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We study the potential effects of pension underfunding on corporate investment, financial constraints and improved employee bonding using 10 Pacific-Basin countries (including the United States, Australia, and eight Asian countries) at heterogeneous economic development stages and different regulatory environments. We document that corporate pensions are significantly underfunded in most countries of our sample in the period of 2001–2017, when interest rates were ultralow in most countries. In addition, firms from countries with stronger employee protection and more generous retirement benefits tend to show higher levels of underfunding in their defined benefit (DB) pension plans. To the extent of pension underfunding imposing constraints on corporate investment, we find that firms in these countries can face more constraints on investment when their pension is underfunded.

The Polish economy has undergone major challenges and changes over the past few decades. The country's trade flows, in particular, have become more firmly tied to the country’s Western neighbors as they have grown in volume. This study examines Poland's trade balances in ten Standard International Trade Classification (SITC) sectors versus the United States of America, first testing for and isolating structural breaks in each time series. These breaks are then included in a set of the cointegration models to examine their macroeconomic determinants.

Linear and nonlinear and nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag models, both with and without dummies corresponding to structural breaks, are estimated.

One key finding is that incorporating these breaks reduces the significance of the real exchange rate in the model, supporting the hypothesis that this variable already incorporates important information. It also results in weaker evidence for cointegration of all variables in certain sectors.

This study looks only at one pair of countries, without any third-country effects.

An important country pair's trade relations is examined; in addition, the real exchange rate is shown to incorporate economic information that results in structural changes in the economy. The paper extends the existing literature by conducting an analysis of Poland's trade balances with the USA, which have not been studied in such a context so far. A strong point is a broad methodology that lets compare the results the authors obtained with different kinds of models, both linear and nonlinear ones, with and without structural breaks.

The purpose of this study is to analyse numerous aspects affecting residential property price in Malaysia against macroeconomics issues such as gross domestic product (GDP), exchange rate, unemployment and wage.

The hedonic pricing model has been adopted as econometric model for this research to investigate the relationship between residential property price against macroeconomics indicator. The data for residential property price and macroeconomic variables were collected from 1991 to 2019. Multiple linear regression had been adopted to find the relationship between the dependent and independent variables.

The result shows that the GDP has a significant positive impact on residential property price, while exchange rate has no significant impact although it was positive. In addition, the unemployment rate has a significant impact on the residential property price and has a negative relationship. Similar to the wage that shows the negative relationship with residential property prices. Moreover, during the pandemic COVID-19 in Malaysia, this research shows a more transparent view of the relationship between residential property price and the macroeconomic issues of GDP, exchange rate, unemployment and wage.

The findings of this research found that macroeconomics issue cannot be eliminated due to Malaysia is a developing country, and there will always be an issue that will happen, but the issues can be reduced to maximise the advantages, e.g. during COVID-19, the solution to fight against COVID-19 were crucial and weaken the macroeconomics issues.

The purpose of the study is to examine the relation between board structure and firm performance variability in an international setting. The authors further explore the effect of national culture in shaping such relations.

The authors’ international sample contains 4,911 firms across 49 countries over the 2002–2017 period. The authors use national culture values on individualism and power distance developed by Hofstede (1980, 2001, 2011). The authors focus on within-firm, over-time variability of firm performance and estimate multivariate linear regressions with fixed effects. The authors address the endogeneity concern using the instrumental variable approach, and the authors’ results are robust to alternative measures of variables and different subsamples.

The authors find that firms with larger board size, greater board independence and less powerful CEOs have less variable performance. Individualism has a magnifying effect while power distance has a mitigating effect in shaping such relations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to answer the call of Adams, Hermalin and Weisbach (2010) for research on corporate boards in an international setting. It is also one of the few studies which examine the variability of firm performance, while the majority of existing literature focuses on the level of firm performance. Most importantly, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to explore the role of national culture in shaping boardroom interactions that affect the decision-making process of corporate boards, which, in turn, affects firm performance variability.

This study investigates the impact of US dollar volatility and oil rents on the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, with an emphasis on understanding how these factors influence SME financing constraints in economies with fixed currency regimes.

Employing a random effects panel regression analysis, this research considers US dollar volatility and oil rents as independent variables, with SME performance, measured through the financing gap, as the dependent variable. Controls such as trade balance, inflation deltas and gross domestic product (GDP) growth are included to isolate their effects on SME financing constraints.

The study reveals a significant positive relationship between dollar volatility and the financing gap, suggesting that increased volatility can exacerbate SME financing constraints. Conversely, oil rents did not show a significant direct influence on SME performance. The trade balance and inflation deltas were found to have significant effects, highlighting the multifaceted nature of economic variables affecting SMEs.

The study acknowledges potential biases due to omitted variables and the limitations inherent in the use of secondary data.

Findings offer pertinent guidance for SMEs and policymakers in the GCC region seeking to develop strategies that mitigate the impact of currency volatility and support SME financing.

The research provides new insights into the dynamics of SME performance within fixed currency regimes, which significantly contributes to the limited literature in this area. The paper further underscores the complex connections between global economic factors and SME financial health.

Purpose: The research determines how the COVID-19 pandemic affected India’s burgeoning education technology sector and how the new normal responded to this advancement worldwide.

Need for Study: India’s education sector saw a boom in Ed-Tech funding during the pandemic. The Indian Education industry adopted technology as a partner and succeeded in being called as the Ed-Tech capital of the world. The country has a strategic edge in online education that, if explored and researched upon, can be deployed for market growth at a global level.

Research Methodology: The researcher prioritised rigorous original quantitative and qualitative methods of investigation on technology applications in educational contexts during COVID-19 pandemic and drew its conclusions after conducting a comprehensive literature review and collecting and analysing the data from numerous journals and published expert articles on the sector.

Findings: The study found that despite the global pandemic, the Ed-Tech industry was an expanding marketplace for start-ups in India. After the pandemic, the market expanded rapidly, and by 2025, it is expected to have quadrupled in size, expenditure, and investment. It is expected that the global e-learning business, which the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has bolstered, will grow to over 400 billion US dollars by 2026.

Practical Implications: The study sets forth the various Ed-Tech categories, outlining their user bases, growth projections, and the innovative technologies employed in developing these products. The research’s long-term investment projections are envisioned to aid consultants in positioning themselves for profitable operations in the era of digital Ed-Tech disruption worldwide.

Bitcoin (BTC) is significantly correlated with global financial assets such as crude oil, gold and the US dollar. BTC and global financial assets have become more closely related, particularly since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this paper is to formulate BTC investment decisions with the aid of global financial assets.

This study suggests a more accurate prediction model for BTC trading by combining the dynamic conditional correlation generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (DCC-GARCH) model with the artificial neural network (ANN). The DCC-GARCH model offers significant input information, including dynamic correlation and volatility, to the ANN. To analyze the data effectively, the study divides it into two periods: before and during the COVID-19 outbreak. Each period is then further divided into a training set and a prediction set.

The empirical results show that BTC and gold have the highest positive correlation compared with crude oil and the USD, while BTC and the USD have a dynamic and negative correlation. More importantly, the ANN-DCC-GARCH model had a cumulative return of 318% before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and can decrease loss by 50% during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the risk-averse can turn a loss into a profit of about 20% in 2022.

The empirical analysis provides technical support and decision-making reference for investors and financial institutions to make investment decisions on BTC.

This study aims to define a “technological statecraft” concept to distinguish tech-based measures/sanctions from an array of economic measures ranging from restrictions of rare earth elements and natural gas supplies to asset freezes under the wider portfolio of economic statecraft. This concept is practically intended to reveal the USA’s “logic of choice” in its employment of technology as an efficient instrument to deal with China in the context of the great power rivalry.

This study follows David A. Baldwin’s statecraft definition and conceptualization methodology, which relies on “means” rather than “ends.” In addition to Baldwin and as an incremental contribution to his economic statecraft analysis, this study also combines national political economy with statecraft analysis with a particular focus on the utilization of technological measures against China during the Trump administration.

The US rationale for choosing technology, namely, emerging and foundational technologies, in its rivalry against China is caused at least by two factors: the nature of the external challenge and the characteristics of the US innovation model based largely on radical innovations. To deal with China, the USA practically distinguished the role of advanced technology and followed a grammer of technological statecraft as depicted in the promulgated legal texts during the Trump administration.

Despite a growing volume of literature on economic statecraft and technological competition, studies focusing on countries’ “logic of choice” with regard to why and under what conditions they choose financial, technological or commodity-based sanctions/measures/controls are lacking. Inspired from Baldwin’s account on the “logic of choice” from among alternative statecrafts (i.e. diplomacy, military, economic statecraft, and propaganda). This study will contribute to the literature with a clear lens to demonstrate the “logic of choice” from among a variety of economic statecraft measures in the case of the US technological statecraft toward China.

Might the impact of the financial stress on exchange markets be asymmetric and exposed to regime changes? Departing from the existing literature, highlighting that the domestic and foreign financial stress in terms of money market have substantial effects on exchange market, this paper aims to investigate the impacts of the bond yield spreads of three emerging countries (Mexico, Russia, and South Korea) on their exchange market pressure indices using monthly observations for the period 2010:01–2019:12. Additionally, the paper analyses the impact of bond yield spread of the US on the exchange market pressure indices of the three mentioned emerging countries. The authors hypothesized whether the negative and positive changes in the bond yield spreads have varying effects on exchange market pressure indices.

To address the research question, we measure the bond yield spread of the selected countries by using the interest rate spread between 10-year and 3-month treasury bills. At the same time, the exchange market pressure index is proxied by the index introduced by Desai et al. (2017). We base the empirical analysis on nonlinear vector autoregression (VAR) models and an asymmetric quantile-based approach.

The results of the impulse response functions indicate that increases/decreases in the bond yield spreads of Mexico, Russia and South Korea raise/lower their exchange market pressure, and the effects of shocks in the bond yield spreads of the US also lead to depreciation/appreciation pressures in the local currencies of the emerging countries. The quantile connectedness analysis, which allows for the role of regimes, reveals that the weights of the domestic and foreign bond yield spread in explaining variations of exchange market pressure indices are higher when exchange market pressure indices are not in a normal regime, indicating the role of extreme development conditions in the exchange market. The quantile regression model underlines that an increase in the domestic bond yield spread leads to a rise in its exchange market pressure index during all exchange market pressure periods in Mexico, and the relevant effects are valid during periods of high exchange market pressure in Russia. Our results also show that Russia differs from Mexico and South Korea in terms of the factors influencing the demand for domestic currency, and we have demonstrated the role of domestic macroeconomic and financial conditions in surpassing the effects of US financial stress. More specifically, the impacts of the domestic and foreign financial stress vary across regimes and are asymmetric.

This study enriches the literature on factors affecting the exchange market pressure of emerging countries. The results have significant economic implications for policymakers, indicating that the exchange market pressure index may trigger a financial crisis and economic recession.