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The purpose of this study is to examine the association between carbon emissions and earnings management (EM). This study also considers the effect of female CEOs on the association between carbon emissions and EM.

This study uses the carbon disclosure project (CDP) for carbon emissions data, the Compustat database for financial information and the ExecuComp database for female CEOs. The empirical sample of this study consists of 1,692 firm-year observations in the USA that voluntarily participated in the CDP survey from 2007 to 2015. Regression analysis and robustness tests are conducted for this study and both accrual and real EM are considered.

This study provides evidence that firms with female CEOs who voluntarily disclose their carbon emissions information engage in less real EM. Thus, the presence of female CEOs moderates the association between carbon emissions and EM. This study/paper also finds a positive association between carbon emissions and real EM, although there is an insignificant association between carbon emissions and accruals EM.

The association between carbon emissions and EM has important implications for investors, regulators and policymakers. This study suggests that policymakers should improve the conditions that promote inclusion of females in the top management positions to constrain EM.

This study focuses on the USA, which is one of the major contributors to carbon emissions in the world. The presence of female CEOs moderates the association between carbon emissions and EM and firms with female CEOs show a greater impact on EM.

This study aims to conduct a quantitative meta-analysis of previous research on lifelong vocational education to generate generalized conclusions about its effects, set directions for future lifelong vocational education and identify implementation measures.

To conduct a meta-analysis on research results that have a heterogeneous distribution, it is important to specify the analysis category for examining the effects of research variables.

First, lifelong vocational education has an effect on dependent variables. And action appears to have the highest effect size on dependent variables. Next, when calculating the size of variables that had an effect on lifelong vocational education by educational type, the effect size of informal education was found to be larger than that of formal education. Finally, regarding the effect on the participants, office workers were influenced most, followed by university students, North Korean defectors, job seekers and foreigners.

Although this study attempted to conduct an in-depth analysis of subcomponents, it was not possible to analyze variables at a more detailed level. Therefore, future studies should aim to conduct a more comprehensive analysis of different variables based on a wider composition. Because lifelong vocational education is relevant to people’s daily lives, it should be investigated in the context of their personal characteristics and social backgrounds.

This research was designed to uncover general effects of lifelong vocational education and discover relevant variables affecting lifelong vocational education in South Korea. A meta-analysis of 15 studies with 67 subgroups examining lifelong vocational education was conducted.

In the current era of VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity), lifelong vocational education needs to be organized systematically, unlike in the past. With the rapid advancements in technology influenced by artificial intelligence and the fourth industrial revolution, there is a surge in social demands for continued reeducation and redevelopment of employees to prepare for talent development paradigm innovation, increasing unemployment among unskilled workers and competence enhancement needs among job seekers and employed individuals.

This study aims to conduct a quantitative meta-analysis of previous research on lifelong vocational education to draw generalized conclusions on its effectiveness and discuss its implications for implementation measures. Specifically, this study will analyze the general effect size; differences in the effect size among different dependent variable groups; and the effect size based on lifelong vocational education participants.

This paper examines the efforts of National Health Service (England) (NHSE) to respond to employee-based racial inequalities via its Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES). The WRES constitutes a hybridised accountability initiative with characteristics of the moral and imposed regimes of accountability.

The study conceptualises the notion of responsive race accountability with recourse to Favotto et al.’s (2022) moral accountability model and critical race theory (CRT), and through it, examines the enactment of WRES at 40 NHSE trusts using qualitative content analysis.

Despite the progressive nature of the WRES that seeks to nurture corrective actions, results suggest that trusts tend to adopt an instrumental approach to the exercise. Whilst there is some evidence of good practice, the instrumental approach prevails across both the metric reporting that trusts engage in to guide their actions, and the planned actions for progress. These planned actions not only often fail to coalesce with the trust-specific data but also include generic NHSE or equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives and mimetic adoptions of best practice guidance that only superficially address racial concerns.

Whilst the WRES is a laudable voluntary achievement, its moral imperative does not appear to have translated into a moral accountability within individual trusts.

Responding to calls for more research at the accounting-race nexus, this study uniquely draws on CRT to conceptualise and examine race accountability.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the integration of sustainable practices in the strategies and operations of world-class higher education institutions (HEIs) under the theoretical guidance of Max Weber's instrumental and value rationalities.

The results of the Quacquarelli-Symonds World University Ranking, Times Higher Education World University Rankings, THE Impact Rankings and GreenMetric World University Ranking rankings from 2019 to 2022 were paired, and the correlation between them was verified. Institutions with simultaneous occurrence in the four rankings in at least one of the years were also classified. A quantitative and qualitative methodology was used to explore how elite HEIs integrate sustainable practices into their operations and strategies, under the theoretical guidance of Max Weber's instrumental and value rationalities. Furthermore, multivariate regression models with supervised data mining techniques were applied, using the SMOReg algorithm on 368 instances with multiple attributes, to predict the numerical value of sustainability in the rankings. Coefficients were assigned to variables to determine their relative importance in predicting rankings.

The results of this study suggest that although many HEIs demonstrate a commitment to sustainability, this rarely translates into improvements in traditional rankings, indicating a disconnect between sustainable practices and global academic recognition.

The research has limitations, including the analysis being restricted to data from specific rankings between 2019 and 2022, which may limit generalization to future editions or rankings. The predictive models used selected data and, therefore, cannot cover the full complexity of metrics from other rankings. Furthermore, internal factors of HEIs were not considered, and the correlations identified do not imply direct causality. The limited sample and potential methodological biases, together with the heterogeneity of the rankings, restrict the generalization of the results. These limitations should be considered in future studies.

The theoretical contributions of this study include an in-depth understanding of the intersection between academic excellence and environmental and social responsibility. From a management perspective, guidance is provided on integrating sustainability into HEI strategies to enhance visibility and classification in global rankings, while maintaining academic integrity and commitment to sustainability.

This highlights the importance of reassessing academic rankings criteria to include sustainability assessments, thereby encouraging institutions to adopt practices that genuinely contribute to global sustainable development.

The originality lies in the predictive analysis between these rankings, examining the link between the level of sustainability of an HEI and its classification as a World Class University. Furthermore, it combines theories of rationality with the analysis of sustainability integration in elite HEIs, introducing new analytical perspectives that can influence future educational policies and institutional practices.

The paper examines the impact of market power on wages within the context of a developing country, focusing on Brazil.

With access to matched employer–employee data from Brazil, we first characterized the evolution of the local labor market concentration (Municipality Herfindahl–Hirschman Index [HHI]). Then, we built a fixed-effect model with instrumental variables to verify the association between the local labor market concentration and wages. Finally, a difference-in-difference (DiD) was implemented to verify whether a merger transaction impacted the workers’ earnings in the Brazilian banking sector.

The paper’s findings suggest that there may be a negative relationship between market power and workers’ earnings.

This research conducted an in-depth investigation of the labor market power in a developing country. As far as we know, our work is the first to evaluate the extension of local concentration in Brazilian formal labor markets and to illustrate its evolution over the last decades. Additionally, when going through the effects of market concentration on wages, we use a new identification strategy that explores changes in the HHI that are caused by national trends in an industry as a source of exogenous variation. Finally, the last part of the paper assesses the effects of antitrust policy on the labor market, a kind of investigation that is still scarce.

We seek to quantify the relationship between urbanization and economic growth in China using recent advances in econometric techniques.

This study adopts a smoothed instrumental variables quantile regression (SIVQR) estimator to obtain consistent estimates of the effects of urbanization on economic growth in China. Our approach accounts for the differential impacts of urbanization across the conditional distribution of economic growth while allowing for an identification strategy that addresses the endogeneity of urbanization. Our main findings reveal that ignoring urbanization endogeneity leads to inconsistent estimates of urbanization effects. Further, we find a positive relationship between urbanization and growth resembling an inverted U-shape. This supports the hypothesis that the beneficial effects of urbanization intensify at initial stages while diminishing beyond a certain threshold, due perhaps to weakening scale economies.

Our main results indicate that the individual productivity gains brought by urbanization outweigh the negative effects thereof that impede productivity, thus contributing to the economic growth in China. Further, we find that ignoring differential impacts of urbanization underestimates the beneficial effects of urbanization for provinces whose quality of governance is in the vicinity of the center of quality distribution. Ignoring the endogeneity of urbanization generates inconsistent estimates of the elasticity of economic growth with respect to urbanization. Finally, we estimate an inverted U-shape resembling relationship between urbanization and growth.

First, future studies would benefit from incorporating more data as provinces further east on the mainland become more urbanized and urbanization runs its course. Second, controlling the barriers to rural-urban mobility would contribute to the robustness of the estimated relationship between urbanization and growth once such data became available. Unveiling the impact of government-imposed barriers is key to designing optimal policies that help fuel economic growth in the country. Finally, future research could benefit from information on urbanization sources not considered here such as inter-provincial migration, as such data become publicly available.

Quantifying the beneficial effects of urbanization on economic growth can help guide the government in China to further fuel the growth through a set of relevant policy tools that promote urbanization.

Rural-urban migration in China lays the groundwork for economic advancement in recipient cities and economies, as it may induce scale economies. This can benefit both the economy at large and the migrants.

The SIVQR estimator accounts for potential heterogeneous effects of urbanization across the entire conditional distribution of growth while allowing for an identification strategy that addresses the endogeneity of urbanization. An additional distinguishing feature of the current study is our use of the most recent novel, provincial-level data obtained from the National Bureau of Statistics of China. Our focus on a single country allows sidestepping issues arising from the inconsistency of the definition of urban across different countries while accounting for intra-country urbanization drivers intrinsic to China, such as natural features and geographic characteristics. Therefore, our approach has the potential to sidestep the bias resulting from the differences in mechanisms behind urbanization-growth relationships across different countries.

This chapter presents a mediation model that aims to disentangle the indirect from the direct effects of retirement on health, considering the mediating role of lifestyles. The model is applied to the risk of depression, and physical inactivity is assumed to potentially mediate the effect of retirement. The results indicate that there is a significant indirect effect via the mediator, albeit relatively small in comparison to the direct effect. The analysis highlights the importance of further exploring the influence of lifestyle factors in the relationship between retirement and health, in order to gain a better understanding of the potential pathways through which retirement impacts health.

Evidence shows that African countries are confronted with high levels of income inequality. Therefore, it is relevant to approach and analyze the factors contributing to these severe inequality cases. This paper addresses the issue by focusing on the role of financial regulation and military spending.

We used a sample of 30 African countries and a recent period (2009–2020), employing various instrumental variable estimation techniques to control for endogeneity.

The results confirm that economic growth aggravates income inequality due to high corruption and political instability. Results confirm that the increase in military spending increases inequality and that financial regulation weakens financial inclusion and also increases income inequality.

The study shows the need for greater control of corruption and the promotion of political stability so that economic growth and financial inclusion can effectively reduce income inequality, as well as the need for a better balance in the drafting of financial regulations and the preparation of military expenditure to safeguard other policy objectives.

The present study contributes to scarce financial, economic, and social literature considering the role of financial regulation and military spending in the persistence of income inequality in African countries. Previous studies disregarded this fact.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-04-2023-0287

To enrich the research on the economic consequences of enterprise digital development from the perspective of capacity utilization.

Using a sample of listed firms from 2010 to 2020, this paper exploits text analysis of annual reports to construct a proxy for enterprise digital development.

Results show that enterprise digital development not only improves their own capacity utilization but also generates a positive spillover effect on the capacity utilization of peer firms and firms in the supply chain. Next, based on the incomplete information about market demand and potential competitors when making capacity-building decisions, the mechanism tests show that improving the accuracy of market forecasts and reducing investment surges are potential channels behind the baseline results. Cross-sectional tests show the baseline result is more pronounced when industries are highly homogeneous and when firms have access to less information.

This paper contributes to the research related to the economic consequences of digital development. With the development of the digital economy, the real effects of enterprise digital development have also triggered extensive interest and exploration. Existing studies mainly examine the impact on physical operations, such as specialization division of labor, innovation activities, business performance or total factor productivity (Huang, Yu, & Zhang, 2019; Yuan, Xiao, Geng, & Sheng, 2021; Wang, Kuang, & Shao, 2017; Li, Liu, & Shao, 2021; Zhao, Wang, & Li, 2021). These studies measure the economic benefits from the perspective of the supply (output) side but neglect the importance of the supply system to adapt to the actual market demand. In contrast, this paper focuses on capacity utilization, aimed at estimating the net economic effect of digital development by considering the supply-demand fit scenario. Thus, our findings enrich the relevant studies on the potential consequences of digital development.

The paper investigates the determinants of the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) bias of the wage return to graduate education for high-school workers in Portugal.

The study uses matched employer-employee data for Portugal, over the 2002–2012 period, to estimate a wage-schooling model that controls not only for individual observed characteristics, firm observed characteristics and year fixed effects, but also for three high-dimensional vectors of fixed effects – one for employees, one for employers and one for job titles.

The main results are the following. First, disregarding individual fixed effects is highly problematic, accounting for 48.5% of the OLS bias. Second, disregarding firm fixed effects is also problematic, accounting for 12.3% of the OLS bias.

The implication for the studies in the labor-supply literature that estimate, by means of instrumental variables, the wage returns to in-school work or to on-the-job schooling is that an instrument dealing with employee’s unobserved ability only may fail to meet the exclusion restriction.

Take the typical instrument based on a policy reform that changes the compulsory schooling level in the population. This instrument may well be argued to be correlated with the education of the employee and uncorrelated with the unobserved ability of the employee, but unfortunately it cannot be seen as orthogonal to the unobserved ability of the employer because of its correlation with the (unobserved) education of the manager. This is a simple corollary of the fact that the employee and the manager belong, in general, to the same population.

Individuals invest a considerable amount of resources in education, which is seen to have positive effects on several dimensions of individual life. Yet, the estimation of these effects is still surrounded by technical difficulties.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that uses the Gelbach decomposition to investigate the determinants of the OLS bias of the wage return to graduate education for high-school workers.