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This paper aims to identify the key patronage factors that encouraged the public for investment in the Modaraba scam – a Ponzi scheme perpetrated in Pakistan with a whim of Sharīʿah-compliant business and intermediation of religious clerics.

In a qualitative research, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the investors of the scam followed by thematic analysis to conclude on the subject matter.

The results reveal numerous stimuli, thematically categorized as the monetary stimulus, religiosity stimulus and lubricants, which mobilized investment towards the scam. In general, a lucrative rate of return on investment and personality of the agents, being religious clerics, were the two prominent reasons, which convinced unanimously all investors. In particular, the religiosity stimulus (agents’ personality and Sharīʿah-compliant business) was a novel and eye-catching slogan of the scheme.

Keeping in view the amount of scam and number of victims, this research is a robust attempt to conclude on the determinants of investment decision in the Modaraba scam.

This study aims to examine the relationship between board capital and firm performance in the Chinese tourism industry.

The study’s sample includes firms from the Chinese hotel, air transportation/travel and catering industries. This study explores the governance environment in tourism industries. This study estimates three dimensions of the board, including education, expertise and directors interlock. These dimensions are further grouped as human capital (i.e. education and expertise), social capital (interlocks) and board capital (sum of social and human capital). Ordinary least square regressions with multiple robustness tests are used to investigate the effect of board capital on firm value in Chinese listed tourism firms during 2005–2018.

This study finds that board capital positively impacts firm performance in its dimensions of human and social capital. This study also highlights the two important ownership contexts, namely, institutional investors and state-ownership, that shape the board capital-firm performance association in the Chinese tourism industry.

The findings suggest that board capital plays a significant role in corporate decisions. The results illustrate that higher board capital improves both governance mechanisms and resource provision roles of the board, resulting in higher firm value. The results further offer implications for managers and shareholders of tourism firms when electing directors as shareholders’ representatives.

The study has two important contributions. First, it extends the prior literature of firm value by considering the board’s human and social dimensions in the tourism sector. Second, contrary to prior research on board, this study takes three facets of board capital, education, expertise and interlocks that improve governance mechanisms and bring new resources in the shape of skills, knowledge and expertise.

This study aims to inspect the impact of Chief Executive Officers’ (CEOs) education in a “specific field,” such as CEOs with science and engineering backgrounds on firms’ innovation. Based on agency theory, this study also reports how an endogenous factor, i.e. CEOs’ compensation, and an exogenous factor such as intellectual property rights (IPR), moderate the CEOs with a scientific background (CEOSB)-innovation relationship.

This study uses a sample of Chinese nonfinancial firms listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2008 to 2018 by applying the ordinary least squares regression method. To deal with the endogeneity issues, this study also performs a series of additional tests.

The results indicate that the effects of CEOSB on the firm innovation activities are positive and significant. Further, this study finds that CEOs’ compensation and IPR protection positively and significantly moderate the CEOSB-innovation relationship. These outcomes are robust to a series of additional tests.

The results of this study have valuable implications for various stakeholders interested in stimulating innovation. To sum up, the results of this study inculcate these stakeholders that the enhancement of firm innovation is contingent on the appropriate selection of CEOs, effective compensation packages and IPR regulations.

Distinct from the existent studies, the focus of the study is on the perspectives of CEOs’ scientific backgrounds. Further, based on agency theory, this study also reports how CEOs’ compensation and IPR protection moderate the CEOSB-innovation relationship, which has not been tested earlier to our knowledge, especially in the context of an emerging economy like China.

This study aims to investigate how the presence of female CEOs (FCEOs) affects investment efficiency in emerging economy, where female participation in business activities is limited.

This paper investigates the impact of CEO gender on investment efficiency by using investment efficiency measures proposed by Biddle et al. (2009), Chen et al. (2011) and Chen et al. (2013).

The findings suggest that FCEOs are associated with high level of investment efficiency. FCEOs improve corporate governance, streamline management and reduce inefficient investment decisions. In addition, FCEOs focus more on curbing underinvestment than overinvestment when making investment decisions. Furthermore, high financial reporting quality (FRQ) strengthens the effect of FCEOs on investment efficiency. The results suggest that FCEOs do not ameliorate the investment efficiency of state-owned enterprises.

This study enhances our understanding of the effects of FCEOs on corporate investment decisions in a male-dominated society. Efficient use of resources is vital from corporate and societal perspectives. Emerging economies are characterized by the unstable political and economic environment and low participation of females in decision-making. Hence, these economies require efficient utilization of resources. This study also sheds light on the role of FCEOs in curtailing underinvestment in emerging economies. It proves that FRQ is important in emerging economies because it strengthens the governance role of FCEOs.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between board diversity measured as relation-oriented, task-oriented and board overall diversity and firm’s investment efficiency.

This study estimates four dimensions of board diversity, including age, gender, tenure and education. The four dimensions are further categorized in relation-oriented diversity (i.e. age and gender), task-oriented diversity (i.e. tenure and education) and overall board diversity (relation and task oriented). Panel data analysis is used to examine the board diversity–investment efficiency relationship in Chinese listed firms during the years 2003–2018. The findings of the study are robust to a battery of econometric techniques.

This study finds relation-oriented, task-oriented and overall diversity of a board curb investment inefficiency by discouraging sub-optimal investment (over- or under-investment). In other words, board diversity improves firms’ investment efficiency.

The results suggest that board diversity plays a significant role in corporate decisions. The findings illustrate that board diversity disciplines the management, reduces agency conflicts and thereby improves corporate governance, resulting in higher investment efficiency.

This study has two important contributions. First, this study extends the prior literature of investment efficiency by considering socio-psychological dimension of the board diversity by constructing relation- and task-oriented diversity. Second, contrary to earlier studies on board diversity, this study takes four facets of board diversity, i.e. age, gender, education and tenure that improve corporate governance mechanism.

There have been many challenges in crawling deep web by search engines due to their proprietary nature or dynamic content. Distributed Information Retrieval (DIR) tries to solve these problems by providing a unified searchable interface to these databases. Since a DIR must search across many databases, selecting a specific database to search against the user query is challenging. The challenge can be solved if the past queries of the users are considered in selecting collections to search in combination with word embedding techniques. Combining these would aid the best performing collection selection method to speed up retrieval performance of DIR solutions.

The authors propose a collection selection model based on word embedding using Word2Vec approach that learns the similarity between the current and past queries. They used the cosine and transformed cosine similarity models in computing the similarities among queries. The experiment is conducted using three standard TREC testbeds created for federated search.

The results show significant improvements over the baseline models.

Although the lexical matching models for collection selection using similarity based on past queries exist, to the best our knowledge, the proposed work is the first of its kind that uses word embedding for collection selection by learning from past queries.

This study aims to empirically explore the nexus between FinTech and a firm’s cash holdings.

A panel data regression analysis is conducted on a sample of A-listed firms registered on the Shenzhen and Shanghai Stock Exchanges from 2011 to 2019. To address simultaneity issues in the study, the authors use various endogeneity tests, including lag of independent variables, generalized method of moments and two-stage least squares estimation.

Results reveal that FinTech has a significantly negative effect on a firm’s cash holdings, suggesting that FinTech development improves cash management by alleviating agency costs and reducing financial constraints. The findings remain consistent across different FinTech measures and alternative cash holding proxies, demonstrating that FinTech serves as a corporate governance mechanism.

The findings suggest that FinTech disciplines corporate managers and alleviates agency problems regarding cash holdings.

This study suggests that FinTech determines a firm’s cash holdings.

This paper aims to examine whether and how gender diversity and CEO gender can influence firm value in the emerging market of Pakistan. The study further tests whether these relations vary across state-owned enterprises (SOE) and non-state-owned enterprises (NSOE).

This study considers Pakistani listed firms over the period 2010-2017. The firms have been divided into SOE and NSOE for additional analysis. Tobin’s Q is used to measure firm’s value.

The authors document that female directors (FDirectors) on corporate boards is positively associated with firm value. The findings also illustrate that female CEOs (FCEOs) enhances a firm value. Additional analyses show that the influence of FDirectors and FCEOs on firm value is stronger in NSOE than in SOE.

The results suggest that gender diversity and CEO gender play a significant role in corporate decisions. The findings imply that FDirectors discipline the management, reduce agency conflicts and thereby improve corporate governance, resulting in higher firm value.

This study has two important contributions. First, while prior studies mostly based their arguments on using gender diversity of corporate boards, this study shows that a firm performance can be significantly improved if a female serves as a CEO. Second, this study also tests the stated relations for SOE and NSOE and show that gender diversity plays a significant role in NSOE than in SOE.

Organisations encourage green creativity among their employees to mitigate pollution and achieve sustainable growth. Green inclusive leadership practices have a key role in influencing employees’ green attitudes and environmental efficiency. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate how green inclusive leadership influences employees’ green creativity. It also aims to analyse the intermediating mechanism of green human capital and employee voice between the relationship of green inclusive leadership and green creativity.

Data was collected through an in-person administered questionnaire-based survey from 312 employees of the manufacturing industry of Pakistan. SPSS PROCESS macro was used for hypothesis testing in the present study.

The findings depict that the perception of green inclusive leadership positively influences employees’ green creativity. Moreover, the findings demonstrate that green human capital and employee voice play substantial intervening roles among the associations investigated.

This research study is novel because it is one of the scarce research studies to examine green inclusive leadership and employees’ green creativity with the underlying mechanism of green human capital and employee voice in an eastern context.

Recent research studies have increasingly suggested leadership as a major antecedent to encourage innovative work behavior among business employees. Empirical studies which investigated the influence of various leadership aspects such as style and ethics on employees' innovative performance and unraveled the mechanism through which leadership exerts its impact on employees' innovative work behavior were restricted. Thus, the purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between ethical leadership and employees' innovative performance by focusing on the mediating role of two forms of the intellectual capital (IC), i.e. human capital and social capital.

Data for present research were collected through in person administered questionnaire-based survey from the managerial level employees of the targeted sample of the manufacturing firms. Furthermore, due consideration was given while selecting the individuals from R&D departments of these organizations, who were typically involved in knowledge-intensive jobs and where application of intellectual assets was needed.

Ethical leadership was observed as to positively influencing employees' innovative performance. Two forms of IC, i.e. human capital and social capital were observed as playing mediating role in the ethical leadership – employees' innovative performance relationship.

The contemporary research study adds value in the literature of the ethical leadership. The most imperative theoretical contribution of the present research study underlines the psychological process, i.e. IC by which ethical leaders encourage innovative behavior among employees.