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This paper examines rent determinants and their relationship with commercial office property rents.

The method adopted in this study differs from that of previous studies on this topic. Firstly, based on the survey of the viewpoints of experts, Relative Importance Index (RII) analysis was used to identify rent determinants and to rank and ensure their relevance and validity in the Sri Lankan context. Secondly, sampling of data related to 115 office properties collected from property tenants and landlords located within the central built-up area of Colombo City was conducted using a multi-methods approach to carry out an objective hedonic analysis of office rents.

This research utilizes RII and hedonic models to provide insights into determinants and relationships. Both analyses confirm that the three top drivers of commercial office rent are distance from the major town center, availability of parking space and the condition of the property. In addition to these three factors, hedonic models reveal that the age of the property and the availability of a conference hall also play a relevant role in explaining office rents. Given the disparities in the findings of the two methods, further examination was able to confirm that factors such as distance from the major town center, parking availability, age of the property, presence of a conference hall, building condition, floor size, business type and type of building are likely to influence commercial office rent. These findings reflect elements such as the quality, newness and better facilities of different office properties.

This systematic study and analysis of office rent for the guidance of real estate investors can support sound investment decisions, potentially leading to more financially sound property development, reduced public debt levels and improved public-private financing. Further, the research findings offer valuable insights to real estate investors, developers and planners regarding location decisions for office development quality enhancements in future office developments.

This research provides fresh insights into the local scale office market, an area where limited evidence currently exists. Further, the methodology adopted provides evidence that hedonic analysis, supported by a multi-method approach, can mitigate the subjective judgments made by professionals.

This paper aims to examine the impact of two psychological drivers, namely, psychological capital (PsyCap) and moral courage on internal audit effectiveness (IAE) and whether there is a substitution effect or complementary role of these psychological factors on IAE in the Tunisian setting.

IAE is measured using managers’ perceptions of the internal audit function based on 157 responses received from managers, while the remaining variables (including PsyCap and moral courage) are based on 157 internal auditors’ responses.

Findings suggest that PsyCap has a positive and significant impact on IAE, while moral courage has an insignificant impact on the same variable. Accordingly, PsyCap and moral courage are not playing a complementary role in improving IAE, and PsyCap substitutes for moral courage in increasing IAE. A battery of checks using interaction terms between moral courage and PsyCap corroborate these findings.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study fills one of the major research gaps in the auditing literature by emphasizing the role played by PsyCap in improving IAE. The findings may have policy implications for top firm management, especially when recruiting internal auditors who should enjoy efficacy, hope, resilience and optimism to help the organization achieve its strategic objectives and increase its performance.

This study aims to explore how key stakeholders and recipients of local food access programs operate strategically to meet individual and community food needs, enhance experiences of dignity and promote social justice. The study of a fragmented community food system highlights the connections between micro and meso dimensions of food access, illustrating how people work around food system limitations to access food.

Using qualitative in-depth interviews with food assistance managers, workers, volunteers and recipients, this study examines the period before the implementation of a centralized community-based food access initiative in a mid-sized, rural Oklahoma college town with a high rate of food insecurity. This study asks: What are community members’ experiences in a fragmented food assistance system? In what ways do individuals use everyday resistance and workarounds to actively promote experiences of dignity and social justice in food access spaces?

Those involved in sites of community food access build important networks to share information and engage in negotiation and trade to gain access to useful food resources. As forms of everyday resistance, such practices encourage co-construction of dignity and social justice in stigmatized spaces.

This research contributes to literature examining micro- and meso-level community dynamics that inform agency, dignity and social justice in community food access approaches.

This chapter discusses the utility of authentic leadership for the UN's Sustainable Development Goals and argues that the capacity-building value of authentic leadership enables change and improves performance. The authors view authentic leadership as a genuine, transparent, positive, ethical form of leadership that strives to address grand challenges. They outline its application in two cases: well-being (SDG3) and education (SDG4). Daskou and Tzokas conclude with a criticism of the value of authentic leadership in the successful delivery of the SDGs. Daskou and Tzokas recommend investigating how authentic leaders' balanced information processing and internalised moral perspective contribute to positive self-development, better education outcomes and well-being among students, educators and employees.

Supply chain governance constitutes the rules, structures and institutions that guide supply chains toward various objectives, including environmental sustainability. Previous studies have provided insight into the relationship between governance and sustainability but have overlooked two crucial dimensions: power dynamics and the influence of outside actors. This paper aims to address these two gaps by measuring differential power (i.e. power asymmetries) among actors across the supply chain, including external actors.

This paper quantifies power dynamics across the entire chain through a structured survey in which supply chain participants rank their peer’s ability to affect environmental and social outcomes. This paper tests this approach by surveying 200 industry professionals (e.g. feedlot owners, retailers) and external actors (e.g. NGOs) in the US beef sector.

Respondents ranked the most powerful actors as follows: feedlot owners; processing plant owners; and regulatory agencies. Results also revealed that trade associations, retailers and cow–calf producers and ranchers perceive a sense of powerlessness. This study reveals multiple power nodes and confirms a shift in the power structure depending on which indicator respondents considered (e.g. environmental impacts vs employee safety). This study concludes that the buyer–producer dichotomy often used to assess supply chain governance fails to capture the complex dynamics among actors within supply chains.

This study demonstrates a novel approach to measure perceptions of power in supply chains. This method enables researchers to map networks of power across entire supply chains, including internal and external actors, to advance understanding of supply chain governance dynamics. Previous studies have misidentified who governs environmental outcomes in supply chains, and NGOs have overestimated the power of consumers and retailers to influence producers.

Applying mitigation measures during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in ‘locking down’ of economies, and disrupted agri-food markets worldwide. Income losses and food price increases negatively affected food security. The ‘stay-at-home’ policy led some households towards a positive shift in eating habits and maintaining these changes could contribute to better nutrition. The Russia–Ukraine war and soaring energy and food prices contributes further to the pressure on the global food system and urgency to consider longer term resilience capacities of national food systems.

The aim of the chapter is to identify and review food security challenges that governments and societies have faced during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond, with specific emphasis on Poland.

The methodological approach was to undertake a narrative literature review and to analyse a number of indicators relating to food security at the national level. These were quantified using data from Economist Impact, the World Bank, the European Commission, FAOSTAT and Statistics Poland.

The 2019–2022 Global Food Security Index for Poland remained quite stable, but the number of food insecure people increased significantly. Hence, urgent government measures are needed to ensure food security for all. Since 2021, high food inflation has reduced food affordability and is expected to remain high due to the Russia-Ukraine war, market pressures on energy prices and climate-related weather conditions. Greater food self-sufficiency in Poland is a key strategy to build up the resilience of the national food system.

Although some research has been carried out on feedback trading in different asset classes, there have been few empirical investigations that consider both major and emerging stock markets (Koutmos, 1997; Antoniou et al., 2005; Kim, 2009) stock index futures (Salm and Schuppli, 2010). In this study, the author examines positive/negative feedback trading in both developed-emerging-frontier-standalone (51) stock markets for 2010–2020 and sub-periods including COVID-19 period.

The hypothesis “feedback trading behaviour led the price boom/bust in the stock markets during the first quarter of COVID-19 pandemic” is tested by employing the Sentana and Wadhwani (1992) framework and using asymmetrical GARCH models (GJRGARCH, EGARCH) in accordance with the empirical literature.

The following conclusions can be drawn from the present study; (1) There is no evidence to support a significant distinction between developed, emerging, frontier or standalone markets or high/upper middle, lower middle income economies in the case of feedback trading. It is more likely to be a general phenomenon reflecting the outcomes of general human psychology (2) in the long term (2010–2020) based on the feedback trading results Asian stock markets appear to be far from efficiency.

Stock markets are selected based on data availability.

Several inferences can be drawn about overall results. First, investors and portfolio managers should beware of their investment decisions during bearish market conditions where volatility is on the rise and also when there is a strong reaction to bad news/negative shocks in the market. Moreover, investing in Asia stock markets may require more attention since those markets are reputed to be more “idiosyncratic”, less reliant on economic and corporate fundamentals in their pricing. Moreover, the impact of foreign investors on stock market volatility and returns and weaker implementation of regulations also affect the efficiency of the markets (Lipinsky and Ong, 2014).

To the best of the author’s knowledge, most studies in the field of feedback trading in stock markets have only focused on a small sample of countries and second, the effect of COVID-19 uncertainty on the stock markets have not been addressed in the literature with respect to feedback trading. This paper fills these literature gaps. This study is expected to provide useful insights for understanding the instabilities in stock markets particularly under conditions of high uncertainty and to fill the gap in the literature by comparing the results for a large sample of countries both in the long term and in the pandemic.

Highlights for review

1. This study has shown that feedback trading is more prevalent in Asian stock markets in the long run in Europe, America or Middle East for the period 2010–2020.

2. Positive feedback traders generally dominated most of the stock markets during the early period of COVID-19 pandemic.

3. Another major finding was that the stock markets in Malaysia, Japan, the Philippines, Estonia, Portugal and Ukraine are dominated by negative feedback traders which may be interpreted as “disposition effect” meaning that they sell the “past winners”.

4. In Indonesia, New Zealand, China, Austria, Greece, UK, Finland, Spain, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Poland, Turkey, Chile and Argentina neither positive nor negative feedback trading exists even under uncertain conditions.

This study has shown that feedback trading is more prevalent in Asian stock markets in the long run in Europe, America or Middle East for the period 2010–2020.

Positive feedback traders generally dominated most of the stock markets during the early period of COVID-19 pandemic.

Another major finding was that the stock markets in Malaysia, Japan, the Philippines, Estonia, Portugal and Ukraine are dominated by negative feedback traders which may be interpreted as “disposition effect” meaning that they sell the “past winners”.

In Indonesia, New Zealand, China, Austria, Greece, UK, Finland, Spain, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Poland, Turkey, Chile and Argentina neither positive nor negative feedback trading exists even under uncertain conditions.

The purpose of this study is to reveal the dynamics of house prices and sales in spatial and temporal dimensions across British regions.

This paper incorporates two empirical approaches to describe the behaviour of property prices across British regions. The models are applied to two different data sets. The first empirical approach is to apply the price diffusion model proposed by Holly et al. (2011) to the UK house price index data set. The second empirical approach is to apply a bivariate global vector autoregression model without a time trend to house prices and transaction volumes retrieved from the nationwide building society.

Identifying shocks to London house prices in the GVAR model, based on the generalized impulse response functions framework, I find some heterogeneity in responses to house price changes; for example, South East England responds stronger than the remaining provincial regions. The main pattern detected in responses and characteristic for each region is the fairly rapid fading of the shock. The spatial-temporal diffusion model demonstrates the presence of a ripple effect: a shock emanating from London is dispersed contemporaneously and spatially to other regions, affecting prices in nondominant regions with a delay.

The main contribution of this work is the betterment in understanding how house price changes move across regions and time within a UK context.

The game plan firms must navigate in the quest of competitive advantage which is changing quickly. More and more firms acknowledge that future prosperity depends on achieving the joint goals of economic, environmental and social sustainability. This understanding has resulted in both firms and actors on the financial markets enhancing their focus on environmental, social and governance dimensions in their respective decision-making processes. In this chapter, the focus is on one key component of the changing game plan, the European Union’s (EU) Sustainable Finance Platform that envisions investors as a key driver of firms’ sustainability transformation. Based on survey data from Swedish listed firms, we discuss implications and outcomes of the Platform. Our results show that investors play an important role in setting the rules of the gameplan for firms. However, not to the extent that it meets the ambitions of the policymakers. This suggests either that the Platform will fail to meet its aims or that firms should expect further significant changes to the gameplan in the future.

This study explores the interconnectedness and complexity of risk-varied climate initiatives such as green bonds (GBs), emissions trading systems (ETS) and socially responsible investments (SRI). The analysis covers the period from September 2011 to August 2022, using six indices: three representing climate initiatives and three indicating uncertainty.

To achieve this, the study first examines dynamic lead-lag relations and correlation patterns in the time-frequency domain to analyse the returns of the series. Additionally, it applies an innovative approach to investigate the predictability of uncertainty measurements of climate initiatives across various market conditions and frequency spillovers in the short, medium and long run.

The findings indicate changing relationships between the series, increased linkages during turbulent market periods and strong co-movements within the network. The ETS is recommended for diversification and hedging against uncertainty indices, whereas the GB may be suitable for long-term diversification.

This study highlights the role of climate initiatives as potential hedges and contagion amplifiers during crises, with implications for policy recommendations and the asymmetric effects on market connectedness.

The paper answers questions that previous studies have not and contributes to the literature regarding financial risk management and social responsibility.