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Business rescue, as a mechanism to aid financially distressed companies in South Africa, has received considerable academic and practical recognition. However, the business rescue plan is an overlooked and, perhaps, underdeveloped aspect of the regime. For stakeholders, this is the ultimate decision-making document. Creditors are the most influential stakeholders in business rescue proceedings owing to their voting rights. For creditors to make informed decisions and exercise their votes meaningfully, the business rescue plan should be transparent and adequately disclose relevant and reliable information. This study aims to identify creditors’ primary information needs to enhance the sufficiency and decision-usefulness of business rescue plans, not only to entice the vote of creditors but to enforce accountability from practitioners.

Using a qualitative research design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 executives from 10 South African financial institutions.

The findings reveal that comprehensive disclosure of financial, commercial and legal information in business rescue plans was a critical antecedent for stakeholder decision-making. Additionally, leadership and social impact information were influential determinants. This study advances academic knowledge and, for practitioners, adds value to the development of business rescue plans. This can enhance creditors' confidence in supporting the rescue effort and approving the plan.

This study advances academic knowledge and, for practitioners, adds value to the development of business rescue plans. This can enhance creditors' confidence in supporting the rescue effort and approving the plan.

The originality of this article lies in its investigation of how creditors assess the information in BR plans as a precursor to supporting the company’s reorganisation in a creditor-friendly business rescue system such as South Africa. This study provides novel insights into the decision-making process, particularly how creditors assess BR plans, address information asymmetry and vote on the plan.

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the new Bankruptcy Law in Saudi Arabia (KSA Bankruptcy Law) under both a comparative lens and a policy-oriented one, while highlighting some of the most essential operational steps and procedures in a bankruptcy proceeding under the law.

The approach adopted analyzes the specific mechanics and procedures of a bankruptcy law under the general policies and goals of bankruptcy. Additionally, where appropriate, a brief comparison to the US Bankruptcy code and its provisions is presented to provide an alternative approach on how similar issues are handled under a reputable and proven bankruptcy system.

Overall, the KSA Bankruptcy Law is a major accomplishment and advancement to the Kingdom’s insolvency regime. The law consolidated and codified the laws governing bankruptcy under the Kingdom’s prior regime, and followed the structure of a modern bankruptcy regime. In doing so, several of the law’s policies and objectives have been fulfilled by providing an effective, predictable and reliable bankruptcy system.

Given the relatively recent adoption of the KSA Bankruptcy Law, the paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the law’s operation and its effectiveness in achieving its policy goals as a modern bankruptcy law.

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on asset redeployability. Capitalizing on a novel measure of asset redeployability, the authors explore the effect of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on redeployable assets using a unique text-based measure of EPU. Asset redeployability is an important aspect of sustainability that has been largely overlooked. More redeployable assets can be repurposed for a variety of uses, lessening the necessity for new products and thus conserving natural resources.

In addition to the standard regression analysis, the authors execute a variety of robustness checks, i.e. propensity score matching, entropy balancing, instrumental-variable analysis, GMM dynamic panel data analysis and use Oster’s (2019) approach for testing coefficient stability. Importantly, the authors incorporate firm fixed effects in the analysis, which helps mitigate endogeneity due to unobservable firm characteristics.

Based on an immense sample of over 200,000 observations over three decades, the results reveal that greater uncertainty raises asset redeployability significantly. The findings corroborate the managerial prudence hypothesis. The future deployment of assets is less predictable in times of increased uncertainty. Consequently, during uncertain times, it is more prudent to have assets that can be redeployed for multiple purposes.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the impact of EPU on asset redeployability, which is a critical aspect of sustainability that has rarely been investigated in the literature. The authors fill this important void in the literature. The authors extend the literature in EPU, asset redeployability as well as sustainability.

Due to its high leverage nature, a bank suffers vitally from the credit risk it inherently bears. As a result, managing credit is the ultimate responsibility of a bank. In this chapter, we examine how efficiently banks manage their credit risk via a powerful tool used widely in the decision/management science area called data envelopment analysis (DEA). Among various existing versions, our DEA is a two-stage, dynamic model that captures how each bank performs relative to its peer banks in terms of value creation and credit risk control. Using data from the largest 22 banks in the United States over the period of 1996 till 2013, we have identified leading banks such as First Bank systems and Bank of New York Mellon before and after mergers and acquisitions, respectively. With the goal of preventing financial crises such as the one that occurred in 2008, a conceptual model of credit risk reduction and management (CRR&M) is proposed in the final section of this study. Discussions on strategy formulations at both the individual bank level and the national level are provided. With the help of our two-stage DEA-based decision support systems and CRR&M-driven strategies, policy/decision-makers in a banking sector can identify improvement opportunities regarding value creation and risk mitigation. The effective tool and procedures presented in this work will help banks worldwide manage the unknown and become more resilient to potential credit crises in the 21st century.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between CEOs' inside debt holdings (pension benefits and deferred compensation) and the operating leverage of the firms they manage, with the aim to examine whether CEO incentives play a role in corporate risk-taking.

The authors investigate the relation between CEO inside debt holdings (CIDH) (pension benefits and deferred compensation) and the operating leverage (DOL) of the firms they manage. Using a sample of 11,145 US firm-year observations over the period 2006–2017, the authors find a strong negative association between CIDH and DOL. Additional analyses reveal that the relationship between CIDH and DOL is more pronounced in firms with heightened agency issues, powerful CEOs and for CEOs with stronger professional networks. The results are robust to various sensitivity and endogeneity tests.

The authors find strong evidence confirming the expected negative association between CEO inside debt and DOL suggesting that firms with higher inside debt tend to maintain lower levels of operating leverage. These findings continue to hold with the alternative measure for the inside debt and operating leverage, and across a range of tests designed to rule out the possibility that the primary findings are in any way driven by potential endogeneity. In addition, the findings demonstrate that the presence of manager-shareholder agency conflicts can strengthen the inside debt–DOL relationship suggesting the strong role of inside debt in reducing firm risk.

Findings in this paper have implications for design of compensation structures so that corporate boards can establish incentives as a tool for risk management. A limitation of this study is that it is focused on one market, i.e. US listed companies, so the findings may not be applicable on a global scale.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that links firm-level management of operating leverage through design of CEO inside debt incentives (two obvious choices for risk-reduction at the CEOs’ disposal include reducing financial risk through reduction of firm leverage and reducing operating risk through reduction of operating leverage). While use of firm leverage as an instrument of choice has been explored in the past, use of operating leverage to achieve risk reduction when CEO possess high inside holding, has received very little attention.

This study aims to investigate the roles of intellectual capital efficiency and institutional ownership on cash holdings and their speed of adjustment.

Using a sample of 432 firm-year observations of tourism-listed companies, three measures of cash holdings are used as dependent variables and intellectual capital efficiency and institutional ownership as independent variables. The financial data is collected from the S&P Capital IQ database for the period 2015–2020. Two system-generalized methods of moment estimation are used for the robustness checks of the results.

The study provides evidence that an increase in intellectual capital efficiency in tourism firms results in lower cash holdings. The research findings also report that characteristics such as firm size, age and market-to-book value ratio are associated with cash holdings. Furthermore, institutional ownership in these firms did not affect the cash holdings. The results also confirm the existence of a target cash holding level to which the tourism firms attempt to converge. These results are robust to the alternative proxy of cash holding and endogeneity tests.

The study uses intellectual capital efficiency measured by the model proposed by Pulic. Alternative measures of intellectual capital can be included in future studies. Future research can also investigate the impact on cash holdings before and during the pandemic for tourism companies. The study is limited to the impact of institutional ownership; thus, research can be extended to consider other types of ownership.

The findings of this study indicate that tourism companies should take into account the impact of intellectual capital efficiency on their cash holding decisions. The industry uses a specific financial management strategy in light of better efficiency and possibly values the opportunity cost of holding more cash. Additionally, regulators should re-examine the role of institutional ownership in tourism firms, as it was found to have no impact on cash holdings. The regulators may need to consider other factors, such as firm size and age, when developing policies and regulations to ensure that tourism firms have adequate cash holdings.

This study adds to the body of knowledge on the factors that influence cash management and ideal cash levels for the tourism industry. The examination of the effect of intellectual capital on cash holdings is a novel contribution, filling a gap in the existing literature. The findings on the speed of adjustment towards optimal cash holdings also provide support for the trade-off theory.

The behavioural theory adds a new paradigm of analysis with the assumptions of the decision maker’s cognitive biases and their repercussions on financing decisions. The aim of the study is to analyse the repercussions of these biases on the adjustment speed of firm’s capital structure toward the optimal level.

Based on a partial adjustment model, the study uses the Dynamic Panel Fractional estimator to analyse panel data from 4,990 Portuguese entrepreneurial firms.

The results show that the cognitive overconfidence bias impacts the entrepreneurial firm’s capital structure. In fact, the firms run by overconfident managers adjust more slowly than their counterparts. Furthermore, the findings suggest that entrepreneurial firms make relatively fast adjustments toward the optimal debt level and follow a hierarchical financing order in the funding process.

The results of this paper are not only interesting to the academia, but also contain practical implications for corporate, institutional and business policy and governance. First, the paper introduces a new measure of cognitive bias in optimistic managers, which is useful for current and future academic research. Also, in practical terms, the findings of the paper reveal that when a company is contemplating hiring a manager, it should consider whether they need an optimistic or non-optimistic manager based on the company's present life cycle or situation.

The current analysis extends the existing literature. The study suggests that financial classical and behavioural paradigms should not be separated, which can provide evidence to help narrow the gap between these two major perspectives.

This study aims to investigate the impact of supply chain concentration (SCC) on corporate research and development (R&D) investment and determine the moderating roles of industry concentration and financing constraints on the relationship between SCC and R&D investment.

The study collected data from Chinese listed companies, used the fixed effects model to test the research hypotheses and further used the two-stage Heckman test and propensity score matching (PSM) to address potential endogeneity issues.

The result reveals a negative impact of SCC on corporate R&D investment. In addition, industry concentration mitigates the negative impact of SCC on corporate R&D investment, but financing constraints strengthen the negative impact.

This study introduces the concept of SCC and empirically tests its effect on R&D investment, further explaining the lack of corporate innovation. This study inspires companies to strengthen SC management and weigh the level of SCC with environmental factors.

Digital transformation is essential for commercial banks to maintain long-term competitiveness in the digital economy era. This study aims to investigate the relationship between inside debt and the bank's digital transformation.

This study set up a quasi-natural experiment based on implementing the executive compensation deferral system in the Chinese banking industry. Using the annual panel data of 180 commercial banks in China from 2007 to 2021, this study employed the difference-in-differences (DID) method to conduct an empirical analysis.

This study confirms a significant statistical relationship between inside debt and the bank's digital transformation, and managerial myopia is the transmission channel of inside debt affecting the bank's digital transformation. Furthermore, the development of Internet finance and the enhancement of bankers' confidence will improve the contributions of inside debt to the bank's digital transformation.

This study contributes to the literature on inside debt and the bank's digital transformation. It has specific policy value for the scientific design of the banking compensation mechanism and accelerating banks' digital transformation.

This paper aims to develop a novel approach to Islamic deposit insurance, specifically addressing the deficiencies in the current prevailing models of Islamic deposit insurance.

The analysis in this paper adopts a qualitative content analysis approach to review the existing literature on Islamic deposit insurance and propose a new model.

The proposed model includes a revised scheme. In the event of a bank failure, the funds used to reimburse depositors of the failed bank are divided into two distinct categories. The first category includes nonrepayable premiums that have been previously paid by the failed bank and managed by the Islamic deposit insurance agency or Islamic deposit insurance corporation. The second category comprises qard hasan, an interest-free loan provided by the Islamic deposit insurance agency or Islamic deposit insurance corporation using the deposit insurance funds from the collective pool of premiums of other banks.

The proposed model ensures that well-managed banks are not unfairly burdened by the failures of their poorly managed counterparts, thus preventing a sense of unfairness and inefficiency. Implementing the proposed model may result in higher business practices and risk management standards, ultimately leading to better depositors’ protection and banking system’s stability.

This paper offers a significant contribution to the limited literature on Islamic deposit insurance. The proposed model enriches the discourse and offers valuable insights for the future development of Islamic banking.