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This article provides the first empirical study on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on sustainability reporting in US financial institutions using institutional, stakeholder and legitimacy theories.

The study used the independent sample t-test and Mann–Whitney U test throughout as well as OLS, random effects, fixed effects and heteroskedasticity corrected model to test the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on sustainability reporting in the US financial sector. A sample from all listed US financial firms was used after controlling for both the Refinitiv Eikon sector classification and the NAICS sector classification.

Using U Mann–Whitney test and independent sample t-test the study revealed that the average ESG score for the pre-COVID19 period is 53% compared with 62.3% for the COVID-19 period, indicating that the sustainability reporting during COVID-19 is much higher compared with the pre-pandemic period. The findings of regression analysis also confirm that the US financial companies increased their sustainability reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study is an early attempt to look at how the COVID-19 epidemic has affected financial reporting procedures, although it is focused only on one area and other entity-related factors like stock market implications, company governance, internal audit practice, etc could have been considered.

This research offers useful recommendations for policymakers to create standards for regulators on the significance of raising sustainability awareness. The findings are crucial for accounting regulators as they work to implement COVID-19 and enforce required integrated reporting rules and regulations.

The study provides the first empirical evidence on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on sustainability reporting, by examining how US financial institutions approach the topic of sustainability during the COVID-19 pandemic and assessing the pandemic's current consequences on sustainability.

This study examines whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives positively impact customers’ selection of retail banks in Hong Kong (HK) and identifies which CSR domains affect customers’ selection of banks.

This study adopted a quantitative approach. Primary data were collected from 416 customers of 22 retail banks in HK. The theoretical framework of this study was developed from a literature review, prior studies by Oberseder et al. (2013 and 2014), and CSR initiatives implemented by leading retail banks in HK. Descriptive statistics and statistical tests were used to analyze the data.

The study found that CSR initiatives positively affect customers’ bank selection. CSR initiatives related to the customer and environment domains are likely to have a greater impact on customers than those related to the society domain and are not likely to significantly impact customers’ bank selection.

This study contributes to the CSR literature by offering enhanced insight into the dynamics of CSR and its effects on customer bank selection. Furthermore, this study tests consumers’ perceptions of CSR initiatives in each CSR domain in the banking sector in Hong Kong – a novel approach that has not been previously explored in existing studies. These findings can help banks review the effectiveness of their CSR initiatives and make informed decisions on which initiatives should pursue improved CSR performance and efficient resource allocation.

This review paper seeks to enhance knowledge of how pre-loading affects reinforced concrete (RC) beams under fire. It investigates key factors like deflection and load capacity to understand pre-loading's role in replicating RC beams' actual responses to fire, aiming to improve fire testing protocols and structural fire engineering design.

This review systematically aggregates data from existing literature on the fire response of RC beams, comparing scenarios with (WP) and without pre-loading (WOP). Through statistical tools like the two-tailed t-test and Mann–Whitney U-test, it assesses deflection extremes. The study further examines structural responses, including flexural and shear behavior, ultimate load capacity, post-yield behavior, stiffness degradation and failure modes. The approach concludes with a statistical forecast of ideal pre-load levels to elevate experimental precision and enhance fire safety standards.

The review concludes that pre-loading profoundly affects the fire response of RC beams, suggesting a 35%–65% structural capacity range for realistic simulations. The review also recommended the initial crack load as an alternative metric for determining the pre-loading impact. Crucially, it highlights that pre-loading not only influences the fire response but also significantly alters the overall structural behavior of the RC beams.

The review advances structural fire engineering with an in-depth analysis of pre-loading's impact on RC beams during fire exposure, establishing a validated pre-load range through thorough statistical analysis and examination of previous research. It refines experimental methodologies and structural design accuracy, ultimately bolstering fire safety protocols.

This study aims to explore the impact of carbon neutral announcements on “stock market value” of publicly listed companies in China.

The event study approach is adopted. Market, market-adjusted, Carhart four-factor model and a cross-sectional regression model are employed to examine the impacts of carbon neutral announcements on “stock market value” of Chinese companies based on data from 188 carbon neutral announcements.

Carbon neutral announcements positively impact Chinese shareholder value. Carbon neutral announcements at the strategic level have a more positive and significant impact on Chinese stock market value. Innovative carbon neutral announcements do not significantly cause Chinese stock market reactions. Companies have more positive and significant stock market reactions when the companies make carbon neutral announcements that reflect high supply chain network resilience and heterogeneity and strong supply chain network relationships.

The findings uncover the business value of carbon neutral activities and provide operations managers in developing countries insights into how to improve enterprises' market value by actively implementing carbon neutral activities.

This paper is the first trial to apply an event study to examine the relationship between carbon neutral announcements and Chinese stock market value from the perspective of announcement level and type and supply chain networks. This paper introduces corporate reputation theory and enriches the application of corporate reputation theory in the field of low-carbon environmental protections and supply chains.

Major maintenance projects are often regarded as maintenance activities regardless of the projects' complexity and scale. Consequently, very scarce research attention has hitherto been paid to the critical skills required when undertaking these projects. More specifically, the body of relevant knowledge is deprived of a study focusing on maintenance projects within the energy sector. In view of this shortcoming, this research aims to examine the critical project management (PM) skills required to deliver major maintenance projects within the energy sector.

Based on a quantitative research strategy, this study addressed the knowledge gap through a cross-sectional survey of professionals involved in the delivery of major maintenance projects in the United Kingdom's (UK) energy sector. Data obtained were analyzed via descriptive (e.g. frequencies, mean and standard deviation [SD]) and inferential statistical analyses (One sample t-test and exploratory factor analysis (EFA)).

Out of the 45 PM skills identified in the literature and examined by the respondents, the results obtained from the One sample t-test (based on p (1-tailed) = 0.05) showed that 37 were considered to be at least “important,” accounting for 80.4% of all the skills identified. EFA revealed a clustering of the PM skills items into seven components: “skills related to work scheduling and coordination”; “communication, risk, safety and stakeholder management skills”; “quality assurance skills”; “people management skills”; “skills related to forecasting scope and duration of outage”; “implementation of processes and time management skills” and “technical/engineering skills and experience pertaining to the outage and local site knowledge.”

This study has identified and contributed to the limited state-of-the-art skills project managers must possess to manage major maintenance projects in the energy sector successfully. The findings would be useful to organizations within the energy sector in ensuring that the organizations have suitable personnel in place to deliver major maintenance projects on the organizations' assets.

This study aims to examine the implementation of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in Saudi Arabia. It investigates how the adoption of IFRS has affected four critical areas in the financial statements of publicly listed companies: profit and loss statement, balance sheet, cash flow statement and retained equity statement in Saudi Arabia. The paper also explores the essential factors/drivers that influence the adoption of IFRS and its implication in Saudi Arabia.

Data was obtained from Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) listed companies from eleven industries in Saudi Arabia. This cross-sectional study analyses critical financial data across eleven distinctive industries. To identify the impact of adopting IFRS, the researchers use a paired t-test to evaluate seven key elements of financial statements underlying the critical areas: non-current asset, current asset, total assets, shareholders equity, non-current liability, current liability and total liability. The sample captures cross-sectional data from well-developed global industries in Saudi Arabia, pre- and post-implementation of IFRS. Thus, the analysis of the sample data gives a representative picture of the population of the Saudi Arabian industry.

The results reveal significant differences between GAAP and IFRS reporting standards in the measurement, recognition and classification of non-current assets and liabilities. The differences are expressed in the variance between the GAAP and IFRS. Specifically, the differences between GAAP and IFRS demonstrated by the t-value are significant and reliable (respectively, 5.3 and 4.1). Additionally, the t-value is validated by the p-value, which in both was significant.

The outcomes of this research will benefit accounting information users, practitioners, researchers and regulators. Since Saudi Arabia’s policymakers have mandated the full adoption of IFRS in financial reporting, the study contributes to the adoption of IFRS practices throughout the Saudi industry. Adopting full IFRS standards requires widespread IFRS expertise to cope with the transition.

This study advances research into the perennial issues associated with changes in reporting towards IFRS standards, especially in Saudi Arabia. The contribution to theory and practice enters new and fruitful areas.

Considering rapid digitalization development, this study examines the impacts of digital technology innovation on social responsibility in platform enterprises.

The study applies the event study method and cross-sectional regression analysis, taking 168 digital technology innovations for social responsibility issued by 88 listed platform enterprises from 2011 to 2022 to study the impact of digital technology innovations for social responsibility announcements of different announcement content and platform attributes on the stock market value of platform enterprises.

The results show that, first, the positive stock market reaction is produced on the same day as the digital technology innovation announcement. Second, the announcement of the platform’s public social responsibility and the announcement of co-innovation and radical innovation bring more positive stock market reactions. In addition, the announcements mentioned above issued by trading platforms bring more positive stock market reactions. Finally, the social responsibility attribution characteristics of the announcement did not have a significant differentiated impact on the stock market reaction.

Most scholars have studied digital technology innovation for social responsibility through modeling rather than second-hand data to empirically examine. This study uses second-hand data with the instrumental stakeholder theory to provide a new research perspective on platform social responsibility. In addition, in order to explore the different impacts of digital technology innovation on social responsibility, this study has classified digital technology innovation for social responsibility according to its social responsibility and digital technology innovation characteristics.

Prodigious teamwork is the basis for augmenting the level of productivity on construction projects. Globalisation of the construction market has meant that many practitioners work outside of their geographical spectrum; however, the multicultural dissimilarities of construction workforces within the project management team (and how these may impact upon project productivity performance) have been given scant academic attention. To bridge this knowledge gap, this paper aims to analyse the effects of a multicultural workforce on construction productivity.

The epistemological positioning of the research adopted mixed philosophies (consisting of both interpretivism and postpositivism) to undertake a deductive and cross-sectional survey to collate primary quantitative data collected via a closed-ended structured questionnaire. Census sampling and convenience sampling techniques were adopted to target Ghana’s construction workforce and their opinions of the phenomenon under investigation. Out of 96 questionnaires administered, 61 were retrieved. The data obtained were analysed by using mean score ranking, relative important index, one sample t-test and multiple regression. The reliability of the scale was checked by using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient.

From the t-test analysis, 11 variables sourced from extant literature, and the null hypothesis for the study was not rejected and all factors (except high cost of training and improper gender diversity management) were affirmed as negative effects of the multicultural workforce on construction productivity. Using multiple regression analysis, six of the independent variables were shown to impact upon productivity. The goodness of fit was verified by collinearity and residual analysis. The model’s validation revealed a relatively high predictive accuracy (R² = 0. 589), implying that the results could be generalized. In culmination, these findings suggest that the predictors can be used to accurately predict the effects of multicultural workforce on construction productivity performance.

The findings indicate that multicultural workforce/teams have a substantial effect on overall construction productivity in the construction sector; consequently, stakeholders must address this issue to enhance productivity across the sector.

The current study significantly contributes to our understanding of how multicultural workers/teams affect construction productivity in the construction business perspective and how to respond to the negative menace.

This paper delves into the ex ante rates of return demanded by the private sector in Indonesian public–private partnership (PPP) infrastructure projects and the manifold factors emanating from project attributes that can influence these rates.

This paper analyzes feasibility studies of 37 PPP projects across different sectors. The studies were carefully selected based on relevance, completeness and validity of data. The analysis uses statistical techniques, including Levene’s tests, t-tests, ANOVA tests, Cohen’s effect size and Pearson correlations, to explore differences in cost of capital and excess returns across various attributes.

Based on the statistical analysis, no significant difference exists between the excess return of 200 basis points (bps) and the equity excess return of 0 bps. This suggests that the eligibility criteria for PPP projects require an internal rate of return (IRR) equal to the weighted average cost of capital plus 200 bps or an equity IRR equal to the cost of equity. The variations in the tested variables among diverse project attributes do not exhibit statistically significant disparities, even though specific attributes display moderate to high effect sizes.

This paper represents one of the first attempts to examine the rates of return demanded by the private sector in the context of Indonesian PPP projects. It comprehensively explores the factors that influence these rates, drawing on insights derived from feasibility studies.

This study aims to minimize the transportation-related cost in distribution while utilizing a heterogeneous fixed fleet to deliver distinct demand at different geographical locations with a proper workload balancing approach. An increased cost in distribution is a major problem for many companies due to the absence of efficient planning methods to overcome operational challenges in distinct distribution networks. The problem addressed in this study is to minimize the transportation-related cost in distribution while using a heterogeneous fixed fleet to deliver distinct demand at different geographical locations with a proper workload balancing approach which has not gained the adequate attention in the literature.

This study formulated the transportation problem as a vehicle routing problem with a heterogeneous fixed fleet and workload balancing, which is a combinatorial optimization problem of the NP-hard category. The model was solved using both the simulated annealing and a genetic algorithm (GA) adopting distinct local search operators. A greedy approach has been used in generating an initial solution for both algorithms. The paired t-test has been used in selecting the best algorithm. Through a number of scenarios, the baseline conditions of the problem were further tested investigating the alternative fleet compositions of the heterogeneous fleet. Results were analyzed using analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Hsu’s MCB methods to identify the best scenario.

The solutions generated by both algorithms were subjected to the t-test, and the results revealed that the GA outperformed in solution quality in planning a heterogeneous fleet for distribution with load balancing. Through a number of scenarios, the baseline conditions of the problem were further tested investigating the alternative fleet utilization with different compositions of the heterogeneous fleet. Results were analyzed using ANOVA and Hsu’s MCB method and found that removing the lowest capacities trucks enhances the average vehicle utilization with reduced travel distance.

The developed model has considered both planning of heterogeneous fleet and the requirement of work load balancing which are very common industry needs, however, have not been addressed adequately either individually or collectively in the literature. The adopted solution methodologies to solve the NP-hard distribution problem consist of metaheuristics, statistical analysis and scenario analysis are another significant contribution. The planning of distribution operations not only addresses operational-level decision, through a scenario analysis, but also strategic-level decision has also been considered.

The planning of distribution operations not only addresses operational-level decisions, but also strategic-level decisions conducting a scenario analysis.