Does ethics improve stock market resilience in times of instability?

This paper compares the resilience of ethical (Islamic and socially responsible) indexes among five developed (US, UK, Japan, Canada, Australia) and three emerging markets (Brazil, India, South Africa) during the period following the 2008 subprime crisis. It relies on a multivariate CAPM-EGARCH model that accounts for sudden changes in volatility through the application of an iterated cumulative sums of squares (ICSS) algorithm on daily data over the sample period 2008–2014 to model time-varying volatility and ensure reliable estimates. The study confirms the lower systemic risk associated with Islamic indexes during the bearish period and reports that SRI, despite being more subject to systemic risk, offered higher alphas in highly integrated markets, while Islamic indexes performed better in less integrated ones. The evidence also reveals a very limited increase in the models’ predictability power from the integration of sudden changes in volatility into the EGARCH models during the full sample period. This limit is more marked during the bearish sub-period. Our findings have important implications for international investment and portfolio diversification perspectives in times of financial downturn.     

Bibliometric and Scientometric analysis on CSR practices in the banking sector

This paper provides a bibliometric and Scientometric analysis of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) in banking sector. Our study analyzes 551 articles from the Scopus database to find out the relationship between CSR and banking. A bibliometric method was used to visualize the results using R-studio and VOS viewer software. The Scientometric analysis was conducted to determine the findings and mappings of the research themes, directions of current and future research, impact, co-occurrence, co-citations and impact and collaboration trends. We explore how CSR literature has evolved over the years in the banking sector between 1993 and 2021. We find that publication in the CSR and banking domain has increased significantly during 2017 and 2021. Social aspects, board of directors, CSR, environment, competitions, Islamic banking, sustainability, disclosure, ethics, legitimacy theory, sustainable banking, loyalty, and brand equity are the popular research trends and collaboration trends identified. We also provide further scope of the study based on the extensive review of the past literature. Our findings may provide help to future researchers, bankers, and regulators in understanding the current trends and future research progression in the CSR and banking sector.     

Service innovation in the hotel industry: culture,behavior, performance

The aim of this study is to focus on the service innovation culture (SIC) in the formation of frontline employees’ (FLE) innovation performance based on two fit theories. More specifically, the research evaluates and examines the mediating role of challenge-oriented citizenship behavior (COCB) and charged behavior in the aforementioned relationship. To test the hypotheses, two-step structural equation modeling with bootstrapping estimation was conducted in AMOS, using data from 215 full-time frontline hotel employees over a one-month time period. This study establishes that the development of a SIC is positively related to the innovation performance of FLE. Likewise, the results indicate that there is a partially mediating role for the COCB and expanded charged behavior (encompassing vitality and creative self-efficacy) of FLE in the relationship between SIC and innovation performance. The findings of this study highlight the need for managers to incorporate a secure and trusting work environment so FLE will eagerly participate in the service innovation process by voicing their novel ideas. Managers can also consider the significance of the employee selection procedures and take advantage of employing university graduate for frontline service jobs.     

Influence of national and engineering culture on team role selection

Engineering education is an emerging field of research. Due to its applied nature, recent theoretical developments have been followed by empirical evidence and interdisciplinary research. The present study attempted to describe the team roles assumed by members of project teams composed of young engineering students. The study was conducted in Pakistan by using the Belbin Team Role Self Perception Inventory. It was found that young Pakistani engineers assumed the roles of implementer, coordinator, shaper and team worker. This study attempts to understand role choices through the framework of national cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede and engineering education culture offered by Godfrey and Parker. The study strongly recommends that engineering curriculum should incorporate activities which could foster creativity among engineers. Moreover, engineering students should be motivated to innovate through collaboration in a problem and project based environment, which is seriously lacking in engineering education of Pakistan.     

Effects of farm credit access on agricultural commercialization in Ghana: Empirical evidence from the northern Savannah ecological zone

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how farmers' access to credit affects agricultural commercialization in the northern Savannah ecological zone of Ghana. The study uses data from the Ghana Feed the Future baseline survey involving a total sample of 2,962 farm households. The study employs endogenous switching regression for ordered outcomes to account for endogeneity and self‐selection bias in the decision to access credit. The results from the estimations revealed that education, age, nonfarm business equipment, multiple crop production, and group membership are the variables influencing farmers' access to credit. Agricultural commercialization is determined by gender, age, marital status, household size, farm size, nonfarm business equipment, means of transport, group membership, assets index, multiple crop production, and location. In terms of causal effect, the results show that credit access stimulates higher commercialization. Thus policies that enhance farmers' access to credit are more likely to be successful in getting them to commercialize.     

CEO's Religious Affiliation and Managerial Conservatism

We investigate whether managers' religious affiliations affect corporate decisions. We hand collect data on the religious affiliations of chief executive officers (CEOs) and find that firms with Catholic CEOs have less leverage, issue debt less often, increase business and geographic diversification, and invest less than firms with Protestant CEOs. We also find that the decisions of Catholic CEOs are associated with lower firm value. These corporate actions are also reflected in the CEOs’ personal decisions, such as owning fewer company stocks and playing less risky sports.     

Do Internet Activities Add Value? Evidence from the Traditional Banks

Very little is known about how adopting Internet activities impact traditional banks. By tracing the experience of Italian commercial banks, we provide evidence and implications for banks’ use of new Internet technology and innovative banking products as they relate to performance. Using different definitions for what is considered as Internet activity and by examining alternative proxies for bank return and risk, we find a significant link between offerings of Internet banking products and bank performance. Although this link is significantly positive for bank returns, we find a negative, marginally significant, association between the adoption of Internet activities and bank risk.

Developing a Group Decision Support System for Advertising Media Evaluation: A Case in the Middle East

The importance of advertising media evaluation as a multifaceted problem is well known by both academics and practitioners. Although previous studies tried to optimize media evaluation, there still are some gaps and problems to address, particularly in areas of flexibility of models/frameworks, decision making quality, tension management, and agility of the evaluation process. Most of previous studies are based on inflexible models/frameworks that have limitations on number of criteria/alternatives they can consider and type of data they can process. A great volume of the work used arbitrary decision making; arbitrary decision making regarding criteria and media importance may reduce effectiveness of advertising campaigns. Furthermore, the academic literature offers little guidance on group decision aggregation, and tension management during decision making is neglected. Media evaluation is a time taking process and any acceleration will reduce pre-campaign costs. The main aim of this paper is to illustrate how a group decision support system (GDSS) can assist media planners to overcome mentioned problems more systematically. For this purpose, we developed a GDSS that is an integration of three well-known multi-criteria decision making techniques. With a real world case study, we illustrate the performance of the proposed GDSS. Results of our quantitative assessments indicate that the GDSS is flexible, allows decision makers to express their opinions, reduces tension among decision makers, and saves time.     

Corruption,product complexity and African exporters

Several studies have shown that African manufacturers perform poorly, especially in comparison to their counterparts from other developing countries. We build on these studies by (a) examining the decision to stop exporting among African manufacturers and (b) investigating whether these decisions can be linked to institutional dimensions (such as corruption). Consistent with previous studies, we observe that a significant fraction of African firms stop exporting every year. Using product complexity as a measure of an industry’s ‘sensitivity’ to corruption, we find that firms in more ‘corruption-sensitive’ industries are more likely to stop exporting if there is an increase in overall corruption in the exporting country. Firm characteristics (such as size and productivity) also seem to influence the decision to stop exporting. Our finding about the relationship between corruption and the decision to stop exporting supports the conventional wisdom that corruption is detrimental to economic performance.     

Labor Regulations,Employment and Wages: Evidence from India's Apparel Sector

While India is among the world's largest producers and exporters of apparel products, the sector has not performed to its potential. This study analyzes why this might be so from the perspective of the structure of production in the sector, the most striking aspect of which is a firm size distribution heavily dominated by small firms. Using nationally representative firm‐level and labor force survey data, we argue that the dominance of firms operating at scales too small to apply modern production and management technologies is one proximate reason for India's relative underperformance. Further, we note that India's labor regulations and the associated enforcement regime are important policy drivers of Indian firms' tendency to avoid placing “too many workers under one roof”.