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This study investigates (1) whether democratization drives sovereign credit ratings (SCR) changes (the “democratic advantage”) or whether SCR changes affect democratization, (2) whether the degree of democratization in sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries affects the associations and (3) whether the associations are significantly affected by resource dependence.

This study investigates the effects of SCR changes on democracy in 22 SSA countries over the period of 2000–2020 VEC Granger causality/block exogeneity Wald tests, and impulse responses and variance decomposition analyses with Cholesky ordering and Monte Carlo standard errors in a panel VECM framework.

The full sample impulse responses find that a SCR shock has a long-run detrimental effect on the democracy and political rights but only a short-run positive impact on civil liberties. Among the sub-samples, it is found that the extent of natural resource dependence does not affect the magnitude of SCR shocks on democratization mentioned above but it is found that a SCR shock affects long-run democracy in SSA countries that are relatively more democratic but is more likely to drive democratic deepening in less democratic SSA countries. The full sample variance decompositions further finds that the variance of SCR to a political rights shock outweighs the effects of all the macroeconomic factors, whereas in more diversified SSA countries, the variances of SCR are much greater for democracy and political rights shocks, which suggests that democratization and political rights in diversified SSA economies are severely affected by SCR changes. In the case of the high and low democracy sub-samples, it is found that the variance of SCR in the relatively higher democracy sub-sample is greater than in the low democracy sub-sample.

These results have three implications for democratization in SSA. First, the effect of a SCR change is not a democratically agnostic and impacts political rights to a greater extent than civil liberties. Second, SCR changes have the potential to spark a negative cycle in SSA countries whereby a downgrade leads to a deterioration in socio-political stability coupled with increased financial economic constraints that in turn drive further downgrades and macroeconomic hardship. Finally, SCR changes are potentially detrimental for democracy in more democratic SSA countries but democratically supportive in less democratic SSA countries. Thus, SSA countries that are relatively politically sophisticated are more exposed to the effects of SCR changes, whereas less politically sophisticated SSA countries can proactively shape their SCRs by undertaking political reforms.

This study is the first to examine the associations between SCR and democracy in SSA. This is critical literature for the Africa’s scholarly work given that the debate on unfair rating actions and claims of subjective rating methods is ongoing.

Prior studies generally focus on income smoothing through discretionary accruals and document that managers have incentives to smooth earnings due to various reasons. This paper aims to focus on income smoothing through research and development (R&D) management and examine whether and how income smoothing through R&D management affects credit rating agencies’ perception of firm risk.

The authors use financial statement data from the CRSP/Compustat Merged data set universe for the period from 1992 to 2019 after excluding financial and utility industries. The authors follow the model for credit ratings used in previous literature to test the hypothesis. Specifically, the authors use an ordered probit model to express credit ratings as a function of income smoothing attributes.

The authors find that R&D-based income smoothing improves a firm’s credit rating. However, the positive effect of R&D-based income smoothing on credit ratings is less than that of accruals-based income smoothing. This study also shows that the positive effect of R&D-based income smoothing is more pronounced for firms less subject to opportunistic incentives, further strengthening the notion that managers smooth earnings through R&D management to provide more informative earnings.

This study contributes to the income smoothing literature in several ways. First, the authors contribute to the research by showing that managers’ income smoothing activity through R&D management positively affects firms’ credit rating. Second, the authors also document the relative benefits of the two different income smoothing techniques in terms of improving credit agencies’ perception of firms’ creditworthiness.

This paper aims to do a comprehensive analysis of the existing literature on workplace spirituality to address the intellectual framework of workplace spirituality and the framework's future direction.

A multistep screening procedure was used to obtain data from the Scopus database, which included 648 papers ranging from 1998 to 2023. The bibliometric analysis is conducted by using VOSviewer and Biblioshiny.

The bibliometric analysis showcases that workplace spirituality is a multidimensional concept primarily studied in the organizational behavior domain. The most important research themes were organizational culture and spirituality. In addition, this paper advances workplace spirituality literature by identifying the keywords, prominent authors, journals and conceptual structure.

The study summarizes the existing knowledge on workplace spirituality using bibliometric analysis, classifies thematic areas, identifies research gaps and suggests future avenues of research.

The review paper conducts a bibliometric analysis of the emerging area of workplace spirituality over time. These results can also serve as a guide for future research in the subject of workplace spirituality.