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The aim of the paper is to rank and analyze the key strategies to sustainable finance adoption in the manufacturing sector using Fuzzy Delphi method (FDM), Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) and MICMAC (impact matrix cross-reference multiplication applied to a classification) analysis.

The study develops a novel framework to identify and analyze the mutual relationships among set of sustainable policies using extensive literature survey and experts opinion. Initially, the study found 14 strategies to implement sustainable finance with the help of vast literature. Then, the list of identified factors were screened through Fuzzy Delphi Method (FDM). Based on driving and dependence power, the final list of factors are divided into three categories.

The study findings reveal that “environmental rules and practices”, “financial incentives, tax reduction and subsidy”, have strongest driving power for promoting sustainable financial system in Pakistani manufacturing sector. Furthermore, “environmental awareness” and “long term vision” are found to be highly influenced by other corresponding elements in a system.

The ISM approach assists professionals, academics, and managers in identifying and ranking policies in implementing green business techniques. The hierarchical representation of ISM results provides a roadmap for decision-makers to navigate and prioritize factors effectively, facilitating the implementation of strategies that contribute to sustainable growth within organizations.

The study results provide interesting clues regarding green finance policies that provide the foundations, incentives, protections or other provisions that support the ecological conservancy’s mission. Specifically, the findings guide that government must offer research grants to private enterprises, research and development institutions, and universities to promote environmental protection and develop transformative technologies such as waste recycling, renewable energy, carbon capture, and power consumption.

The exploration of strategies for sustainable finance adoption with the help of mixed methodological approach and classification of these strategies on the basis of importance level is a new attempt in the field of manufacturing sector.

Contemporary technological disruptions are espoused as though they stimulate sustainable growth in the built environment through the Green Internet of Things (G-IoT). Learning from discipline-specific experiences, this paper articulates recent advancements in the knowledge and concepts of G-IoT in relation to the construction and smart city sectors. It provides a scoping review for G-IoT as an overlooked dimension. Attention was paid to modern circularity, cleaner production and sustainability as key benefits of G-IoT adoption in line with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs). In addition, this study also investigates the current application and adoption strategies of G-IoT.

This study uses the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) review approach. Resources are drawn from Scopus and Web of Science repositories using apt search strings that reflect applications of G-IoT in the built environment in relation to construction management, urban planning, societies and infrastructure. Thematic analysis was used to analyze pertinent themes in the retrieved articles.

G-IoT is an overlooked dimension in construction and smart cities so far. Thirty-three scholarly articles were reviewed from a total of 82 articles retrieved, from which five themes were identified: G-IoT in buildings, computing, sustainability, waste management and tracking and monitoring. Among other applications, findings show that G-IoT is prominent in smart urban services, healthcare, traffic management, green computing, environmental protection, site safety and waste management. Applicable strategies to hasten adoption include raising awareness, financial incentives, dedicated work approaches, G-IoT technologies and purposeful capacity building among stakeholders. The future of G-IoT in construction and smart city research is in smart drones, building information modeling, digital twins, 3D printing, green computing, robotics and policies that incentivize adoption.

This study adds to the normative literature on envisioning potential strategies for adoption and the future of G-IoT in construction and smart cities as an overlooked dimension. No previous study to date has reviewed pertinent literature in this area, intending to investigate the current applications, adoption strategies and future direction of G-IoT in construction and smart cities. Researchers can expand on the current study by exploring the identified G-IoT applications and adoption strategies in detail, and practitioners can develop implementation policies, regulations and guidelines for holistic G-IoT adoption.

Accelerating the influences of external stakeholders in any construction project is inevitable. Studies on external stakeholder influence on construction projects and literature on external stakeholder management in irrigation infrastructure projects executed with donor funds are scarce. Thus, this study aimed to investigate how to manage the external stakeholders' influence on donor-funded irrigation infrastructure projects effectively.

A mixed approach consisting of 17 semi-structured interviews and two rounds of questionnaire surveys was adopted to rank the following: the types of external stakeholders who can significantly influence irrigation infrastructure projects, significant influencing strategies used by those stakeholders, and significant strategies that can be adopted to manage external stakeholder influence on the projects.

In total, 12 of external stakeholders who can significantly influence irrigation infrastructure projects were identified; 17 significant influencing strategies used by external project stakeholders and 22 significant strategies used to manage external stakeholder influence on the projects were identified. The influencing/management strategies specific to each external stakeholder type and those that are common to all external stakeholder types were identified separately. The grievance redress mechanism should be activated for managing external stakeholder influence on donor-funded irrigation infrastructure projects.

This study contributes to theory by identifying significant strategies that can be used to manage external stakeholder influence on donor-funded irrigation infrastructure projects during the planning and design stages. The study will help project teams to handle external stakeholder influence on the projects successfully, accomplish project objectives, and make maximum utilization of the donor funds received.

This paper aims to examine whether and how gender diversity and CEO gender can influence firm value in the emerging market of Pakistan. The study further tests whether these relations vary across state-owned enterprises (SOE) and non-state-owned enterprises (NSOE).

This study considers Pakistani listed firms over the period 2010-2017. The firms have been divided into SOE and NSOE for additional analysis. Tobin’s Q is used to measure firm’s value.

The authors document that female directors (FDirectors) on corporate boards is positively associated with firm value. The findings also illustrate that female CEOs (FCEOs) enhances a firm value. Additional analyses show that the influence of FDirectors and FCEOs on firm value is stronger in NSOE than in SOE.

The results suggest that gender diversity and CEO gender play a significant role in corporate decisions. The findings imply that FDirectors discipline the management, reduce agency conflicts and thereby improve corporate governance, resulting in higher firm value.

This study has two important contributions. First, while prior studies mostly based their arguments on using gender diversity of corporate boards, this study shows that a firm performance can be significantly improved if a female serves as a CEO. Second, this study also tests the stated relations for SOE and NSOE and show that gender diversity plays a significant role in NSOE than in SOE.

The study aims to empirically estimate the role of public supports for energy efficiency financing and presents the way forward to mitigate the energy financing barriers that incurred during the COVID-19 crisis.

Using the G7 countries data, the study estimated the nexus between the constructs. Generalized method of moments (GMM) and conventional increasing-smoothing asymptotic of GMM are applied to justify the study findings. Wald econometric technique is also used to robust the results.

The study findings reported a consistent role of public support on energy efficiency financing indicators, during the COVID-19 crisis period. G7 countries raised funds around 17% through public supports for energy efficiency financing, and it raised 4% of per unit energy usage to GDP, accelerated 16% energy efficiency and 24% output of renewable energy sources, during COVID-19. By this, study findings warrant a maximum support from public offices, energy ministries and other allied departments for energy efficiency optimization.

The study presents multiple policy implications to enhance energy efficiency through different alternative sources, such as, on-bill financing, direct energy efficiency grant, guaranteed financial contracts for energy efficiency and energy efficiency credit lines. If suggested policy recommendations are applied effectively, this holds the potential to diminish the influence of the COVID-19 crisis and can probably uplift the energy efficiency financing during structural crisis.

The originality of the recent study exists in a novel framework of study topicality. Despite growing literature, the empirical discussion in the field of energy efficiency financing and COVID-19 is still shattered and less studied, which is contributed by this study.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how alertness enable small and medium scale enterprise (SME) owners to leverage their individual entrepreneurial orientation (IEO) such as risk-taking, pro-activity, innovation, passion and perseverance in a better way to recognize opportunities for financial resources as compared to their counterparts who are not alert. Moreover, it elaborates on the mediating role of opportunity recognition of financial resources between IEO and SMEs’ access to finance (AF).

A three-wave time-lagged survey from a stratified sample of 271 small and medium scale business owners in Pakistan was conducted and the data were analysed using PROCESS models 1 and 4.

The findings grounded in the theory of Action Regulation, signify that the IEO of small and medium scale business owners helps them attain financial resources through opportunity recognition capacity which is an action characteristic. Moreover, the IEO of SME owners, coupled with entrepreneurial alertness (EA; a cognitive pre-action state), amplifies their ability to recognize opportunities for financial resource availability.

This is one of the initial studies to test the IEO scale, including passion and perseverance. Moreover, it has added to the individual-level antecedents of AF in small and medium scale businesses through the role of EA and opportunity recognition.

This paper aims to assess the effectiveness of Hall currents and power-law slip condition on the hydromagnetic convective flow of an electrically conducting power-law fluid over an exponentially stretching sheet under the effect of a strong variable magnetic field and thermal radiation. Flow formation is developed using the rheological expression of a power-law fluid.

The nonlinear partial differential equations describing the flow are transformed into the nonlinear ordinary differential equations by employing the local similarity transformations and then solved numerically by an effective numerical approach, namely, fourth-order Runge–Kutta integration scheme, along with the shooting iteration technique. The numerical solution is computed for different parameters by using the computational software MATLAB bvp4c. The bvp4c function uses the finite difference code as the default. This method is a fourth-order collocation method. The impacts of thermophysical parameters on velocity and temperature distributions, skin friction coefficients and Nusselt number in the boundary layer regime are exhibited through graphs and tables and deliberated with proper physical justification.

Our investigation conveys that Hall current has an enhancing behavior on velocity profiles and reduces skin friction coefficients. An increase in the power-law index is observed to deplete velocity and temperature evolution. The temperature for the pseudo-plastic (shear-thinning) fluid is relatively higher than the corresponding temperature of the dilatant (shear-thickening) fluid. The streamlines are more distorted and have low intensity near the surface of the sheet for the dilatant fluid than the pseudo-plastic fluid.

The study is pertinent to the expulsion of polymer sheet and photographic films, hydrometallurgical industry, electrically conducting polymer dynamics, magnetic material processing, solutions and melts of polymer processing, purification of molten metals from nonmetallic. The results obtained in this work can be relevant in fluid mechanics and heat transfer applications.

The present problem has, to the authors' knowledge, not communicated thus far in the scientific literature. A comparative study with the published works is conducted to verify the accuracy of the present study. The results obtained in this analysis are significant in providing the standards for validating the accuracies of some numerical or empirical methods.

In this communication, a theoretical simulation is aimed to characterize the Darcy–Forchheimer flow of a magneto-couple stress fluid over an inclined exponentially stretching sheet. Stokes’ couple stress model is deployed to simulate non-Newtonian microstructural characteristics. Two different kinds of thermal boundary conditions, namely, the prescribed exponential order surface temperature (PEST) and prescribed exponential order heat flux, are considered in the heat transfer analysis. Joule heating (Ohmic dissipation), viscous dissipation and heat source/sink impacts are also included in the energy equation because these phenomena arise frequently in magnetic materials processing.

The governing partial differential equations are transformed into nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) by adopting suitable similar transformations. The resulting system of nonlinear ODEs is tackled numerically by using the Runge–Kutta fourth (RK4)-order numerical integration scheme based on the shooting technique. The impacts of sundry parameters on stream function, velocity and temperature profiles are viewed with the help of graphical illustrations. For engineering interests, the physical implication of the said parameters on skin friction coefficient, Nussult number and surface temperature are discussed numerically through tables.

As a key outcome, it is noted that the augmented Chandrasekhar number, porosity parameter and Forchhemeir parameter diminish the stream function as well as the velocity profile. The behavior of the Darcian drag force is similar to the magnetic field on fluid flow. Temperature profiles are generally upsurged with the greater magnetic field, couple stress parameter and porosity parameter, and are consistently higher for the PEST case.

The findings obtained from this analysis can be applied in magnetic material processing, metallurgy, casting, filtration of liquid metals, gas-cleaning filtration, cooling of metallic sheets, petroleum industries, geothermal operations, boundary layer resistors in aerodynamics, etc.

From the literature review, it has been found that the Darcy–Forchheimer flow of a magneto-couple stress fluid over an inclined exponentially stretching surface with heat flux conditions is still scarce. The numerical data of the present results are validated with the already existing studies under limited cases and inferred to have good concord.

The success of projects is a major challenge for information technology (IT) project-based businesses (PBOs). Employees' negative emotions (NE) disrupt the employees' usual work activities by creating obstacles to routine operations. Organizations should take steps to lessen these NE. The current study assessed the mediating role of NE and the moderating influence of employee mindfulness in the association between despotic leadership (DL) and IT project success (PS).

Time-lagged data were collected from 341 employees working in various IT-based project organizations in Pakistan using purposive sampling.

Results were consistent with the authors' hypothesized framework, as DL increases employees' NE, which in turn negatively affects IT PS. In addition, mindfulness plays a buffering role in mitigating the damaging impact of DL on NE.

Previous researchers focused on the positive aspects of leadership and its influence on PS and paid limited attention to the dark leadership style. The authors' study's findings help understand how project-based organizations can reduce employees' NE.

This study aims to examine the effect of corporate derivatives use on firm value and how the corporate governance index modifies this relationship.

The sample consists of 219 nonfinancial firms on the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) from 2011 to 2019. The study used ordinary least square regression with year and industry dummies for estimations. Multiple estimation models such as fixed/random effect, Fama–MacBeth and two-stage least squares (2SLS) are used for robustness. Finally, the PROCESS macro tool is used to estimate the effect of moderating the role of corporate governance (CG) as robustness.

The findings show that derivatives use has an inverse influence on firm value. The firms did not use derivatives as a risk management tool but for speculation motives. However, the corporate governance index significantly weakens this relationship. However, strong governance forces the managers to use derivatives for hedging purposes. The firm-specific factors, including size, age, leverage, cash, financial distress cost, dividend and growth opportunities, also significantly influence firm value. The findings are robust to the other estimation models.

The findings indicate that emerging economies like Pakistan are more prone to agency problems. The strong corporate governance structure helps firms turn the speculative motive of derivatives use into hedging purposes and mitigate the agency issues.

This empirical evidence suggests that good governance structures can help improve the impact of derivative usage on firm value.

To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first study that examines the conditional role of corporate governance on the derivatives–value relationship from the viewpoint of agency problem/speculative motive.