors have specialised in this field, and there currently exists low levels of international collaborations among authors as well as practitioners.

The paper provides a novel contribution to the emerging field of corporate SDGs reporting. The key theoretical implications from this study’s SLR include the need for more interventionist research. Although there is an increasing number of accounting scholars developing research within this field, the prevailing research is concentrated on corporate SDGs engagement, drivers of SDGs reporting and scope of SDGs reporting. Furthermore, the scientific discourse remains largely under-theorised with positivist framings primarily focussed on the “what” questions. Thus, a modification to the current approaches and research methods is necessary to advance this field further.

The study provides practitioners with valuable insights into the current state of corporate reporting on the SDGs. To achieve more substantive engagement and reporting, a deeper understanding of the factors that influence corporate behaviour and disclosure practices is necessary. In particular, the study identifies new opportunities for practitioners to enhance the value relevance of corporate SDGs reporting.

The paper offers a comprehensive structured review of the empirical papers published on corporate SDGs reporting. It contributes to deepening this nascent research field by identifying five distinct areas where accounting and business scholars may focus to advance the field further and contribute to achieving the SDGs agenda.

This study aims mainly to test the effect of audit committee independence and expertise attributes on corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting, assurance and global reporting initiative (GRI) framework adoption and to investigate how CSR committee existence moderates this main relationship.

The study uses a large global sample that includes all (59,172) firm-year observations having CSR-related data in the Thomson Reuters Eikon database for a period between 2002 and 2019. The empirical analyses are based on random-effects logistic panel regression and Hayes methodology for the moderation analysis.

The study finds that audit committee independence and expertise are significantly associated with CSR reporting, CSR report assurance and GRI framework adoption. Moderation analysis largely supports the existence of a substitution role between audit and CSR committees and implies that audit committees are significant predictors of CSR reporting, assurance and GRI framework adoption mostly in the absence of the CSR committee.

The findings propose audit committee members be extra-vigilant in CSR reporting and assurance practices arising from undertaking substitution roles with the CSR committee. Hence, firms may configure their corporate structure in line with the results such as augmenting the audit committee with independent and expert members if they do not constitute a CSR committee. If firms establish a CSR committee, audit committee members may allocate less time to CSR reporting and assurance and more time to financial reporting quality.

This is the first study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to investigate the direct and indirect effect of audit committees’ attributes not only on CSR disclosure but also on GRI implementation and CSR reporting external assurance, considering the CSR committee’s possible substitutability or complementarity moderating role. This research develops a deeper understanding of audit committees’ non-financial role.

There is a substantial body of the literature on the role of destination image in tourist’s future behavior, however, the majority of these studies were conducted in “Sun-and-Sand” destinations, and only a few studies have addressed this research topic in “Historical-and-Cultural” destinations context. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by investigating the impact of Egypt’s perceived destination image – as one of the most famous cultural and historical destinations in the global tourism arena – and tourist satisfaction on tourists’ future behavioral intentions.

The study adopted a mixed methodology (a combination of survey questionnaire based on a quota sample from 400 tourists, as well as semi-structured interviews with tourists from different nationalities). Data were analyzed using exploratory factor analyses, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling.

The results related to the impact of the perceived destination image are discussed. Also, some practical implications related to destination management organizations are highlighted.

The study contributes theoretically and empirically to destination image literature, by improving the understanding of the multi-dimensional nature of destination image and its impact on revisit intention and word-of-mouth recommendation. Also, it helps in guiding Egypt’s destination image management activities to rebuild Egypt’s image as a safe destination for all the world’s travelers.

Kuwait has taken significant steps to reform its corporate governance (CG) by introducing the New Company Law (NCL) in 2013. This study investigates how this reform of CG mechanisms affects the disclosure of future-oriented information. Likewise, it explores how CG mechanisms affect the informativeness of this disclosure.

The sample comprises the nonfinancial firms listed on the Boursa Kuwait from 2014 to 2018. The study uses an automated textual analysis to measure the level of future-oriented disclosure in the annual reports of these firms. The informativeness of disclosure is proxied by firm value at three months of the date of the annual report.

The study finds that Kuwaiti firms with larger board sizes and substantial ownership by institutional investors are less likely to disseminate future-oriented information. Conversely, firms with more independent directors and larger audit committees are more inclined to provide future-oriented disclosure. Furthermore, the disclosure of future-oriented information carries contents that enhance investors' valuations of Kuwaiti firms, especially in firms with fewer institutional ownership and more prominent audit committees.

It focuses on management decisions to disclose information in the annual reports. Examining other channels of disseminating information, such as social media disclosure, provides avenues for future research.

Policy setters in Kuwait should consider the importance of some CG mechanisms to improve the transparency of Kuwaiti firms, as suggested by the NCL. Likewise, investors should rely on such specific CG mechanisms to build their prospects about the firm's value.

Apart from developed countries, the current study is the first evidence on how CG mechanisms could affect the informativeness of future-oriented disclosure in a developing economy. It is also the first to investigate the new CG mechanism introduced by Kuwait NCL in 2013.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the existing disclosure literature by examining the determinants of narrative risk information in the interim reports for a sample of UK non‐financial companies.

This study uses the manual content analysis to measure the level of risk information in interim report narrative sections prepared by 72 UK companies. It also uses the ordinary least squares regression analysis to examine the impact of firm‐specific characteristics and corporate governance mechanisms on narrative risk disclosures.

The empirical analysis shows that large firms are more likely to disclose more risk information in the narrative sections of interim reports. In addition, the analysis shows that industry activity type is positively associated with levels of narrative risk disclosure in interim reports. Finally, the analysis shows statistically insignificant impact of other firm‐specific characteristics (liquidity, gearing, profitability, and cross‐listing) and corporate governance mechanisms on narrative risk disclosure.

The study's findings have practical implications. It informs investors about the characteristics of UK companies that disclose risk information in their interim reports. For example, the findings show that narrative risk disclosures are affected by firm size and industry type rather than firms' risk levels (e.g. financing risk measured by the gearing ratio or liquidity risk measured by lower liquidity ratios). Practical implications for managers from these findings are that, in order to keep investors satisfied, companies with high levels of financing and liquidity risks should look at investors' demands for risk disclosure. This will help investors when making their investment decisions.

The determinants of narrative risk disclosure in interim reports have not been explored so clearly in prior research and, therefore, this paper is the first of its kind to examine this research issue for a sample of UK companies.