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This paper aims to explore how historical context influences the content and selection of rhetorical legitimation strategies. Using case study method, this paper will focus on how insurance companies and labor tried to defend their legitimacy in the context of enactment of Medicare in the USA. What factors influenced the strategic (rhetorical) decisions made by insurance companies and labor unions in their institutional work?

The study is empirically grounded in archival research, involving an analysis of over 9,000 pages of congressional hearings on Medicare covering the period 1958–1965.

The authors show that rhetorical legitimation strategies depend significantly on the specific historical circumstances in which those strategies are used. The historical context lent credibility to certain arguments and organizations are forced to decide either to challenge widely held assumptions or take advantage of them. The authors show that organizations face strong incentives to pursue the latter option. Here, both the insurance companies and labor unions tried to show that their positions were consistent with classical liberal ideology, because of high respect of classical liberal principles among different stakeholders (policymakers, voters, etc.).

It is uncertain how much the results of the study could be generalized. More information about the organizations whose use of rhetorics the authors studied could have strengthened our conclusions.

The practical relevancy of the revised paper is that the authors should not expect hegemony challenging rhetorics from organizations, which try to influence legislators (and perhaps the larger public). Perhaps (based on the findings), this kind of rhetorics is not even very effective.

The paper helps to understand better how organizations try to advance their interests and gain acceptance among the stakeholders.

In this paper, the authors show how historical context in practice influence rhetorical arguments organizations select in public debates when their goal is to influence the decision-making of their audience. In particular, the authors show how dominant ideology (or ideologies) limit the options organizations face when they are choosing their strategies and arguments. In terms of the selection of rhetorical justification strategies, the most pressing question is not the “real” broad based support of certain ideologies. Insurance company and labor union representatives clearly believed that they must emphasize liberal values (or liberal ideology) if they wanted to gain legitimacy for their positions. In existing literature, it is often assumed that historical context influence the selection of rhetorical strategies but how this in fact happens is not usually specified. The paper shows how interpretations of historical contexts (including the ideological context) in practice influence the rhetorical strategies organizations choose.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between voluntary disclosure and the cost of capital as a direct relationship and as an indirect relationship mediated by information asymmetry. It provides evidence from Jordan as a developing economy.

The sample was selected from the companies listed in the first market of the Amman Stock Exchange during the period 2010–2019. Four exclusion criteria were used in selecting the companies for analysis.

The findings show that the cost of capital and information asymmetry are negatively affected by voluntary disclosure, as well as that the cost of capital is positively affected by information asymmetry. In addition, information asymmetry does not mediate the relationship between voluntary disclosure and the cost of capital.

This research looks at the mediating effect of information asymmetry in the relationship between voluntary disclosure and the cost of capital; thus, it provides new explanations about it using empirical evidence from a developing economy. As a necessary consequence, this research has the potential to significantly contribute to the existing body of knowledge and literature in this field.

There is extensive literature on the determinants of job tenure insecurity. However, very little is known about the individual drivers of labour market insecurity. Additionally, while a piece of literature shows that volunteering improves workers' income, no study considers volunteering as an activity which could help workers to feel more confident about their perception of labour market insecurity if they lost or resigned their jobs. Therefore, purpose of this paper is to study whether workers who volunteer are less likely to perceive labour market insecurity.

The paper employs data from the sixth European working conditions survey which provides a great deal of information on working conditions. For the empirical investigation, probit model as well as robustness analysis have been implemented.

Results show that employees who do voluntary activities have a greater likelihood of declaring perceived labour market insecurity, which is nearly 3 percentage points lower, than employees who do not volunteer. Findings suggest that governments need to improve the relationship between for-profit and non-profit sectors to encourage volunteering.

This is the first study which considers volunteering as an activity which could help workers to feel more confident about their perception of “labour market insecurity”. Most of the studies on “labour market insecurity” do not focus on the workers individual characteristics but mainly on the labour markets institutional characteristics and welfare regimes differences.

This study aims to investigate the equity market reaction to sustainability disclosure measures derived from firms' inaugural sustainability reports following the implementation of mandatory sustainability reporting in Singapore.

This study explores the equity market reaction to first-time sustainability reports of mandatory adopters and compares the reactions between voluntary and mandatory adopters. To mitigate any imbalanced distribution effects, entropy balancing techniques are employed.

The author observes a significant equity market reaction when mandatory adopters adhere to a reporting framework and release sustainability reports as standalone documents. Additionally, the study indicates that government regulation amplifies the equity market reaction for companies that include a board statement within their sustainability reports and present them as standalone publications.

The lack of quantitative information disclosed in the first-time sustainability reports may restrict the generalizability of the findings.

The findings provide valuable insights for organizations and managers to evaluate the market's response to sustainability disclosures and improve communication effectiveness with investors. Furthermore, the study has direct policy implications for global standard-setting organizations in sustainability reporting. The findings support the notion that investors value market-led and investor-focused sustainability disclosures.

The study contributes to the limited body of research that examines the capital market effects of mandatory sustainability disclosures. To the author’s knowledge, this is among a few studies to directly investigate the equity market reaction to mandatory sustainability disclosures at the firm level.

This study aims to assess if the voluntary reporting of adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), a widely used non-generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) measure, has effects on information asymmetry and value relevance and how the adjustments to GAAP earnings made to derive it contribute to these effects. This study focuses on firms from two countries with contrasting institutional settings, Canada and France.

Relying on multivariate analyses and using Heckman’s procedure to address the sample self-selection issue, this study first estimates the likelihood of a firm to report adjusted EBITDA. Then, this study examines if adjusted EBITDA, as well as the adjustments made to GAAP earnings to derive adjusted EBITDA (adjustments), affect a firm’s information asymmetry and its value. These adjustments are essentially GAAP-grounded items that are discarded by management to derive non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA. The dependent variables are share price volatility, as a proxy for information asymmetry, alongside market-to-book and stock market return as indicators of value.

In terms of the used sample, results suggest that Canadian firms are much more likely to report adjusted EBITDA than French firms. Chief executive officer (CEO) attributes (CEO power) appears to increase such likelihood. Moreover, for both Canadian and French firms, adjusted EBITDA is associated with reduced stock market volatility, an indication of lower information asymmetry, as well as higher market-to-book and returns, suggesting value relevance. The results also indicate that investors view the adjustments to GAAP earnings made by management to derive adjusted EBITDA as not value relevant (similar to noise). The GAAP-grounded elements that management discard to derive adjusted EBITDA actually increase information asymmetry.

This study adds to prior research on the interface between a CEO attributes and governance and non-GAAP reporting. This study also provides evidence that, despite very different institutional settings, non-GAAP reporting conveys relevant information to capital markets’ participants in both France and Canada. Hence, a country’s institutional setting may have a differential impact on the disclosure choice but not on the resulting value relevance of such disclosure. Finally, this study extends the non-GAAP literature by examining the value relevance of a widely used yet under-researched measure, adjusted EBITDA.

This study aims to explore the status and drivers (including free-floated shares, board size, rule duality and board independence) of corporate risk disclosure (CRD) for the conventional listed banks in the Egyptian stock market from 2010 to 2021, which include the country’s major political upheavals and the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study based on a sample of 117 annual reports of sampled banks from 2010 to 2021. RD index of Al-Maghzom (2016) was developed and adopted to quantify CRD using an unweighted scoring system. The multiple linear regression model was used to validate the hypotheses.

The analysis shows that the COVID-19 pandemic increased insignificantly disclosure of all risks except for segment risks. In addition, findings reveal that all sampled banks adhere highly to the requirements of mandatory RD, with a low level of adherence to voluntary RD. Moreover, the analysis concluded that the board size and free-floating shares positively affect the disclosure of financial, operational, general information.

The study’s limitations include the content analysis methodology, reliance on annual reports, emphasis on financial and non-financial risks, focus on listed conventional banks in Egypt.

Current study’s findings are more likely to be useful for many parties. It informs investors about the characteristics of the boards’ directors of Egyptian listed banks that disclosed risk information. Banks should disclose more comprehensive risk information. For academics, the current study’s limitations can be considered in their future research.

This work fills a new research area in which there is relatively little research in emerging financial markets that adds new evidence to the relationship between RD and both free-floating shares and board characteristics, particularly in Egypt.

The regulatory design of Indian stock market provides us with the opportunity to disaggregate initial returns into two categories, i.e. voluntary premarket underpricing and post market mispricing. This study explores the impact of investor attention on the disaggregated short-run returns and long-run performance of initial public offerings (IPOs).

The study employs regression techniques on the sample of IPOs listed from 2005 to 2019. It measures investor attention with the help of the Google Search Volume Index (GSVI) extracted from Google Trends. Along with GSVI, the subscription rate is used as a proxy to measure investor attention.

The empirical results suggest a positive and significant relationship between initial returns and investor attention, thus validating the attention theory for Indian IPOs. Furthermore, when the returns are analysed for a more extended period using buy-and-hold abnormal returns (BHARs), it was found that price reversal holds in the long run.

This study highlights the importance of information diffusion in the market. It emphasizes the behavioural tendency of the investors in the pre-market, which reduces the market efficiency. Hence, along with fundamentals, investor attention also plays an essential role in deciding the returns for an IPO.

According to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies that has attempted to explore the influence of investor attention and its interplay with underpricing and long-run performance for IPOs of Indian markets.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

The authors target the interrelationships between non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized finance (DeFi) and carbon allowances (CA) markets during 2021–2023. The recent shift of crypto and DeFi miners from China (the People's Republic of China, PRC) green hydro energy to dirty fuel energies elsewhere induces investments in carbon offsetting instruments; this is a backdrop to the authors’ investigation.

The quantile vector autoregression (VAR) approach is employed to examine extreme-quantile-connectedness and spillovers among the NFT Index (NFTI), DeFi Pulse Index (DPI), KraneShares Global Carbon Strategy ETF price (KRBN) and the Solactive Carbon Emission Allowances Rolling Futures Total Return Index (SOLCARBT).

At bull markets, DPI is the only consistent net shock transmitter as NFTI transmits innovations only at the most extreme quantile. At bear markets, KRBN and SOLCARBT are net shock transmitters, while NFTI is the only consistent net shock receiver. The receiver-transmitter roles change as a function of the market conditions. The increases in the relative tail dependence correspond to the stress events, which make systemic connectedness augment, turning market-specific idiosyncratic considerations less relevant.

The shift of digital asset miners from the PRC has resulted in excessive fuel energy consumption and aggravated environmental consequences regarding NFTs and DeFi mining. Although there exist numerous studies dedicated to CA trading and its role in carbon print reduction, the direct nexus between NFT, DeFi and CA has never been addressed in the literature. The originality of the authors’ research consists in bridging this void. Results are valuable for portfolio managers in bull and bear markets, as the authors show that connectedness is more intense under such conditions.

Ethiopia has enacted laws on transparency and disclosure of information in state-owned enterprises (SOEs). However, these laws are not strict enough, with the transparency and disclosure practices disappointing in the country. Thus, this study aims to investigate the legal framework governing transparency and disclosure in SOEs.

This study uses doctrinal, qualitative and comparative approaches. Domestic legal texts are appraised based on the organization for economic co-operation and development Guideline on Corporate Governance of State-owned Enterprises, the World Bank Toolkit on Corporate Governance of State-owned Enterprises and best national practices. This approach has been further corroborated by qualitative analysis of the basic principles of transparency and disclosure.

The finding reveals that the laws on transparency and disclosure do not comply with global practices and are inadequate to ensure transparency and discourse in SOEs. They fail to establish appropriate disclosure frameworks and practices at the SOE and state-ownership entity levels. They also indiscriminately subject enterprises to multiple auditing functions and conflicting responsibilities.

To the author’s knowledge, this study is the first legal literature on transparency and disclosure in Ethiopian SOEs. This study assists the state as owner in reforming the laws and uplifting SOEs from their current unpleasant condition. It can also become a reference for future research.