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The purpose of this paper is to examine the world’s first social impact bond (SIB) and the lessons that can be learned for the Islamic finance industry to fulfil its true objectives.

The Peterborough SIB was recently announced to be successful in achieving its targeted social and investment outcomes, reducing recidivism by 9 per cent and paying back investors a 3 per cent pa return. The paper compares Peterborough SIB with socially responsible investment (SRI) sukuk in terms of form and substance, and finds that there are various lessons from the Peterborough SIB that can be useful for future development of Islamic financial products.

Innovative social financial tools such as SIB exemplify the true spirit of risk sharing and social responsibility, which is arguably missing in current practices of the Islamic finance industry. With the growing interest towards SRI strategies and increase in socially motivated investors, such financial tools may not only help the sustainable growth of the Islamic finance industry, but also fill in the gap between its theory and practice.

As such, the paper also proposes a social impact sukuk model which integrates the key aspects learned from Peterborough SIB. This includes prioritising social impact, measurable success indicators, data and management systems, flexible contracts, third sector integration, risk sharing and fostering the culture of innovation.

The findings can offer some practical insights in dealing with the issue of Islamic finance practice being overly concerned with its formal adherence with Islamic legal rules whilst neglecting its true fundamental values.

This study aims to investigate why companies use the internal price of carbon (IPC) for carbon management.

The authors adopt sustainable transition management theory to design the research and explain the findings of empirical models. The sample includes companies that participated in the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) questionnaire survey, derived from 37 countries and regions for the period 2015–2018.

The results first reveal that transition management facilitates an upward adoption trend annually during the study period. Second, the authors find that the proxies for transition management are all correlated with the adoption of the IPC in the predicted direction. Third, the authors identify spatial patterns and driving factors for adoption of the IPC.

This study provides additional insight beyond the limited prior literature in this area. In particular, the findings regarding the influence of physical environment on climate-related decisions have not been documented in extant literature. IPC is expected to interact with and complement external price of carbon for climate change governance. Thus, the exploring results of the paper fill an important gap and pave the way for future study to examine emerging issues in the burgeoning field of carbon accounting for climate change.

Discusses the increasing use of valuation models in accounting and finance research, identifies potential difficulties in the conventional model and develops a simple version (which can deal with negative earnings) of the Edwards, Bell and Ohlson model, estimated from 1987‐1997 UK data. Finds it sensitive to firm size, dividend policy and return on equity; but not to capital structure. Compares consistency with other research and considers the underlying reasons for the results.

The main objective of this study is to investigate an impact of organizational culture on supply chain risk and strategic sourcing. It also examines the relationship between organizational culture and strategic sourcing. By collecting 159 survey responses from supply, executives and managers of U.S. manufacturing firms, it provides empirical evidence that organizational culture and strategic sourcing mitigate supply chain risks. Organizational culture also makes a positive impact on the implementation of strategic sourcing. This study emphasizes the importance of cultural impacts to supply executives and managers in supply chain risk management.

This study aims to examine the mediating role played by corporate governance (CG) in the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and analyst forecast quality.

The authors raise three specific questions: Does CG play a mediating role in the relationship between CSR and analyst forecast quality? If so, is such mediation effect of CG reduced for firms with weak governance? Do firms with superior CSR performance experience higher analyst forecast quality through the mediation effect of CG?

The present results suggest that CG serves as a partial mediator that facilitates CSR’s positive influence on analyst forecast quality. However, further analyses show that in firms with a low governance score, CG does not have a mediation effect. Conversely, the authors find that firms with superior CSR performance have higher forecast quality through the mediation effect of CG. The authors also find that the mediation effect of CG is more pronounced for the environmental component than for the social component of CSR.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the role of CG as a mediator between CSR and analyst forecast quality and to reveal that the strength of this effect varies depending on firms’ CG level and CSR commitment.

The purpose of this paper is to explore corporate social performance attained by listed family and non-family firms in Japan. They are measured by the composite CSP index and five attributes composed of employ relations, social contributions (SCs), firm security and product safety, internal governance and risk control, and environment concern.

The authors employ univariate and regression analyses on the quantitatively aggregated CSP score data of Japanese firms from 2007 to 2009.

Japan non-family firms tend to perform better than family firms in terms of attaining corporate social performance overall. Family CEOs positively affect CSP in the foods, textiles and apparels, and pharmaceutical industries as well as in retail trade, wholesale, and services industries, but negatively affect CSP in the heavy manufacturing industry. In these industries the joint effect of the percentage of family shareholdings and the fraction of family members on the board also augments the positive role played by family CEO. The findings are robust when the sample is ranked by Tobin’s q.

The observation period is short due to the data availability of CSP by Toyo Keizai Inc. This data covers all the listed firms which answered the questionnaire, which may also contain sample selection problems.

Positive role of CEO and negative effects of shareholdings among listed family firms in Japan call for attention and corrective measures for top management and family shareholders.

While family firms in Japan may accumulate socioemotional wealth, they should exert more efforts to advance CSP and create social capital.

This is the first comprehensive quantitative study in the field, which explored CSP of all the listed family firms vs non-family firms in Japan with large sample.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze investor reactions to ethical screening by pension plan managers.

The author presents a sample consisting of data corresponding to 573 pension plans in relation to such aspects as financial performance, inception date, asset size, number of participants, custodial and management fees, and whether their managers adopt ethical screening or give part of their profits to social projects. On this data the author implements the fixed effects panel data model proposed by Vogelsang (2012).

The results obtained indicate that investors/consumers prefer traditional or solidarity pension plans to ethical pension plans. Furthermore, the findings show that ethical investors/consumers are more (less) sensitive to positive (negative) lagged returns than caring and traditional consumers, causing traditional consumers to contribute to pension plans that they already own.

The author does not know what types of environmental, social and corporate governance criteria have been adopted by ethical pension plan managers and the weight given to each of these criteria for selecting the stock of the firms in their portfolios that could influence in the investors’ behaviour.

The results obtained in the current paper show that investors invest less money in ethical pension plans than in traditional and solidarity pension plans; this could be due to the lack of information for their part. To solve this, management companies could increase the transparency about their corporate social responsibility (CSR) investments to encourage investors to invest in ethical products so these lead to raising CSR standards in companies, and therefore, sustainable development.

The Spanish socially responsible investment retail market is still at an early phase of development, and regulators should promote it in order to encourage firms to adopt business activities that take into account societal concerns.

This paper provides new evidence in a field little analysed. This paper contributes to the existing literature by focusing on examining the behaviour of pension funds investors whose investment time horizon is in the long-term while previous literature focus on analysing behaviour of mutual fund investors whose investment time horizon is in the short/medium term what could cause different investors’ behaviour.

Drawing on agency theory and legitimacy theory perspectives, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of board characteristics on sustainability reporting of listed companies in the Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE), Sri Lanka.

A sample of 148 listed companies was drawn from the CSE using stratified random sampling method and data were collected from the 2012 annual reports. The proposed hypotheses were tested using a hierarchical binary logistic regression.

This study documents that board size and dual leadership are positively associated with sustainability reporting and boards with female directors are negatively associated with sustainability reporting. This study also found that sustainability reporting is likely to be influenced by firm size and firm growth. Additionally, the study also reveals that younger firms are likely to adopt sustainability reporting.

This is the first study to examine the influence of board characteristics on sustainability reporting in Sri Lanka, considered as a developing economy with an emerging equity market.

Recognition of a tactile image independent of position, size and orientation has been a goal of much recent research. Many tasks (e.g. parts identification) often give rise to situations which demand a more generalized methodology than the derivation of a single forward measurement, such as the computation of part area and perimeter from its run‐length‐coding representation. In this situation, an interpretation procedure generally adopts the techniques and methodology of a pattern recognition approach. To achieve maximum utility and flexibility, the methods used should be sensitive to any image change in size, translation and rotation, and should provide good repeatability. The algorithm used in this article generally meets these conditions. The results show that recognition schemes based on these invariants are position, size and orientation independent, and also flexible enough to learn most sets of parts. Assuming that parts can vary only in location, orientation and size, then certain moments are very convenient for normalization. For instance, the first moments of area give the centroid of a part, which is a natural origin of co‐ordinates for translation invariant measurements. Similarly, the eigenvectors of the matrix of second central moments define the directions of principal axes, which leads to rotation moment invariant measurements.

Purpose: The purpose of the chapter is to determine the connection between organizational culture and specifics of the process of decision making in modern business systems and to determine the directions of managing the organizational culture depending on the set criteria of decision making.

Methodology: A proprietary classification of the types of organizational culture of modern business systems according to the criterion of employees' involvement into decision making is offered. This classification uses two dimensions of employees' involvement into decision making for classification of the types of organizational culture of modern business systems. First dimension: interest of business manager in involvement of employees into the process of decision making. Second dimension: employees' inclination for participation in the process of making of managerial decisions. The factors that influence these dimensions are determined.

Conclusions: Connection between organizational culture and specifics of decision making in modern business systems according to the criterion of employees' involvement in decision making is determined. The minimal level of involvement envisages independent decision making by business manager without participation of employees. In this case, a lot of problems of the business system remain unsolved and possibilities remain unused. Resource intensity of decision making is the highest, and their practical implementation is complicated by employees' dissatisfaction, but this process is conducted very quickly. The medium level of involvement envisages either collective discussion, but decision making by business manager, or collection of feedback by business manager with low interest in it from employees. In this case, resource intensity of decision making is lower, and decisions could be made and implemented faster. The highest level of involvement is connected to collective decision making by employees and business manager. This allows determining problems and using possibilities of the business system with minimal resources. Though the duration of the process of decision making is the highest, solutions are implemented quickly due to employees' support.

Originality/value: The determined specifics show the necessity for considering the influence of the organizational culture on specifics of the process of decision making in modern business systems. It is substantiated that no type of organizational culture of modern business systems according to the criterion of employees' involvement in decision making can provide a guarantee of decisions' optimality. The directions of managing the organizational culture depending on the set criteria (completeness, speed, resource intensity) of decision making are recommended.