Indigenous sustainable finance as a research field: A systematic literature review on indigenising ESG,sustainability and indigenous community practices

Sustainable finance research has come into its own as an established area in the finance literature. The increased awareness of sustainability and global concerns around environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, particularly among institutional investors, has catalysed a shift towards greater research and publications in this area. Accompanying this is the emerging body of work being produced on indigenous investments and indigenous community practices. These nascent strands of literature tell a story of the shift that is taking place within the finance field. To chart this shift and create a harmonised view of these bodies of work, this paper conducts a systematic literature review of the significant nexus between sustainable investments and indigenous approaches to sustainability. We present a framework for conceptualising and characterising the various stands of literature and, in so doing, make the case for Indigenous Sustainable Finance (ISF) as a distinct disciplinary field. This paper argues that ISF is distinct from mainstream sustainable finance and other social and management sciences and constitutes a legitimate, well-defined sub-field of research in its own right.     

The decade-long cryptocurrencies and the blockchain rollercoaster: Mapping the intellectual structure and charting future directions

Recent advances in science mapping allowed to analyze the entire intellectual structure of blockchain and cryptocurrencies in business-related disciplines to identify 174 academic articles as well as 1482 practitioner-oriented articles published since the inception of cryptocurrencies in 2008 to highlight key trends of the published outputs. The results demonstrate academic research done by 389 authors in 296 organizations based in 50 countries that only just initiated the conversation on four major streams of the literature—Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies; blockchain adoption; cryptocurrency and blockchain environment; and business model innovations. When comparing academic scholarship to practitioner-oriented literature, the results demonstrate that practitioners discussed investor-related themes, cryptocurrency intrinsic value, political-economic sphere, and the impact of cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies on the wider society in greater detail. As a result, a number of themes are identified and discussed that could align academic and practitioner interests and provide guidance for further research in this important field.     

Accounting and auditing with blockchain technology and artificial Intelligence: A literature review

This paper surveys the published work on how blockchain technology will impact accounting in general, but AI-enabled auditing specifically. The purpose is to investigate how blockchain technology can improve transparency and trust in accounting practice and how professionals can use blockchain data to improve decision-making, based on the qualities of immutability, append-only, shared, verified, and agreed-upon (i.e., consensus-driven) blockchain data. The multi-party validation of blockchain protocols adds real-time trusted data for the AI systems used by auditors to improve assurance and efficiency. This review summarizes four themes emerging from the literature focusing on how blockchain technology has changed record-keeping in accounting: event approach to accounting; real-time accounting; triple entry-accounting and continuous auditing. The research interprets the findings using agency theory and stakeholder theory to advance how using blockchain to mitigate information asymmetry and improve stakeholder collaborations is understood. The investigation also summarizes the challenges and clarifies organizations’ reasons to be cautious about adopting blockchain. Lastly, the study suggests that future researchers use this study in two ways that enrich blockchain literature: first, to apply the themes and answer the questions identified within this review to improve the business methods of practitioners and policymakers; and second, to encourage stakeholders such as practitioners, system designers/developers, and policymakers to collaborate in designing blockchain ecosystems that suit accounting and auditing as they transform digitally.     

A systematic literature review on risk disclosure research: State-of-the-art and future research agenda

This study presents a systematic review of the existing literature on corporate risk disclosure (RD). The study reviews 104 studies published in 51 high-ranked journals over the period 1999–2019 following the systematic literature review methodology developed and employed by past works. The results highlight the substantial knowledge gaps and inconclusive findings of extant literature in several aspects, including identifying avenues for further research in terms of research designs, settings, scope and theories. The findings also indicate that limited studies focus on developing countries, private institutions, and non-profit organizations. Similarly, our findings show that existing research that examines other firm and cross-country drivers of risk, such as national accounting, auditing, economic, governance, language, and legal systems, are not well documented. By contrast, our review illustrates that there is an increase in the number of studies published in recent years with over one-half of those that we review in this research published in the last six years of our sample period. Furthermore, our results suggest that past review studies have also focused excessively on the immediate firm-level characteristics, such as firm size, growth, leverage, value, and cost of capital. The findings of our review will be of great interest to academics, accounting standard-setters, managers and practitioners, policymakers, regulators, researchers, and students.     

CEO characteristics: a review of influential publications and a research agenda

This paper provides a systematic review of literature pertaining to CEO characteristics and firm performance. The CEO of a firm provides critical leadership, social capital, and legitimacy, and as such exerts significant influence on firm performance. By using a bibliographic mapping approach, we identify the fifty‐one most influential publications on CEO characteristics. This field has developed from a few Upper Echelon Theory publications into four distinct categories. We review each of these to identify the main contributions to this research area and to outline research gaps and future research trends.     

A systematic review of the bubble dynamics of cryptocurrency prices

This paper surveys the academic literature concerning the formation of pricing bubbles in digital currency markets. Studies indicate that several bubble phases have taken place in Bitcoin prices, mostly during the years 2013 and 2017. Other digital currencies of primary importance, such as Ethereum and Litecoin, also exhibit several bubble phases. The Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF) as well as the Log-Periodic Power Law (LPPL) methodology are the most frequently employed techniques for bubble detection and measurement. Based on much academic research, Bitcoin appears to have been in a bubble-phase since June 2015, while Ethereum, NEM, Stellar, Ripple, Litecoin and Dash have been denoted as possessing bubble-like characteristics since September 2015. However, this latter group possess little academic evidence supporting the presence of bubbles since early 2018. An overall perspective is provided based on a robust bibliography based on large deviations of market quotes from fundamental values that can serve as a guide to policymakers, academics and investors.     

Emerging new themes in environmental,social and governance investing: a systematic literature review

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing is a large and influential industry. Its activities could be illuminated, appraised and improved by academic research. Unfortunately, research to date has focused on measuring return performance. A wider range of topics is necessary before research can properly inform investors, companies and regulators. This paper contributes to the challenge by systematically exploring the literature to reveal a richer array of topics: the heterogeneous nature of ESG investing, its costs and motivations, and its management literature origins. In addition to these established topics, five emerging themes are identified: the human element, climate change, fund flows, fixed income and the rise of non-Western players.     

Corporate finance and governance in emerging markets: A selective review and an agenda for future research

There are important organizational and behavioral differences between firms in emerging markets and those in developed markets. We propose a top-down approach to understand how key institutional forces shape the structures and policies of firms in emerging markets. We review a selective set of prior studies as well as papers included in this Special Issue in identifying government quality, state ownership, and financial development as critical institutional forces that shape the financing and governance of firms in emerging markets. We suggest that future research should pay attention to several important but unanswered topics related to informal enforcement, government incentives, family firms, and network organizations.     

Central bank digital currency: A systematic literature review using text mining approach

Central bank digital currency (CBDC) is seen as a possible next step in the evolution of money, offering a more stable unit of account, a more efficient medium of exchange, and a safer way to store value. However, since it began to get significant attention from academics and practitioners a few years ago, many concerns about how a central bank may build an efficient CBDC and how it would impact a country's current financial system still remain unanswered satisfactorily. Based on the combination of text mining and systematic review methods, this work presents a thorough literature assessment of 191 academic papers on CBDC in order to identify major research issues and knowledge gaps that may be addressed in the future. We find seven primary research themes linked to CBDC including (1) Central bank, (2) CBDC and other digital currency, (3) CBDC and money markets, (4) CBDC and monetary policy, (5) CBDC design and technologies, (6) CBDC and payment system, and (7) CBDC and financial stability and regulatory. The finding helps provide both overall and in-depth views of the current state of research in digital fiat currency topics, as well as drawing some important implications and suggestions on directions for the future research.     

12 years of integrated reporting: A review of research

Stakeholders’ demand for forward-looking corporate reporting that includes both financial and non-financial stories opened the path for the evolution of a new form of reporting known as integrated reporting (IR). The purpose of this paper is to review the articles on IR published by the accounting, finance and management journals on the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) list of journals from 2009 to 2020. Our study reviews 210 articles on IR published by 64 journals. The findings reveal that the IR research spectrum has broadened over time and now includes more research into IR in practice compared with earlier research, which was mostly normative.     

Facilitating co-production in public services: management implications from a systematic literature review

Drawing on the results of a systematic literature review of empirical studies, this paper sheds light on six broad factors that facilitate the initiation and implementation of co-production in public services. The factors are classified into two overarching categories: organizational factors, including organizational arrangements, professional roles, and managerial tools; and procedural factors, including participant recruitment, participant preparation, and process design. For each set of factors, the paper provides a series of management implications. It concludes with additional observations for practice.     

General insurance marketing: A review and future research agenda

The financial services sector is a huge and diverse industry comprising many different forms of organisations and product offerings. Yet, a review of past papers in the Journal of Financial Services Marketing (JFSM) reveals a heavy bias towards articles on banking, to the neglect of other equally important financial services categories. The purpose of this article is to address this imbalance and to call for more research to be conducted in a wider range of financial services categories. In particular, general insurance is singled out as a category worthy of further research. Looking to the past, this article reviews research published to-date on general insurance in the JFSM to establish a benchmark and explore theoretical contributions. Attention is then turned to the future to identify a research agenda for the general insurance sector going forward. Five important themes are identified: trust, transparency and simplification, technology, HNW, and Takaful.     

A bibliometric review of dividend policy literature

This study systematically reviews the dividend policy literature, combining quantitative and qualitative techniques. We screened a sample of 270 articles retrieved from the Scopus database from 1981 to 2022. We contribute to the literature by identifying six research streams based on bibliometric co-citation analysis: (1) Dividend payment practices, (2) Price–dividend relationship, (3) Capital market valuation, and dividend policy, (4) Risk governance and dividend policy, (5) Taxes and dividend policy, and (6) The dividend disconnects and catering incentives. For each of these streams, the central research theme is outlined, allowing us to recommend potential directions for further investigation. We provide influential journals, authors, topics, articles, and institutions from our analyses. We also contribute 77 research questions that can be explored in future research to develop the field of dividend policy. Our findings should be of value to academics, financial executives, policymakers, investors, and other practitioners.     

Social and solidarity finance: A conceptual approach

An analysis of the social- and solidarity-finance system of relationships, which has characteristics that differ from those of other financial intermediaries, underpins the conceptual approach of this article. Social and solidarity finance constitutes a set of interdependent financial and social relationships, and partnerships between individuals and organisations, that mesh into an organised whole.This article makes use of institutional economics to understand those mechanisms of interaction between individuals, organisations and institutions that are not strictly economic. First, we offer a new conceptual framework on social and solidarity finance from an institutional point of view. Then, based on this framework, we outline the sustainability of alternative finance and its ability to respond to specific entrepreneurship needs. Finally, we present the French situation regarding social and solidarity finance to highlight the main characteristics of alternative finance.     

Investment in gold: A bibliometric review and agenda for future research

Significant surge in gold prices has attracted speculators, investors and intellectuals alike. Factors driving gold prices, the effectiveness of gold price predictions, the economic viability of gold mining, risk management using gold, and its comparisons against exchange rates and stock prices have been some of the consistent foci of researchers. Applying bibliometrics on 453 top articles published on gold between 1970 and 2021, we present a comprehensive overview of the academic discussions on one of the fast evolving research domains. Apart from identifying the publication and citation trends, we note seven intellectual clusters contributing to growth of the contemporary research identified as: dynamics of gold prices and its linkage with other asset prices, gold prices: forecasting and comparison, gold as an instrument for an inflation hedge, gold and currency market, economic policy and gold prices, role of gold in the global financial market, and expected value and volatility of gold.     

Anti-money laundering and financial fraud detection: A systematic literature review

Money laundering has affected the global economy for many years, and there are several methods of solving it presented in the literature. However, when tackling money laundering and financial fraud together there are few methods for solving them. Thus, this study aims to identify methods for anti-money laundering (AML) and financial fraud detection (FFD). A systematic literature review was performed for analysis and research of the methods used, utilizing the SCOPUS and Web of Science databases. Of the 48 articles that aligned with the research theme, 20 used quantitative methods for AML and FFD solution, 13 were literature reviews, 7 used qualitative methods, and 8 used mixed methods. This study contributes by presenting a systematic literature review that fills two research gaps: lack of studies on AML and FFD, and the methods used to solve them. This will assist researchers in identifying gaps and related research.     

Firms and social responsibility: A review of ESG and CSR research in corporate finance

We review the financial economics-based research on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) with an emphasis on corporate finance. In doing so we focus on the most debated and researched issues. Although a firm's ESG/CSR profile and activities are shown to be strongly related to the firm's market, leadership and owner characteristics as well its risk, performance and value, there still exist conflicting hypotheses and results that we show are not resolved, leading to continued questions and a need for more research.     

Issues in Islamic Equities: A Literature Survey

This article reviews the current literature on Islamic equities. Our survey indicates that the bulk of articles is quantitative or empirical in nature, with a notable dearth of theoretical works. Among the common research themes explored by these articles are comparative performances of Islamic equities vis-à-vis their conventional counterparts, comparisons of Islamic portfolios with SRI funds, and empirically articulating portfolio diversification benefits associated with Islamic equities. In addition, numerous articles discuss idiosyncrasies of Shari’ah compliant stocks and portfolios under subthemes such as volatility, risk factors, and performance attributes. This survey also includes articles addressing efficiency perspectives, calendar anomalies, and issues in Shari’ah stock screening norms. We summarize general findings and offer suggestions for future research. Literature surveys on Islamic equities are few and far between, and this article, to date, represented the most recent and comprehensive attempt at that.