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This study aims to explore the relationship between firm risk, capital structure, cost of equity capital and social and environmental sustainability during the COVID-19 pandemic for companies listed on Tehran Stock Exchange.

To this aim, the information about 190 companies in 2014–2020 was retrieved to be analyzed. The total risk and systematic risk were used as the indicators of company risk; the industry-adjusted earnings price ratio (IndEP) and GORDON were used for the cost of equity capital. To measure social sustainability and environmental sustainability, the procedure suggested by Arianpoor and Salehi (2020) was used.

Underleveraged firms have had a lower total risk during the COVID-19 pandemic, while overleveraged firms have not had a higher risk during this time. In overleveraged firms, using systematic risk has a negative impact on social sustainability during the COVID-19 pandemic. In overleveraged firms, using total risk and systematic risk has a significant negative impact on environmental sustainability in the pandemic. Besides, overleveraged firms have a lower cost of equity capital (IndEP) during COVID-19.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no similar study has so far examined the joint impact of COVID-19 and corporate risk on social and environmental sustainability and also the joint impact of COVID-19 and capital structure on the cost of equity. This study contributes to the related literature by providing corporations with insightful post-pandemic directions on capital structure decisions and social and environmental activities. Furthermore, this research and the relevant findings can help understand and develop social responsibility in Iran as a developing country.

Urban rail projects are typically large-scale transport infrastructure projects (megaprojects) which have many potential risks that can influence the strategic goals of owners. However, there is a paucity of studies which explore the impact of risks on both “urban rail” project time and cost together considering quantitative assessments. Therefore, this paper focuses on investigating critical risks and quantifying such risk impacts on urban railway project schedule and cost in practice.

A combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods comprising semi-interviews with five experts and a questionnaire survey of 132 professional respondents is used. The data were modeled using Monte Carlo Simulation to predict the probability of project schedule and cost.

The results show that 30 risk variables are categorized into seven main groups which have significant impacts on both project time and cost. Outstanding five risk variables were highlighted as follows: (1) project site clearance and land compensation; (2) design changes; (3) physical project resources; (4) contractors’ competencies and (5) project finance. Such findings were supported by Monte Carlo simulation which predicted in the worst case that the project may suffer 11.03 months’ delays and have cost overrun with a contingency of US$287.68 million.

This study expands our knowledge about time and cost contingency of urban metro railway implementation across developing economies and particularly within the context of Vietnam. Policymakers will not only gain an understanding about risk structure but will also recognize the significant impacts of critical risk through risk impact modeling and simulation. Such an approach provides insights into risk treatment priorities for planners so that they can proactively establish suitable strategies for risk mitigation in practice.

Disruptions at ports may destroy the planned ship schedules profoundly, which is an imperative operation problem that shipping companies need to overcome. This paper attempts to help shipping companies cope with port disruptions through recovery scheduling.

This paper studies the ship coping strategies for the port disruptions caused by severe weather. A novel mixed-integer nonlinear programming model is proposed to solve the ship schedule recovery problem (SSRP). A distributionally robust mean conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) optimization model was constructed to handle the SSRP with port disruption uncertainties, for which we derive tractable counterparts under the polyhedral ambiguity sets.

The results show that the size of ambiguity set, confidence level and risk-aversion parameter can significantly affect the optimal values, decision-makers should choose a reasonable parameter combination. Besides, sailing speed adjustment and handling rate adjustment are effective strategies in SSRP but may not be sufficient to recover the schedule; therefore, port skipping and swapping are necessary when multiple or longer disruptions occur at ports.

Since the port disruption is difficult to forecast, we attempt to take the uncertainties into account to achieve more meaningful results. To the best of our knowledge, there is barely a research study focusing on the uncertain port disruptions in the SSRP. Moreover, this is the first paper that applies distributionally robust optimization (DRO) to deal with uncertain port disruptions through the equivalent counterpart of DRO with polyhedral ambiguity set, in which a robust mean-CVaR optimization formulation is adopted as the objective function for a trade-off between the expected total costs and the risk.

This study aims to investigate the association between corporate tax avoidance and environmental costs and disclosure in Indonesia and Australia for the research period 2015–2019. This study also analyzes corporate strategies for overcoming public concerns about tax avoidance activities, namely, the trade-off legitimacy and risk reduction strategies, through two mechanisms: the mediation and moderation roles of environmental disclosure on the relationship between environmental costs and tax avoidance activities.

The data consists of 675 and 235 observations for Australia and Indonesia, respectively, which were analyzed quantitatively using panel regression.

The results showed that the trade-off legitimacy or risk reduction strategies are not found to be implemented by companies in Indonesia, while in Australia, corporations use the trade-off legitimacy strategy to reduce risk and overcome the negative impact of tax avoidance activities. The results also provide empirical evidence on the impact of environmental costs on environmental disclosure in both countries.

This study contributes to the literature by providing the latest evidence on the role of environmental costs on environmental disclosure, which has rarely been investigated in previous studies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between CEOs' inside debt holdings (pension benefits and deferred compensation) and the operating leverage of the firms they manage, with the aim to examine whether CEO incentives play a role in corporate risk-taking.

The authors investigate the relation between CEO inside debt holdings (CIDH) (pension benefits and deferred compensation) and the operating leverage (DOL) of the firms they manage. Using a sample of 11,145 US firm-year observations over the period 2006–2017, the authors find a strong negative association between CIDH and DOL. Additional analyses reveal that the relationship between CIDH and DOL is more pronounced in firms with heightened agency issues, powerful CEOs and for CEOs with stronger professional networks. The results are robust to various sensitivity and endogeneity tests.

The authors find strong evidence confirming the expected negative association between CEO inside debt and DOL suggesting that firms with higher inside debt tend to maintain lower levels of operating leverage. These findings continue to hold with the alternative measure for the inside debt and operating leverage, and across a range of tests designed to rule out the possibility that the primary findings are in any way driven by potential endogeneity. In addition, the findings demonstrate that the presence of manager-shareholder agency conflicts can strengthen the inside debt–DOL relationship suggesting the strong role of inside debt in reducing firm risk.

Findings in this paper have implications for design of compensation structures so that corporate boards can establish incentives as a tool for risk management. A limitation of this study is that it is focused on one market, i.e. US listed companies, so the findings may not be applicable on a global scale.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that links firm-level management of operating leverage through design of CEO inside debt incentives (two obvious choices for risk-reduction at the CEOs’ disposal include reducing financial risk through reduction of firm leverage and reducing operating risk through reduction of operating leverage). While use of firm leverage as an instrument of choice has been explored in the past, use of operating leverage to achieve risk reduction when CEO possess high inside holding, has received very little attention.

This article analyzes the moderating role of investment opportunities, business risk and agency costs in shaping the nexus between excess cash and corporate performance.

This research uses dynamic regression models (two-step system generalized method of moments) to analyze the data related to 200 Turkish companies listed on Borsa Istanbul (BIST) for the years between 2009 and 2020.

The findings indicate that when excess cash increases, the financial performance deteriorates only for firms with lower investments compared to firms with more investments. In addition, investment contributes to better financial performance for firms that hold cash surplus, whereas the influence of investment is insignificant for firms that have insufficient cash. Agency costs of equity exacerbate the adverse impact of excess cash on financial performance while agency costs of debt mitigate this effect. Excess cash reduces the financial performance of highly leveraged firms. However, this impact becomes insignificant when debt ratio decreases. The findings also show that investment has more significant role than business risk in building the precautionary motive to hold cash.

The findings of this article are limited to the Turkish market. Future research is still needed in other emerging markets to compare the results and reveal more about the effect of excess cash on firm performance, and how other factors can change this effect.

The findings verify the increased significance of excess cash in the presence of investment opportunities and difficulties in accessing external funds. Nevertheless, the role of the equity related agency problem in reducing the benefits of cash surplus confirms the necessity of policies that support corporate governance, especially in emerging markets.

This article, according to the knowledge of author, is the first to examine the role of agency costs associated with debt and equity, and the compound effect of investment opportunities and business risk on the nexus between excess internal funds and corporate financial performance in emerging markets.

Interest rate derivatives (IRDs) are the essential components of financial risk management and are used across various industry sectors. The objective is to analyze the differences in approach to managing interest rate risks between the Indian corporates that execute IRDs and the ones that do not.

Interest rate fluctuations require Indian corporates to hedge their exposures in foreign currency interest rates. This is all the more true for mid-sized corporates because of their balance sheet exposures. Additionally, they may not have the resources to formulate risk management policies. This paper analyzes data collected from financial statements of a diverse set of companies that use IRD and helps in formulating such a strategy.

The results indicate significant differences for some of the parameters like information asymmetry and agency cost between users and non-users of IRDs. The study further suggests causality between users of derivatives and parameters like size, growth and debt.

The study compares users and non-users of IRDs, thereby identifying factors unique to users of IRDs. It also studies causality relations which explain the motivation to do IRDs. Thus, it enables risk managers to use this as a reference point to decide on their strategies.

While there are multiple studies across geographies and sectors including commercial banks in India on the usage of interest rate swaps, this study focuses on Indian mid-tier corporates. Furthermore, the study distinguishes between users and non-users based on financial parameters, which in turn would provide a framework for decision-hedging strategies.

This study investigates the role of market concentration and efficiency in banking system stability during the COVID-19 pandemic. We empirically test the hypothesis that market concentration and efficiency are significant determinants of bank performance and stability during the time of crises, using a sample of 575 banks in 20 countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

The main sources of bank data are the BankScope and BankFocus (Bureau van Dijk) databases, World Bank development indicators, and official websites of banks in MENA countries. This study combined descriptive and analytical approaches. We utilize a panel dataset and adopt panel data econometric techniques such as fixed/random effects and the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator.

The results reveal that market concentration negatively affects bank profitability, whereas improved efficiency further enhances bank performance and contributes to the banking sector’s overall stability. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that during the COVID-19 pandemic, bank stability strongly depended on the level of market concentration, but not on bank efficiency. However, more efficient banks are more profitable and stable if the banking institutions are Islamic. Similarly, Islamic banks with the same level of efficiency demonstrated better overall financial performance during the pandemic than their conventional peers did.

The main limitation is related to the period of COVID-19 pandemic that was covered in this paper (2020–2021). Therefore, further investigation of the COVID-19 effects on bank profitability and risk will require an extended period of the pandemic crisis, including 2022.

This study provides information that will enable bank managers and policymakers in MENA countries to assess the growing impact of market concentration and efficiency on the banking sector stability. It also helps them in formulating suitable strategies to mitigate the adverse consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our recommendations are useful guides for policymakers and regulators in countries where Islamic and conventional banking systems co-exist and compete, based on different business models and risk management practices.

The authors contribute to the banking stability literature by investigating the role of market concentration and efficiency as the main determinants of bank performance and stability during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study is the first to analyze banking sector stability in the MENA region, using both individual and risk-adjusted aggregated performance measures.

This study aims to empirically examine environment, social, and governance (ESG) as an effective strategy to reduce major impediments for a corporation in the form of costs of capital (COC) and systematic risk, especially for emerging markets such as India.

A sample of 114 Indian firms from eight prominent industries based on Thomson Reuters classification (TRBC) are used in the study. A panel regression with industry-fixed effects is carried out to account for industry heterogeneity. For robustness, the authors also carry out a matched sample analysis.

The authors observe a negative and significant relationship between ESG performance with COC and systematic risk, respectively. For the pillar-wise analysis, the authors observe that only governance performance is negatively and significantly related to COC whereas the environmental and social performances are negative and insignificant. For ESG pillar level analysis for beta, the authors observe that all pillars are negative and significant, thus making a case for how firms can fine-tune their ESG strategies according to each pillar.

As the ESG concept is still in a very nascent stage, data availability is a definite challenge in India.

As ESG is increasingly becoming relevant for multiple stakeholders, this study aims to provide evidence that can potentially guide the regulators, practitioners, and academicians to address the contemporary needs of these stakeholders, while also doing good for the firm in the traditional sense.

The transition to a sustainable economy is a challenge for emerging economies, especially for a country like India where stakeholders are not only varied but also huge in number. With this study's contribution towards an incremental understanding of ESG, Indian regulators and policymakers can bring forward mandates as to ESG compliances that are rewarding for the firms and give them enough impetus towards complying with ESG norms.

The extant literature on ESG majorly discusses the relationship between ESG performance and financial performance. This study addresses the lacuna of the relationship of ESG with COC and beta in the Indian context.

The construction industry has struggled to deliver schemes on time to budget and right-first-time (RFT). There have been many studies into nonconformance and rework through quantitative research over the years to understand why the industry continues to see similar issues of failure. Some scholars have reported rework figures as high as 12.6% of total contract value, highlighting major concerns of the sustainability of construction projects. Separately, however, there have been few studies that explore and detail the views of industry professions who are caught in the middle of quality issues, to understand their perceptions of where the industry is failing. As such, this paper interrogates qualitative data (open-ended questions) on the topic of nonconformance and rework in construction to understand what industry professionals believe are the causes and suggested improvement areas.

A qualitative approach is adopted for this research. An industry survey consisting of seven open-ended questions is presented to two professional working groups within a Tier 1 contractor, and outputs are analysed using statistic software (NVivo 12) to identify prominent themes for discussion. Inductive analysis is undertaken to gain further insight into responses to yield recurrent areas for continuous improvement.

Qualitative analysis of the survey reveals a persistent prioritisation of cost and programme over quality management in construction project. Furthermore, feedback from construction professionals present a number of improvement areas that must be addressed to improve quality. These include increased training and competency investment, overhauling quality behaviours, providing greater quality leadership direction and reshaping the way clients govern schemes.

There are limitations to this paper that require noting. Firstly, the survey was conducted within one principal contractor with varying levels of knowledge across multiple sectors. Secondly, the case study was from one major highways scheme; therefore, the generalisability of the findings is limited. It is suggested that a similar exercise is undertaken in other sectors to uncover similar improvement avenues.

The implications of this study calls for quality to be re-evaluated at project, company, sector and government levels to overhaul how quality is delivered. Furthermore, the paper identifies critical learning outcomes for the construction sector to take forward, including the need to reassess projects to ensure they are appropriately equip with competent personnel under a vetted, progressive training programme, share collaborative behaviours that value quality delivery on an equal standing to safety, programme and cost and tackle the inappropriate resource dilemmas projects finding themselves in through clear tendering and accurate planning. In addition, before making erratic decisions, projects must assess the risk profiling of proceed without approved design details and include the client in the decision-making process. Moreover, the findings call for a greater collaborative environment between the construction team and quality management department, rather than being seen as obstructive (i.e. compliance based policing). All of these must be driven by leadership to overhaul the way quality is managed on schemes. The findings demonstrate the importance and impact from open-ended survey response data studies to enhance quantitative outcomes and help provide strengthened proposals of improvement.

This paper addresses the highly sensitive area of quality failure outcomes and interrogates them via an industry survey within a major UK contractor for feedback. Unique insights are gained into how industry professionals perceive quality in construction. From previous research, this has been largely missing and offers a valuable addition in understanding the “quality status quo” from those delivering schemes.