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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.

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic is the most severe threat we have faced since World War II. So far, there have been about 5 million recorded cases, with over 300,000 fatalities globally. The epidemic is also wreaking havoc on the corporate world. People are losing their jobs and money, and no one knows when normalcy will return. So, addressing the VUCA Leadership Strategies Model is important to get more insight into this topic.

Need for the Study: According to the International Labor Organization, the pandemic might cost 195 million jobs. Even when the immediate impacts wear off, the long-term economic impact will reverberate for years. All four volatile, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) characteristics apply to the issues we confront due to the coronavirus.

Methodology: Changes caused by COVID-19 occur daily, and are unpredictable, dramatic, and quick. No one can predict precisely when the epidemic will end or when a treatment or immunisation will be available. The pandemic impacts many parts of society, including health care, business, the economy, and social life. There is no ‘best practice’ that enterprises may utilise to tackle the pandemic’s issues. The VUCA leadership strategy models will be discussed and compared in this research study.

Findings: In this moment of transition, leaders must adhere to their fundamental values, core purpose, and ambition for big, hairy, and audacious goals.

Practical Implications: In this chapter, VUCA leadership strategy models will be discussed in detail for pre- and post-pandemic scenarios and their impact on different sectors, which will be very important for researchers in the same field.

This study adopts a new macro-perspective to explore the complex and dynamic links between financial instability and the Euro-American green equity market. Its primary focus and novelty is to shed light on the non-linear and asymmetric characteristics of dependence, causality, and contagion within various time and frequency domains. Specifically, the authors scrutinize how financial instability in the U.S. and EU interacts with their respective green stock markets, while also examining the cross-impact on each other's green equity markets. The analysis is carried out over short-, medium- and long-term horizons and under different market conditions, ranging from bearish and normal to bullish.

This study breaks new ground by employing a model-free and non-parametric approach to examine the relationship between the instability of the global financial system and the green equity market performance in the U.S. and EU. This study's methodology offers new insights into the time- and frequency-varying relationship, using wavelet coherence supplemented with quantile causality and quantile-on-quantile regression analyses. This advanced approach unveils non-linear and asymmetric causal links and characterizes their signs, effectively distinguishing between bearish, normal, and bullish market conditions, as well as short-, medium- and long-term horizons.

This study's findings reveal that financial instability has a strong negative impact on the green stock market over the medium to long term, in bullish market conditions and in times of economic and extra-economic turbulence. This implies that green stocks cannot be an effective hedge against systemic financial risk during periods of turbulence and euphoria. Moreover, the authors demonstrate that U.S. financial instability not only affects the U.S. green equity market, but also has significant spillover effects on the EU market and vice versa, indicating the existence of a Euro-American contagion mechanism. Interestingly, this study's results also reveal a positive correlation between financial instability and green equity market performance under normal market conditions, suggesting a possible feedback loop effect.

This study represents pioneering work in exploring the non-linear and asymmetric connections between financial instability and the Euro-American stock markets. Notably, it discerns how these interactions vary over the short, medium, and long term and under different market conditions, including bearish, normal, and bullish states. Understanding these characteristics is instrumental in shaping effective policies to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including access to clean, affordable energy (SDG 7), and to preserve the stability of the international financial system.

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.

The case describes a hypothetical hedge fund manager who is examining whether to invest in bitcoin. The case discusses potential risks and rewards of investing in bitcoin, the role of bitcoin and digital currencies more broadly, and financial innovation in the space, such as ICOs. It can be taught as part of a second-year MBA elective course in investments, financial institutions/capital markets, or fintech.