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This work aims to investigate the current financial structure of Italian agri-food micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to understand how MSMEs face innovation challenges, which are also required to support sustainable development.

To reach the goal, an empirical longitudinal analysis is performed on a sample of Italian agri-food firms. In detail, to highlight the changes in the use of financial sources between 2013 and 2019, a descriptive ratio analysis is carried out on the data extracted by the AIDA database. In addition, statistical analyses were performed, including t-tests and U Mann–Whitney. Finally, a fixed-effects model is created to analyse the panel data. To ensure homogeneity, the sub-sectors of production and transformation are separately considered.

The financial structure analysis shows an increase in the equity percentage in the funding sources, attributable to an attempt to compensate for the reduction of banks' funding. However, even though this change has not compromised firms' profitability, the undercapitalisation of companies is still present. Therefore, more equity investments are required to support the innovation process.

The value of the present research is to highlight the choice of using new alternative financing sources instead of traditional banks' credit to implement sustainable and innovative development Italian agri-food sector (AFS). This choice is forced by reducing finance from banks and other financial institutions because of the credit crunch. This issue is even more relevant, considering that MSMEs have structural financial problems but have to fulfil the mission of pursuing innovation in the same way as large companies. Therefore, this paper expands the literature on agri-food, delving into an issue typical of MSMEs and combining agri-food with the need for innovation.

It is over five years since the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) initiated a rapid programme of economic reforms. Although substantial progress has been achieved within this short period, especially with regard to price and monetary reforms, trade liberalisation and privatisation of large state‐owned enterprises, the majority of these countries have yet to develop a properly functioning financial market to accommodate the financing needs of the growing population of privatised firms. While considerable progress has been made in reforming and modernising the banking and financial sectors, the undercapitalisation of banks and the limited capacity of financial institutions to fill the capital gap (Dockery, 1995) have tended to cause slowness in restructuring the enterprises and general economic progress. The continuing demands for investment capital by the newly privatised firms (and those in the process) require active support of financial institutions to provide the much needed capital in the emerging market economy.

Although the microfinance sector in developing countries has seen an impressive development in recent years, many small-scale farmers in rural areas are still undersupplied with capital. One of the main reasons for this undercapitalization is the exposure to weather risks. Weather index insurance is assumed to bear high potential for accelerating agricultural lending. The index design hereby is of particular importance. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the influence of evapotranspiration and precipitation indices on the credit risk of farmers in Madagascar.

The authors base the analysis on a unique borrower data set provided by a commercial microfinance institution in Madagascar and weather data provided by CelsiusPro. In this context, evapotranspiration and precipitation indices both at aggregated bank level and at branch level are identified and their influence on credit risk of small-scale rice farmers is estimated.

The results show that the weather-related part of the credit risk of farmers can be better explained by an evapotranspiration then by a precipitation index. The precipitation index underestimates the weather influence on credit risk especially during the harvesting season. The results suggest a potential for weather index insurance which is based on an evapotranspiration index. The results are of similar importance for developed and developing countries.

The results suggest that, should insurance be considered as an appropriate risk management instrument for the farmers or the bank, weather index insurance has the potential to mitigate a certain part of the credit risk. The authors also find that the focus on precipitation-based index insurance products would underestimate the weather influence on credit risk. Furthermore, the results suggest that insurance products should be tailored to branches to be most effective.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that compares the explanatory values of evapotranspiration and precipitation indices in general and for the credit risk of small-scale farmers in particular.

Today's academic literature on new technology-based firms is rather growth and success-oriented, despite the fact that many valuable lessons can be learned from failures. This study aims at contributing to our understanding of failure processes by documenting five case studies of spin-offs that originated from European universities. Within the framework of the resource-based view of the firm and social capital theory, the venture's resource base is used as a central element in explaining the failures through the presence or absence of certain resources or by inappropriate application. The analysis mainly illustrated the negative influence of the lack of a champion, poor market development, the absence of market(ing) experience in the venture team and an unbalanced shareholder structure. The relatively small financial base seems rarely to be the main issues in the failure process.

The increasing demand for highly differentiated products in today’s enterprise economies has emphasized the small firms’ comparative advantage over larger firms. Business mortality rates, however, remained very high among more vulnerable start‐up businesses still in their earliest stage of business development. The challenges experienced by agribusiness entrepreneurs and their counterparts from other industries in their start‐up years are analyzed using case‐study research techniques. Results indicate that highly differentiated start‐up conditions between industries and among firms usually resulted in varied survival strategies. Notable differences include pricing policies dependent on market structures, more consultative management styles, inadequate start‐up resources, and preferences for brand new equipment.

The authors provide a comprehensive study on systemic risk of the banking sectors in the ASEAN-6 countries. In particular, they investigate the systemic risk dynamics and determinants of 49 listed banks in the region over the 2000–2018 period.

The authors employ the market-based SRISK measure of Brownlees and Engle (2017) to investigate the systemic risk of the ASEAN-6's banking sectors.

The authors find that the regional systemic risk fluctuates significantly and currently at par or higher level than that of the recent global financial crisis. Systemic risk is generally associated with banks that have bigger size, more traditional business models, lower quality in their loan portfolios, less profitable and with lower market-to-book values. However, these relationships vary significantly between ASEAN countries.

The research focuses on the systemic risk of ASEAN-6 countries. Therefore, the research results may lack generalizability to other countries.

The authors’ empirical evidence advocates the use of capital surcharges on the systemically important financial institutions. Although the region has been pushing to higher financial integration in recent years, the authors encourage the regional regulators to account for the idiosyncratic characteristics of their banking sectors in designing effective macroprudential policy to contain systemic risk.

This paper provides the first study on the systemic risk of the ASEAN-6 region. The empirical evidence on the drivers of systemic risk would be of interest to the regional regulators.

The instability of the relationships which Export Management Companies have with their Manufacturer‐Suppliers is, perhaps, the most pressing problem which the EMCs have in their long‐term development as viable export marketing channel entities. Three different variables were empirically tested as possibly affecting the stability of EMC/M‐S relationships: (1) the “operating arrangement” which the EMC has with the M‐S; (2) whether or not the EMC “takes title” to products which it markets abroad; and (3) the size of a given M‐S's export sales generated by the EMC. All three variables were shown to affect the stability of the EMC/M‐S dyadic relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the financial structure of Italian cooperatives in the period before and during the crisis (2004-2013), in relation to two discriminating factors. At this end, it focuses on two research questions: What financial dynamics the Italian cooperatives have involved before, during and after the 2008 crisis, that is, in the decade 2004/2013? Are there statistically differences between business sectors and geographic area?

Secondary data on AIDA database have been used. The financial structure is assessed using two ratios: the financial leverage ratio and quick ratio. The final sample consists of 1,446 cooperatives. The trend and exploratory analysis, analysis of variance and Tukey-Kramer post-hoc test have been used.

The financial structure of cooperatives has not been substantially affected by the crisis in any geographic area and business sector, by virtue of resilience of their business model. Moreover, these two factors produce statistically significant differences in the financial structure of cooperatives.

The study takes into account only the cooperatives that survived the crisis, so, presumably, the strongest. Moreover, another and more ratios should be considered at the end to have a more complete view on the financial dynamics.

The literature on resilience of cooperatives is still not very rich. Moreover, this work analyses and integrates aspects and approaches that are not usually considered together.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between the volume of investment deposits and capitalization of Islamic commercial banks.

Unlike current accounts holders, investment accounts holders may support part or all of the losses on assets value, which could be a source of moral hazard among bank managers and shareholders. To test these assumptions, the authors use the system generalized method of moments (system GMM) on a dynamic panel of 59 Islamic banks observed during the period 2005‐2009.

After controlling for a set of variables that may influence capital level, the results show a significant negative relationship between PSIA and regulatory capital ratio. This may indicate that the specific nature of PSIA can be a source of excessive risk‐taking in Islamic banks. This behavior is likely to threaten the solvency of Islamic banks and shows that some deficiencies may exist in their risk management and governance system.

This paper suggests some recommendations to better implement the principle of profit and loss sharing and to curb excessive risk‐taking in Islamic banks.

The originality of this paper is to give empirical responses to theoretical assumptions of a relationship between PSIA and moral hazard in Islamic banks.