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Purpose: This chapter examines the effect of COVID-19 on the stock market volatility (SMV) in the Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE), Sri Lanka.

Need for the Study: The study is necessary to understand investor behaviour, market efficiency, and risk management strategies during a global crisis.

Methodology: Utilising daily All Share Price Index (ASPI) data from 2 January 2018 to 31 August 2021, the data are divided into subsamples corresponding to the pre-pandemic period, the pandemic period, and distinct waves of the pandemic. The impact of the pandemic is investigated using the Mann–Whitney U test, the Kruskal–Wallis test, and the Exponential Generalised Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (EGARCH) model.

Findings: The pandemic considerably affected CSE – the Mann–Whitney U test produced different market returns during the pre-COVID and COVID eras. The Kruskal–Wallis test improved performance during COVID-19 but did not continue to do so across COVID-19 waves. The EGARCH model detected increased volatility and risk during the first wave, but the second and third waves outperformed the first. COVID-19 had a minimal overall effect on CSE market results. GARCH and Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (ARCH) models identified long-term variance memory and volatility clustering. The News Impact Curve (NIC) showed that negative news had a more significant impact on market return volatility than positive news, even if the asymmetric term was not statistically significant.

Practical Implications: This study offers significant insight into how Sri Lanka’s SMV is affected by COVID-19. The findings help create efficient mitigation strategies to mitigate the negative consequences of future events.

How can large international financial firms go green in authentic ways? What enhances ‘Net Zero action’? Changes in global banks, fund managers, and insurance firms are at the heart of green finance. External change pressures – combined with problematic firm predispositions – exacerbate barriers to change and promote scepticism about authentic Net Zero change. Field research reveals main elements, connections, and interactions of this question by considering financial firms as complex socio-technical systems (Mitleton-Kelly, 2003). An interdisciplinary/holistic narrative approach (De Bakker et al., 2019) is adopted to design a conceptual framework that can support a green ‘behavioural theory of the financial firm’ (green BTFF). The BTFF presents an international version (Peng, 2001) of the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm (Barney, 1991; Hart, 1995; Teece et al., 1997).

The approach of this chapter is aimed at closing knowledge gaps and realign values in financial markets and society. By raising awareness about organised hypocrisy and facades (Brunsson, 1993; Cho et al., 2015; Schoeneborn et al., 2020) in financial firms the chapter aims at overcoming the gap between ‘talking’ and ‘walking’ in the financial sector. The chapter defines testable firm-level hypotheses for ‘Green Finance’ (Poterba, 2021) as well as – by implication – tests for ‘greenwashing’.

First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.