The Role of Corporate Governance in Sustaining the Economy: Examining Its Moderating Effect on Brand Equity and Profitability in Tourism Companies

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 

 

1)The abstract should be better written in a parsimonious manner. It also has to include information on the sample size and period. Moreover, write the abstract using the present tense in a logical sequence. Please make sure the abstract is clearly written following the structure below.  Please consider a similar sequence as follows for the abstract to maximize the impact of your article. The first sentence in the abstract should be about what is the problem or motivation or question. The second sentence should be about what we already know from the literature. In the third sentence, please say what you are doing and how (something like: using data from xx countries/firms over the time period xxxx, we examine …); the next two sentences should be about what you find, followed by the significance of your finding in terms of how two variables are correlated with a clear channel/mechanism.

2)

The introduction should be better developed and organized to include, among others:-     (one or) several paragraphs that position the paper compared to prior relevant academic literature.

-           (one or) several paragraphs that detail the contribution of the paper to the academic literature.

-           (one or) several paragraphs that summarize/present the study's results.

-           The last paragraph of the introduction should "introduce" the remaining parts of the paper.

3) The authors should either better develop a section that explains the features of corporate governance in emerging markets in general and in Taiwan in particular or add a footnote that orients the readers for following references.

"To gain deeper insights into corporate governance in emerging markets, readers are encouraged to refer to Boubaker and Nguyen (2014)" Boubaker, S., & Nguyen, D. K. (2014). Corporate governance and corporate social responsibility: Emerging markets focus. World Scientific Publishing.

 

4)The authors should better explain the channels through which their variable of interest affects the dependent variable. The reasoning should be clear and the empirical part has to be consistent with the underlying reasoning

5)   All tables in the paper should be self-sufficient. Authors should add a caption for each table that explains its objective and content. In other words, all variables in the table should be explained in the caption. The caption should include a brief description of the variables used in the table. Readers should be able to understand the table without going back to the text. Please proceed in the same way for the figures

 

Before submitting the revised version of their paper, the authors have to proofread their manuscript by a native English professional to ensure that it reads smoothly and is free from typos, grammatical errors, and awkward sentences.

Author Response

Please see the attached PDF file. Thanks.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The work presents an innovative approach to the topic with application value.

The hypotheses were correctly formulated and verified.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer’s Comments

Manuscript ID: sustainability-2519806

 

Title: The Role of Corporate Governance in Sustaining the Economy: Examining

its Moderating Effect on Brand Equity and Profitability in Tourism Companies

The authors would like to express our great appreciation to the referee for the helpful and constructive comments on our work and the manuscript of the paper.

Reviewer 2

 

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The work presents an innovative approach to the topic with application value.

The hypotheses were correctly formulated and verified.

Author Response:

Thank you for your acknowledgment and support.

Reviewer 3 Report

The title "The Role of Corporate Governance in Sustaining the Economy: Examining its Moderating Effect on Brand Equity and Profitability in Tourism Companies"

Is ok, and does fit the paper content.

The abstract is concise, but lacks any information about the method that was used (panel regression for example?).

 

Introduction is well written and does explain well important concepts of BE, CP and CG. I would suggest to also include few sentences that explain the difference between brand equity and brand value.

With regards to you commentary of results and discussion, you also focused on advertising expenditure and its influence on CP, but that is not stated in your aim at the end of the introduction, where you want to analyse only CG? So some clarification is needed.

(lines 87-91) -> also your H1 is about relationship between BE and CP. On the other hand, H2 to H7 are related to your aim, so it would be good to look at it

 

Literature review

Line 112 " BE. This paper adopted the tourism industry as the observed sample and focused on analyzing the correlation between market orientation and CP" Again a bit confusing when your aim is to focus on investigation of the relationship between CG and CP.

On line 135 and 140 you mentioned brand value is such context that it can be for some readers confusing (did you mean BE or what is actually the relation between BE and BV?)

 

Methods

Line 276-279, there you mention that using No. of employees is not a good measure of size and that you use log transformed Total assets, but later in the paper and in the tables you say its number of employees? Please clarify. See table 1

Also, the AVE might be dependable on size etc. so instead of NTD a percentage of costs or sales would be better?

 

Results

It would be good to show the actual results of your tests not just that they were OK.

Line 343-344 -> a typo: The descriptive statistics for the independent, dependent, control, and moderator variables of the 196 TWSE/GTSM-listed tourism companies are tabulated in Table 2. (should it be 32? or 196 data tables)

Table 2 -> type between year and size (NTD -> for size its millions or its different measure when you used log transformation?)

Line 363 - 369 -> the question is how many of the 32 companies du actually have independent directors ->thus how significant results would are only few -> then it could be only arbitrary...

Table 3 -> you results are interesting, however some of them could be expected -> expenditure decreases profitability, but it might increase EPS since the expenditure on advertising attracts more investment as well as customers.

Size matters in this industry as much as elsewhere -> institutional investors also quite follow the profitable companies and try to invest in them. Also, the EPS is influenced by the company capital structure, so might be the number of directors.

I find the moderating effects the most interesting finding.

Is there any useful CG index in Taiwan (on TWSE) that could be used as an indicator of good CG of these companies? Or can it be constructed from your data?

 

Discussion

In the discussion you focus on how AVE (BE as proxy) is important and ha significant influence -> true, but the results are significant but for example less than company size (meaning that advertising is important but maybe the growth and financial stability more  -> thus the company can survive in time like COVID). The section 5.1.1 includes general recommendation and thought on how advertising helps but that does not directly come from your analysis.

So the recommendations regarding the BE seems not directly related to your results

The impact of the CG is well discussed and its conclusions are sound and related to results of your study.

 

Conclusion

I found having such a table in the conclusion as rather distracting -> i would suggest to put the table in discussion or results. And putting some recommendation from the discussion to conclusion.

Small typos in Table 4

So i definitely recommend to look at the discussion and conclusion

 

There are some duplications in the refences for example 15 and 41.

 

Finally, I have some doubts about being relevant to the journal. There is a word sustaining in the title, but there is no clear explanation how is sustainability related to your analysis in the actual paper?

 

Overall the structure and methodology seem ok but there are some parts of the paper to be improved or clarified.

Author Response

Please see the attached PDF file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Thank you very much for the invitation to review the manuscript sustainability-2519806 entitled “The Role of Corporate Governance in Sustaining the Economy: Examining its Moderating Effect on Brand Equity and Profitability in Tourism Companies.” My comments are in pdf

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attached PDF file. Thanks a lot.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report

Thank you very much for the invitation to review the revised manuscript sustainability-2519806 entitled “The Role of Corporate Governance in Sustaining the Economy: Examining its Moderating Effect on Brand Equity and Profitability in Tourism Companies.” I think the authors have done a good job of revising the manuscript. However, I have still some questions/issues.

 

1.     The theoretical support is very weak. It should be improved.

 

2.     Why the data from recent years were not included? Justify in the manuscript.

 

Good luck.

Author Response

Please refer to the attached document for more detailed information.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf