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Each company, large or small, starts with a dream and an idea for a new product or service. Companies can succeed or fail for a wide variety of reasons, including inexperienced managers, failure to build or sell the desired product, launching products into highly competitive environments, and a lack of capital. This chapter reviews the traditional methods of capital formation, including funding by angel investors and venture capital firms. These funding methods are only available to relatively large firms, leaving millions of small firms without reliable debt and equity funding sources to scale their business. The growth of the internet, blockchain technology, and fintech firms has introduced innovative funding methods, such as crowdfunding and Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). While these structures have been successful in raising capital for smaller firms, changes in the regulatory environment, such as the JOBS Act, are needed for these new forms of capital formation to reach their full potential.

This paper aims to explore how accounting is fostering neoliberal citizenship through the participants of Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). More specifically, this paper aims to understand how accounting discourse and the management accounting technique of budgeting, when intertwined with automated administrative processes of the NDIS, are giving rise to a pastoral form of power that directs people’s behaviour toward certain ends.

Publicly available data has been crafted into an autoethnographic case study of one fictitious person’s experiences with the NDIS – Mina. Mina is an amalgam created from material submitted to the Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on the NDIS. Mina’s experiences are then analysed through the lens of Foucault’s concept of pastoral power to explore how accounting has contributed to marketising and digitising public disability services.

Accounting rhetoric appears to be a central part of rationalising the decision to shift to individualised disability funding. Those receiving payments are treated as self-governable, financially responsible subjects and are therefore expected to have knowledge of management accounting techniques and budgeting. However, NDIS’s strong reliance on the accounting concepts of funds, budgets, cost and price is limiting people’s autonomy and subjecting them to intervention and control.

This paper addresses calls to explore the interplay between accounting and current disability policies. The analysis shows that incorporating accounting into the NDIS’s algorithms serves to conceal the underlying ideology of the programs, subtly driving behaviours towards neoliberal objectives. Further, this research extends the Foucauldian accounting literature by revealing the contribution of accounting to reinforcing the authority of digital pastors in contemporary times.

Several empirical studies indicate that the existence of a large informal sector is a major obstacle to firms’ choices of innovation strategies. This paper aims to address this issue and investigates the effect of the informal sector on the innovation of formal firms in Greece.

Using the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey data, the impact of informal competition on formal firms’ innovation in Greece is investigated by testing whether formal firms use innovation as a tool to protect and sustain their competitive advantage vis-à-vis informal firms and whether overall and informal competition has an inverted-U relationship with the innovation of formal firms. The effects of bribing and other variables drawn from the empirical literature are also controlled for.

The findings fill a gap in the literature regarding the effects of the informal sector on formal economic activity in Greece, by indicating that the informal sector puts pressure on formal firms to innovate, in order to differentiate their product or service and enhance their productivity and by offering learnings to help policymakers to promote innovation in Greece.

The originality of this study is that it investigates the impact of informal competition on formal firms’ innovation in Greece, a developed economy with a large informal sector. It does so by focusing on the effects that formal firms’ informal practices have on their competitors’ innovation activities, and the role of informal competition in creating and sustaining a competitive advantage in Greece.

Informality in the tourism sector of the Philippines is a pervasive phenomenon, yet only few studies have explored the former's contribution to the latter, especially at the local level. Hence, this chapter utilizes a tourism value chain model developed by the United Nations World Tourism Organization and Directorate-General for Development and Cooperation (DEVCO) to determine the presence and examine the role of the informal sector in various spheres of Binondo's tourism industry. Findings reveal that informality is thriving in the areas of transportation, food and beverage, handicraft, leisure, excursion, tours, and support services. Conversely, they are inexistent or less visible in the accommodation and tourism assets in destination segments. Moreover, the fragmented tourism value chain of Binondo is heavily shaped by three primary challenges, namely, difference in perception between decision-makers and economic actors, resistance to change by the informal sector, and lack of relevant data to support evidence-based policymaking. To address these issues, the local government of Manila City may hence consider the following policy options: (i) mainstream a “whole-of-locality” approach, (ii) conduct an industry mapping of Binondo's tourism value chain, (iii) facilitate linkages between formal and informal businesses, (iv) develop shared infrastructure and extend capacity-building to the informal sector, and (v) employ a regulatory sandbox approach.

Informal housing stands out as a major challenge surrounding the massive reconstruction of Syrian cities, devastated by a bloody war and a terrible earthquake. The purpose of this article is to assess the adequacy of the Syrian Law to adequate provide a solution to this problem.

With the purpose of informing the question, this paper offers a legal-institutional analysis of the informal housing phenomenon and the corresponding regulatory responses in Syria. A literature review is conducted, and functional analysis of the legal texts and their effective implementation is provided.

First, informal housing in Syria has been fostered by the existence of an erratic regulation, particularly burdened by the incoherence of passing repressive provisions against informal housing while master plans were conspicuously absent or incomplete. Second, the regulatory policy seems to be leaning toward the urban renewal option, indicating a supply-oriented housing approach that may face serious challenges due to the scarcity of capital. In this context, regulation should not underestimate any policy tools at hand (renewal and upgrading; with the contribution of public, private and cooperative sectors).

Although there have been several studies on informal housing in Syria, none has taken a legal institutionalist approach. Furthermore, this study offers an up-to-date account of the problem, taking into account the problematic after the 2023 earthquake and the content of Law 2/2023.

Press reports have indicated that firms frequently underprice restricted stock and employee stock options. I test for underpricing of stock and options.

I examined a sample of 5,333 private firm stock and option issuances between 1985 and 2017. I tested for underpricing using two approaches: assuming investors have no special market-timing ability and assuming instead they have perfect market-timing ability.

I find evidence of widespread stock and option underpricing by private firms before they go public reflecting large discounts that exceed reasonable compensation for lack of marketability. Unreported underpricing is more frequent in the last pre-IPO private equity transactions that offer the last opportunity to give such discounts before the stock is publicly traded, but the discounts are greater in the earlier pre-IPO transactions where unreported discounts are presumably tougher for the SEC to detect. Underpricing is still detected even when the actual DLOMs are tested against a benchmark that assumes investors have perfect market-timing ability.

Firms frequently underprice restricted stock and employee stock options. Firms tend to underprice stock options more frequently than restricted stock, but restricted stock tends to be priced at deeper discounts when recipients are assumed not to have any special market-timing ability.

Private firms issue restricted stock and options as incentive compensation. Lowballing the valuation transfers wealth from outside stockholders to employees/insiders. Wealth transfers take place through the issuance of equity claims to employees/insiders before firms go public. I found that more than a quarter of the DLOMs exceed the theoretical maximum by, on average, between 16% (median) and 20% (mean). This finding raises two questions worthy of investigation. First, to what extent do the frequency and magnitude of DLOMs above the theoretical maximum depend on whether a board of directors obtains an independent appraisal of a stock’s fair market value? Second, if DLOMs above the theoretical maximum are observed even when the stock is independently appraised, how do appraisers justify such large DLOMs?

The wealth transfers that take place through the issuance of equity claims to employees/insiders before firms go public benefit employees/insiders at the expense of outside shareholders.

My paper is the first to furnish evidence of widespread stock and option underpricing by private firms before they go public; demonstrate that the unreported underpricing is more frequent in the last pre-IPO private equity transactions that offer the last opportunity to give such discounts before the stock is publicly traded and show that the discounts are greater in the earlier pre-IPO transactions where unreported discounts are presumably tougher for the SEC to detect.

The chapter explores the implications of digitalization on the informal economy of Ghana, focusing on the agricultural, microcredit, transportation, and retail sectors. The study was designed as a qualitative study with data collected from books, articles, government reports, business reports, and newspapers. The data collected were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The study argues that in the agricultural sector, e-agriculture initiatives and digital tools have improved farming practices, providing timely scientific knowledge to farmers and increasing yields. The microcredit sector has been transformed through digital financial services, which have expanded financial inclusion, lowered costs, and simplified regulatory compliance. In the transportation sector, digital platforms like Uber and local startups have streamlined operations, improved safety, and created economic opportunities for drivers. Additionally, e-commerce platforms have facilitated stock ordering and delivery for retailers, reducing downtime and formalizing their transactions. These digital innovations are crucial in enhancing the formalization of the informal economy in Ghana, providing numerous benefits for businesses and individuals in these sectors.

In recent years, new and technologically innovative financial products and services, generally subsumed under the fintech umbrella, have permeated all areas of capital markets at an exponential rate. Primarily driven by developments in Web3 and advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), fintech solutions offer valuable benefits to all existing markets and participants and are the basis for introducing wholly new segments to classic capital market ecosystems. However, this increasing fintech adaptation does not come without challenges. Due to the technologies' nascent nature and often unregulated status, many products are susceptible to manipulation and fraud. The result can be sizable investor losses and excessive regulatory and public scrutiny. This chapter highlights the most essential and prominent fintech solutions used in capital markets today, along with their features, value additiveness, and degree of adaptation.