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Branding plays a vital role in the success of every organization and even industry. In Islamic countries, every organization must consider Sharia rules while strategy making. Nowadays, the supply chain is considered a major tool of branding and marketing. After an extensive literature review, it has been found that the studies that test the marketing advantages (MAs) and sustainable competitiveness through branding are scarce. The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the relationship between branding and MAs and mediating the role of sustainable competitiveness.

This is a quantitative study. An instrument was adopted, and data were collected. The researchers tested the hypotheses from the survey data from 179 electronic organizations. The data ware analyzed through structural equation modeling to examine the proposed hypothesis of this study.

The findings indicate that the relationship among dimensions of branding attitude and MAs were supported (expect reliability). Additionally, this study also revealed that a sustainable competitive variable plays a substantial role as a mediating variable in those relationships.

This study is a cross-sectional survey. Consequently, the limited sample size from the electric industry may affect the power of generalizability. The next study may be demonstrated for other industries to respect the nature of the branding and MAs among the managerial staff of other industries.

This study will help managers to understand how to use the supply chain as branding for their MAs through sustainable competitiveness.

This study adds practical value to the literature on sustainable competitive, branding and MA and supply chain. The study shows that sustainable competitiveness has varying mediating effects on industry value.

This paper aims to examine the impact of general elections on the stock returns of the politically connected group affiliated firms of Pakistan.

This study uses the market model to assess the impact of political connections (PCs) on abnormal stock returns, before and after election events. We have used share price data of non-financial firms of Pakistan for the years 2008-2013.

It has been found that behavior of cumulative average abnormal returns (CAAR) is significantly different for standalone and politically connected group affiliated firms. The results reveal that CAARs of politically connected group affiliated firms have experienced less deviation as compared to stand alone firms. Therefore, it is argued that politically connected group firms may reduce the impact of political uncertainty on stock returns in comparison to stand alone firms.

This study is helpful for policy regulators of Pakistan to devise appropriate policies to maintain a level playing field for politically connected and standalone firms.

This study provides a new dimension to understand the role and association of PCs and general elections with stock markets returns.

This paper aims to examine the impact of corruption and money laundering (ML) on the profitability and stability of Islamic banks.

This study used the data of 53 conventional and 19 Islamic banks of Pakistan and Malaysia to have comparative insights. The empirical methods include the fixed effect and random effect regression and generalized methods of moment for robust results.

The results indicate that Islamic banks gain from corruption and ML. Corruption and ML affect bank profitability and stability positively in a less corrupt environment, i.e. Malaysia; however, corruption hurts Islamic banks’ performance, and ML favours Islamic banking profitability and stability in a more corrupt environment, i.e. Pakistan.

The present study pioneers the debate on corruption and ML related to Islamic banking profitability and stability. This study provides important insights to regulators and Shariah advisors to build a real model of Islamic banking.

This paper aims to provide a review of Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) after the latest amendments, i.e. Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 in Pakistan.

This paper performs a detailed review of AML and related laws and amendments to record notable changes and improvements in the recent amendments and drew a comparison among these legal amendments.

This paper finds that recent amendments are essential and judiciously crafted to cover the legal clinches, ensuring effective implementation of AML laws and positive expected outcomes for Pakistan.

This paper is unique in the context of the ongoing struggle against money laundering (ML) in Pakistan; covering the legal progress of Pakistan regarding ML, corruption and terrorism financing.

Roles and responsibilities of higher education academics (educators) have dramatically changed since COVID-19 outbreak. Considering this, the present study applies servant leadership and social cognitive theories to test three determinants of pedagogical resilience, i.e. servant leadership, professional self-efficacy and workplace thriving. The study also tests moderation of professional self-efficacy between servant leadership and pedagogical resilience.

Applying snowball sampling, time-lagged data were collected on T1 and T2 through survey questionnaire from 205 employees of six higher education institutes (HEIs) in Sindh, Pakistan. For data analysis, the study employed structural equation modeling using SmartPLS.

Results indicate that servant leadership and professional self-efficacy predict pedagogical resilience of educators. Moreover, professional self-efficacy moderates the relationship between servant leadership and pedagogical resilience.

This study has a few limitations. The study was conducted in HEIs of Pakistan, which are non-profit organizations. Given this, generalizability of findings in profit-making organizations is suggested with caution. Cross-cultural and cross-regional generalizability may also be challenging.

Training, coaching and role modeling may improve efficacy of educators, which is vital to pedagogical resilience. Furthermore, servant leadership attributes (i.e. emotional support and empathy) may also enhance resilience. Rolling-out tailored training programs for boosting professional efficacy of existing faculty could be helpful in building pedagogical resilience. Fostering a culture of teamwork through adopting collaborative and state of the art educational technologies could also enhance self-efficacy, which is vital to resilience. This could be done when vice chancellors, rectors, HODs, etc., adopt servant leadership attributes to play their role by navigating a paradigm shift from traditional teaching platforms and physical meetings to digital educational tools.

Post-pandemic educational management necessitates resilient workforce to handle any uncertain situation. Given this, the authors apply servant leadership and social cognitive theory and introduce a novel construct of “pedagogical resilience”. This paper offers unique theoretical contributions and suggests universities/HEIs to adopt servant leadership model and foster professional self-efficacy of educators for boosting their pedagogical resilience in times of uncertainty. Pedagogically resilient educators may be well equipped to adopt venerable pedagogical competencies, and could contribute significantly to the quality of higher education.

In today's dynamic business environment and crisis and pandemic like situations, psychological capital has become very significant for sustainable competitive advantage. Due to its importance in organizational context, researchers are investigating it from various perspectives, making it a burgeoning research area. Hence, this study aims to review the literature, provide identity in terms of various patterns and trends, and build the intellectual structure (academic structure) of psychological capital research by presenting a big picture. It further provides the theories, characteristics, context and methodologies (TCCM) analysis and potential avenues for possible future research to facilitate the growth of the field.

This study compiles, evaluates and synthesizes the extant literature of psychological capital, consisting of 954 journal articles collected from Web of Science (WOS) database, using bibliometric techniques, content analysis, and TCCM analysis.

The study identifies various patterns and trends of psychological capital research and unfolds four major themes, namely psychological capital theoretical concept development, psychological capital relationship building with organizational variables, psychological capital as an underlying mechanism for linkage between organizational variables and psychological capital interventions. It also identifies TCCM outcome and potential avenues for possible future research. The study reveals that psychological capital research area is progressing and has enormous potential to advance in the future.

This study is pivotal to past–future orientation wherein past is being investigated for developing new pathways of psychological capital research. It has used research articles published in the WOS database, and future studies may further enhance the understanding of psychological research using other databases.

In addition to advance a comprehensive understanding of psychological capital research, this study will be a quick reference and notable and profound resource for researchers venturing into this marked research area. Further, it will facilitate to leaders and managers to look into various possible avenues to enhance psychological capital of their subordinates for greater organizational good.

To the best of authors' knowledge, this is first study to advance a comprehensive and systematic understanding of psychological capital by integrating bibliometric, TCCM and content analysis.

This study aims to analyze access of cotton growers to Sustainable Livelihoods Assets Pakistani Punjab.

This study uses the department for international development (DFID’s) sustainable livelihoods framework (DFID) (1999). Where data collection was done by using a well-structured questionnaire from 200 randomly selected cotton growers of the district Muzaffargarh. There are five livelihood assets (human assets, natural assets, financial assets, physical assets and social assets) in the SLF, this study has used three different indicators/proxies for each asset except natural assets, where four indicators were used to capture the salient features of the respondents’ access to that assets. Each indicator was given a weight by using the entropy technique to keep the consistency of the quantification. Livelihood assets indices were calculated in case of each livelihood asset for conducting Livelihood Assets Pentagon Analysis. Value of livelihood index ranged from 0–4.

Livelihoods Assets Pentagon analysis shows that cotton growers do not have proper access to all five livelihood assets. The asset with the highest capacity were social assets (sustainable livelihood index value = 0.3994), followed by natural assets (0.3294), financial assets (0.2511), human assets (0.2143) and physical assets (0.0897).

This study uses the SLF developed by DFID for analyzing factors affecting access to livelihoods assets of cotton growers in Pakistani Punjab. Sustainable agriculture and sustainable rural livelihoods lead to sustainable livelihoods where environment quality is taken into consideration. The study contains significant and new information.

Most research on tax evasion focused on microeconomic variables revolving around perceptions and decisions of individual taxpayers. However, a new wave of research is now investigating the role of macroeconomic variables in inducing tax evasion. This study adds to the limited studies in this new direction of research. Previous studies found that inflation, low gross domestic product (GDP) growth and gross fixed capital formation causes recession, increases unemployment, raise interest rates, hurts both domestic and foreign direct investments. This study examined the relationship between these variables and estimated tax evasion in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The study adopts a correlation research design with 2,300 data points collected from 23 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, tax to GDP ratio, gross fixed capital formation per GDP and the GDP annual growth report from each country for the period 2011–2020 was retrieved. Generalised least square regression technique was employed to analyse the data due to the presence of heteroskedasticity in the model and random effect was utilized based on the Hausman test. To avoid misspecification and biased result; therefore, all relevant test was conducted including the multicollinearity test.

The results indicate that GDP annual growth and gross fixed capital formation have a significant negative impact on estimated tax evasion in Sub-Saharan Africa. The findings further indicate a negative but insignificant relationship between inflation and estimated tax evasion in Sub-Saharan Africa. The study concludes that both GDP annual growth rate and gross fixed capital formation negatively influence estimated tax evasion and the policy implications in the African continent were discussed.

The new findings on the effects of GDP annual growth, growth fixed capital formation and inflation on estimated tax evasion provide novel knowledge that is currently lacking in the current literature, specifically Sub-Saharan African continent.

Drawing upon conservation of theory, this study aims to extend the scant literature on the effect of leader-member exchange (LMX) on workplace deviance behaviour (WDB) and adaptive performance by investigating the role of Islamic work ethics as moderators.

A time-lagged and multi-source data of (269 paired responses) of employees working in Islamic banks were used for hypotheses testing.

Taken together, the findings revealed that Leader Member Exchange (LMX) has a positive and significant impact on adaptive performance and is negatively related to employees’ WDB. The results of the moderation effect showed the positive relationship of LMX with adaptive performance and the negative relationship with WDB is stronger for high Islamic work ethics (IWE).

This study provides practical insight that Islamic business ethics plays a significant role in fostering adaptive performance and reducing the deviance behaviour of employees.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that examined the moderating role of IWE between LMX-adaptive performance and LMX-WDB. This study has also filled the gap of scant literature about the impact of LMX on adaptive performance and WDB.