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The authors examine the role of CEO political ideology in the credit rating process.

This study adopts a quantitative method with panel data regressions using a sample of 5,211 observations from S&P 500 firms from 2001 to 2012.

The authors find that firms run by Republican-leaning CEOs, who tend to have conservative political ideologies, enjoy more favorable credit ratings than firms run by Democratic-leaning CEOs. In addition, the association between CEO political ideology and credit ratings is more pronounced for firms with high operating uncertainty, low capital intensity, high growth potential, weak corporate governance and low financial reporting quality. Finally, the authors find that CEO political ideology affects a firm's cost of debt incremental to credit ratings, consistent with debt investors incorporating CEO political ideology in their pricing decisions.

Leveraging CEO political ideology, the authors document that credit rating agencies incorporate managerial conservatism in their credit rating decisions. This finding suggests that CEO political ideology serves as a meaningful signal for managerial conservatism.

The study suggests that credit rating agencies incorporate CEO political ideology in their credit rating process. Other capital market participants such as auditors and retail investors can also use CEO political ideology as a proxy for managerial conservatism when evaluating firms.

The paper carries practical implications for practitioners, firm executives and regulators. The results on the association between CEO political ideology and credit ratings suggest that other financial institutions could also incorporate CEO political ideology in their evaluation in their evaluation of firms. For example, when evaluating audit risk and determining audit pricing, auditors may add CEO political ideology as a risk factor. For firms, especially those that have Democratic-leaning CEOs, the authors suggest that they could reduce the unfavorable effect of CEO political ideology on credit ratings by improving their corporate governance and financial reporting quality, as demonstrated in the cross-sectional analyses. Finally, this study shows that CEO political ideology, as measured by CEOs' political contributions, is closely related to a firm's credit ratings. This finding may inform regulators that greater transparency for CEOs' political contributions is needed as information on contributions could help capital market participants perform risk analyses for firms.

Credit rating agencies release their research methodologies for determining corporate credit ratings and identify managerial conservatism as an important factor that affects their risk assessments. The extant literature, however, has not empirically investigated the relation between credit ratings and managerial conservatism, which, according to behavioral consistency theory, can be proxied by CEO political ideology. This study provides novel empirical evidence that identifies CEO political ideology as an important input factor in the credit rating process.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) might be among the primary factors ensuring any organization’s survival, and disclosing its related information is very important. This research initially investigates the effect of managers’ behavior characteristics, including overconfidence, myopia and narcissism and corporate political ties on the disclosure of CSR. This study also aims to assess the mediating impact of political connections on the association between managerial personality traits and CSR.

The research sample included 129 listed companies on the Tehran Stock Exchange from 2013 to 2020. Behavioral managerers charecteristics. A multivariate regression method with combined data (firm-year) was used to test the research hypotheses.

The results show that overconfidence and managerial myopia cause the disclosure of CSR to decrease. Managers’ overconfidence and short-term attitudes lead to a decrease in the level of CSR activities of the companies and their disclosure, respectively, 0.021 and 0.025. However, the existence of narcissism in managers and having political ties by companies may lead to an increase in the disclosure of the CSR, respectively, around 0.089 and 0.02. Further findings also indicate that political connections may motivate narcissistic managers to increase CSR disclosure near 0.037. However, the results document no significant impact of political ties on the relationship between managerial overconfidence and myopia with CSR involvement.

According to the findings, the authors recommend to stockholders that employing narcissistic managers and improving political connections might be two effective strategies to enhance the level of CSR engagement. One of the critical limitations of the current paper might be its generalizability. As Iran is an emerging and fossil fuel seller country, its institutional settings may significantly differ from those of developed and industrial nations. Thus, the readers of these nations must consider such an important issue.

For the first time, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research has investigated the moderating effect of political ties on the association between management behavioral characteristics and the level of fulfilling CSR by listed companies.

Protected areas, lands and seas set aside for nature conservation, are the main tool for governments to conserve biodiversity. The complexity of government processes, however, can lead to fragmentation in protected area systems. Institutional fragmentation can preclude central coordination and undermine funding and performance. Here, we examine the impact of institutional fragmentation on budgets for protected area agencies in the United States, an important actor in the global conservation movement.

This article uses visual text and network analysis with agency budget documents to examine linkages between agencies. These findings are triangulated with semi-structured interviews analyzed with axial coding to develop a framework for the budget process and its outcomes in US protected area agencies.

The visual text analysis demonstrates varying levels of coordination between agencies. The conceptual framework shows that five factors - mismatches within agencies, the influence of the Presidential administration, the power of Congress as the appropriator of funds, external forces that influence Congress, and a lack of accountability in allocations – lead to institutional fragmentation and “disparate nature enclaves”.

Interview findings are derived from a non-representative population, and thus should not be generalized for all agencies or budget systems.

Understanding the factors influencing agency budget proposals will inform policy to make budgeting more effective for U.S. and other national protected area systems.

Few studies have conducted qualitative analyses of federal agencies and their budgets, particularly for federal protected areas.

This paper aims to fill gap in the literature and explore policy options for resolving the problems of accountability by framing three research questions. The research questions are (i) whether certain elements of Scott’s (2014) institutional pillars attenuate (accentuate) corporate and public accountability; (ii) whether the presence of ruling party-affiliated enterprises (RPAEs) create an increase (decrease) in the degree of corporate (public) accountability; and (iii) whether there is a particular form of ownership change that transforms RPAEs into public investment companies.

Using a qualitative research methodology that involves term frequency and thematic analysis of publicly available textual information, the paper examines Mechkova et al.’s (2019 forms of government accountability. The paper analyzes the gaps between the de jure and de facto accountability using the institutional pillars framework.

The findings of the paper are three. First, there are gaps between de jure and de facto in all three (vertical, horizontal and diagonal) forms of government (public) accountability. Second, the study finds that more than three fourth of the parties that contested the June 2021 election did have regional focus. They did not advocate for accountability. Third, Ethiopia’s RPAEs are unique. They have regional focus and are characterized by severe forms of agency and information asymmetry problems.

The main limitation of the paper is its exploratory nature. Extending this research by using cross-country data could provide a more complete picture of the link between corporate (public) accountability and a country’s institutional pillars.

Academic research documents that instilling modern corporate (public) governance standards in the Sub Sahara Africa (SSA) region has shown mixed results. The analysis made in this paper is likely to inform researchers and policymakers about the type of change that leads to better corporate (and public) accountability outcomes.

The institutional change proposed in the paper is likely to advance the public interest by mitigating agency and information asymmetry problems and enhancing government accountability. The changes make the enterprises investable, save scarce jobs, enhance diversity and put the assets in RPAEs to better use.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that uses the institutional pillars analytical framework to examine an SSA country's corporate (public) accountability problem. It demonstrates that accountability is a domestic and a (novel) traveling theory. The paper identifies the complexity of resolving the interlock between political institutions and business enterprises. It theorizes that it is impossible to instill modern corporate (public) accountability standards without changing regulatory, normative and cultural cognitive pillars of institutions. The paper contributes to the change management and public interest literature.

The World Bank-sponsored public financial management reforms attempt to instil fiscal discipline through techno-managerial packages. Taking Ghana's integrated financial management information system (IFMIS) as a case, this paper explores how and why local actors engaged in counter-conduct against these reforms.

Interviews, observations and documentary analyses on the operationalisation of IFMIS constitute this paper's empirical basis. Theoretically, the paper draws on Foucauldian notions of governmentality and counter-conduct.

Empirics demonstrate how and why politicians and bureaucrats enacted ways of escaping, evading and subverting IFMIS's disciplinary regime. Politicians found the new accounting regime too constraining to their electoral and patronage politics and, therefore, enacted counter-conduct around the notion of political exigencies, creating expansionary fiscal conditions which the World Bank tried to mitigate through IFMIS. Perceiving the new regime as subverting their bureaucratic identity and influence, bureaucrats counter-conducted reforms through questioning, critiquing and rhetorical venting. Notably, the patronage politics of appropriating wealth and power underpins both these political and bureaucratic counter-conducts.

This study contributes to the critical accounting understanding of global public financial management reform failures by offering new empirical and theoretical insights as to how and why politicians and bureaucrats who are supposed to own and implement them nullify the global governmentality intentions of fiscal disciplining through subdued forms of resistance.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of political connections and gender diversity on the performance of Iberian companies as a singular market and considering Portugal and Spain separately.

The authors used panel data methodology, specifically GMM system estimation model by Arellano and Bond (1991) for the period from 2015 to 2020.

Results show that the performance of listed Iberian companies is influenced by political connections, by gender diversity and that gender diversity has a mitigating effect on the effects of political connections in each country. The mitigating effect of women is evident in both Portugal and Spain, as they are more cautious and principled, which is valued by short-term investors interested in an immediate investment. However, considering the Iberian Peninsula as a whole, the results indicate that – in the long term – women's political relationships can benefit performance through a better reputation and image, which can lead to better social and economic results in the long term.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is original and covers an important gap in the literature when considering political connections and women's impact on these connections as determinants of the performance of Iberian companies.

This article develops an innovative multidisciplinary conceptual framework in the field of refugee entrepreneurship by combining the theory of mixed embeddedness with the concepts of intersectionality and agency. Focusing on the phenomenon of refugee entrepreneurship, this conceptual framework addresses the following questions: how is entrepreneurship informed by the various intersectional positions of refugees? And how do refugees exert their agency based on these intersecting identities?

By revising the mixed embeddedness approach and combining it with an intersectional approach, this study aims to develop a multidimensional conceptual framework.

This research illustrates how the intersectional positions of refugees impact their entrepreneurial motivations, resources and strategies. The authors' findings show that refugee entrepreneurship not only contributes to the economic independence of refugees in new societies but also creates opportunities for refugees to exert their agency.

This conceptual framework can be applied in empirical research and accordingly contributes to refugee entrepreneurship studies and intersectionality theory.

This paper examines the relationship between heterogeneous political connections and corporate overinvestment.

Based on a comprehensive Malaysian dataset of 834 publicly listed companies from 2000 to 2022, the authors employed multivariate ordinary least squares regression to test the relationship.

Despite different types of political connections, the findings demonstrate a positive relationship between political connections and corporate overinvestment. In particular, the association is more profound in government-linked companies (GLCs) but weaker in firms that developed political ties through family members of ruling elites. Further analysis reveals that the “helping hand” effect is only observed in GLCs and firms with politically connected directors and businessmen, whereas the “grabbing hand” effect is observed among firms connected through board, businessmen, and family ties. Moreover, the relationship is more persistent among firms with politically connected directors and businessmen around the regime change.

Regardless of the types of political connections, the findings show that politically connected firms tend to engage in rent-seeking through political patronage networks and high levels of government interference in resource allocation. Therefore, a more sophisticated monitoring system should be developed within the political patronage networks to reduce the likelihood of different types of political-business collusion. In terms of research limitations, the research design does not consider the influence of financial constraints and management efficiency. Future research could explore these facets to comprehensively understand the dynamics between political connections and corporate investment decisions.

The evidence informs market participants about the relationship between heterogeneous political connections and corporate overinvestment, reinforcing previous findings that crony capitalism, political patronage, agency problems, and weak governance are well-entrenched in Malaysia’s emerging economy. The government should acknowledge these concerns by enacting anti-corruption campaigns and promoting a fair business environment. In the meantime, policymakers might redesign regulations and revise corporate governance frameworks to substantially reduce the value of political connections, thereby diminishing the bargaining power of politicians.

As corporate investment efficiency has a considerable impact on firm value, investment decisions that enhance firm value will increase share price and maximise shareholder value. Conversely, firms may damage shareholder value if they overinvest or undertake projects that do not yield sufficient. Hence, the findings of this study may assist investors in making more informed judgements, particularly by understanding different types of business-government relations, as political connections are one of the determinants of corporate overinvestment.

This study reveals that the degree to which overinvestment issues manifest within firms is influenced by the nature of the political connections those firms possess. This indicates that politically connected firms should not be regarded as a homogenous group of firms.

This paper aims to investigate how the technical logics of a World Bank-led performance management reform interacted with the social, political and historical logics within a developing country (DC) regulatory organisation. The institutional environment both within and outside the organisation was considered to understand the performance management reform experience.

An interview-based, longitudinal, qualitative case study approach was used to locate accounting in its technical, social and political space. A large regulatory organisation in Bangladesh was investigated as a case study to reveal how traditional organisational practices and public sector norms mediated a performance management reform. Informed by the institutional logics (IL) and economies of worth perspectives, interviews were used to locate IL at macro-level and associated organisational actors’ strategic responses that ultimately shaped the implementation of a performance management system (PMS).

This paper reveals how accounting, as a social and political practice, influences accountability reform within a regulatory organisation. It provides an account of both the processes and resultant practices of an accounting reform initiative. While a consultative and transparent performance management process was intended to enhance accountability, it challenged the traditional organisational authority structure and culture. The new PMS retained, modified and adjusted a number of its characteristics over time. These adjustments reflected an amalgamation of the influence of institutional pressures from powerful constituents and the ability of the local agents (managers) in negotiating and mediating the institutionalisation of a new PMS.

The findings of this paper carry major implications for policy makers, particularly with respect to the design of future reform programs on PMS.

This paper offers a theoretical mapping of IL and its organisation-level interpretations and practices. Thus, the authors locate power and influence at field and firm levels. The findings of this study reflect historical, political and cultural backgrounds of the case study organisation and how these contextual forces were active in shaping the meaning of reform logics. Though the institutional environment and agents were unique to the case study organisation, this research offers a “process generalisation” that reveals how a best practice PMS was translated and transformed by the traditional organisational practices in a DC regulatory context.